the problem with the movie is the employment of the device of the narrator. it doesn’t involve the audience as much. There seem to be some distance in the story. Lack of emotion centre. You don’t feel for the character as much. Claire Danes’ performance is good in this show. Though she seem to underact…

The problem with this movie is that the character’s are very flat and do not make their intentions known. Why does Claire Danes fall for Steve Martin? Is it just because he’s rich? I hope so, because he’s quite creepy in the movie. However, we don’t know the reason, and it’s a fairly uncomfortable relationship because of that. What does she see in Jason Schwartzman?

If I am right in what I think is going on, then I’d say it’s a great movie. However, I don’t know that I’m right. It’s not a very decisive movie. If I’m right, then Claire Danes plays a girl that only cares about money, Jason Schwartzman is lonely, and Steve Martin is just looking for a booty call that he can keep at bay with money. However, we don’t have any of these questions answered for us. We don’t know what attracts these characters to each other. The only narration in the movie is Steve Martin talking about nonsense that doesn’t give any insight on the characters in the story.

This is a movie that needed more direction and better writing. Perhaps it was a brilliant story, but it got completely lost somewhere along the way from Steve Martin’s head to page to film.

Two things:
1) Every moment with Jason Schwartzman in it was golden.
2) I attibute this to his acting talent alone.

I hate it when my friends are right, but this movie was Steve Martin’s weird old man fantasy. It’s loosely based on George Eliot’s Middlemarch (Steve as Casaubon, Claire as Dorothea, Jason as what’s-his-name, Dorothea’s other man). Claire Danes (who, by the way, is uniquely beautiful and a uniquely good actor and should be competing for roles with Scarlett Johansson) plays a delicate flower who just wants to be held, but it might just be because she’s depressive (maybe her incompetence should offend depressives rather than women). The action is forced into the rigidity of Steve Martin’s narration, and too much is made explicit (perhaps the audience is full of delicate flowers, too?). I was touched by some of the sweetness, by the post-breakup meeting, and even a little Schwartzman’s romanic moments (although these were obscured by his awesome comedic ability), but Steve Martin’s ineffective telling and simultaneous inability to show made me lose respect for the movie and start giggling and telling sarcastic jokes to the person next to me (who happened to be my mom, and she only appreciated some of them).