"Upside of Anger"
Well, right up front, if I'd known that this was going to be a chick
flick along the lines of all those others that are already running on
cable tv (think 'Lifetime' or 'Oxygen' channels) I might have thought
twice before plunking down $5.25 at the economy hour, and going on in.
At the outset, it's about a lady whose millionaire 50-ish husband
abandons her. -And along these lines, what's this we learn? He
apparently prefers to run off with his young 20-ish secretary than
spend the rest of his life with a shrill, hissing wife-bitch that
sees only the negative side of life. (But where is the 'UP' side to
life, that this movie takes its name from?) As for the missing husband,
we never get to see him but for some family photos on the walls to his
three-story million-dollar mansion. He's a family man, and posed next
to his loving wife and his three or four wonderful daughters. Here a
picture, there a picture, everywhere a picture-picture, but no real good
closeups. What kind of man is he? Shouldn't we all be asking that
question? After all, the camera just follows the abandoned wife through
most of the movie, and we're supposed to be sympathetic to her plight.
Aren't we walking in her footsteps, if not in her shoes? But of course,
half an hour into the movie, she throws a shrieking tissy-fit and rips
all of his pictures off all the walls. Boy, now THAT shows HIM!
So, the underlying question that continues to pain his adoring wife
through the course of the movie is HOW on earth could he EVER abandon
her, and leave EVERYTHING behind, just to be with his beautiful Swedish
secretary??? (I couldn't help but wonder if this movie was going to
take a sudden turn along the lines of "White Oleander" - one of the few
other chick flicks I've accidentally seen at the theater. Did she
secretly KILL her husband, or did someone else?)
Okay, so much for the underlying theme.
The rest of the movie is spent with the nextdoor neighbor, a disc
jockey (or sports radio commentator that doesn't really want to talk
about sports) that keeps coming on to the jilted housewife. Does
he really want to talk about subdividing the south twenty, or is he
really interested in starting up a brazenly blunt 'physical'
relationship with her?
There's more boozing in THIS movie than in any other movie I've seen
this year, including the award-winning 'Sideways.' It's hard liquor
all the way, at least for this angry, jilted woman, and the disc-jockey
that is coming on to her. If the movie doesn't take a hard turn to
the left and touch on the theme of a man-hating mother in "White
Oleander" maybe it would take a hard turn to the right and borrow
some of the themes of a jilted girlfriend from Clint Eastwood's "Play
Misty for Me" - - but here and there, as fate would have us follow it,
we encounter a series of nearly comic situations, as if it were a comedy.
But that said, there are her four daughters with their own attempts
to go on with their lives- There's the daughter who's on the verge
of graduating from college, another daughter that wants to specialize
in dance interpretation (but she finds herself having to specialize in
ballet instead), and a daughter in high school that wants to make a
boyfriend out of a new boy in town, but he would much rather go
bungie-cord jumping than make out with her in her bedroom). And then
there's the daughter that wants to be a radio announcer's assistant and
finds her in a frankly physical relationship with her stubble-faced
immediate superior. Now, how hard is that kind of a job going to be,
aside from raising questions of sexual harassment and favoritism?
All in all, this kind of movie will be highly regarded by people
already addicted to the Lifetime cabletv channel, where it is
going to find itself playing someday, but the rest of us are going
to find ourselves squirming and enduring, waiting for the movie to
come to an end.
Camerawork: A+
Soundtrack: B
Sets and Props: A
Plot & Storyline D-
Car Chases: F (no car chases in THIS movie, folk, but there
is a gratuitous traffic jam at an intersection)
Explosions C- (bloody gore at a dinner table in a fantasy
sequence)
Destruction C+ (don't bungie cord through people's picture
windows, folks)
========== X-RAMR-ID: 39684 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1382831 X-RT-TitleID: 1143222 X-RT-AuthorID: 10937
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