At first I didn’t want to watch this movie – I don’t remember it getting great reviews and had heard it was a bit sappy. But it was one of Denis’ picks so we opted to watch it on Saturday night.
Kevin Kline stars as a man who is laid off from his job and finds out he has terminal cancer pretty much on the same day. Divorced for 10 years from his wife (Kristin Scott Thomas) and estranged from his now-teenaged goth-suicidal drug-dependent letting-himself-get-pimped-out son (Anakin Skyw…I mean, Hayden Christianson), he decides to spend his severance pay on tearing down his current shack of a home and rebuilding a new one in it’s place.
All in all it was a good movie. At some point when Anakin was huffing from aerosol cans and trading sex for pot I said to Denis, “Oh dear lord I hope that’s not our kids someday.” At some point when the next door neighbor’s daughter regularly starts taking showers with Anakin I thought to myself, “Oh dear lord I hope that’s not my kid someday. That’s completely unacceptable.” Despite that I thought it was a well done movie and Anakin didn’t screw it up too badly and it never got too schmaltzy. And it helped that Boone from “Lost” had a small role.
3 magnificent views of the ocean out of five.
we saw this movie at the Toronto Film Festival and LOVED it. i don’t know if it was because it was a huge event and all the stars were there and that automatically made us like it just a little bit…
and i LOVE Jena Malone. i think she’s fantastic in everything she does.