Duplicity film has some New York scenes, but film is a pretentious, confusing, over-edited MESS!



Just went to a ridiculously “secure” screening of the new Julia Roberts/Clive Owen film DUPLICITY—we were all forced to open our bags at the door and be searched by guards as we entered the Director’s Guild Theatre on West 57th Street in New York City. The same guards roamed with aisles with night vision equipment during the screening to make sure no one was trying to record the film or it’s soundtrack. It was pretty amusing… This happens more and more at screenings. It’s very insulting…and why? The movie is a huge, muddled mess: overedited, over-imagined and over-thought…it’s a whole lot of “nothin”… It’s a “spy thriller” ala James Bond but without the cool gadgets and the bloody death everywhere. The film has wonderful actors…the wonderful Kathleen Chalfante, the aforementioned Roberts & Owen. Also, Tom Wilkinson is reteamed with his “John Adams” co-star Paul Giamatti and they start the movie with confusing slow-motion fisticuffs on a private plane runway. The movie, written and directed by Tony Gilroy, is supposed to be about two corporate spies with a romantic history who collaborate to pull off a con, but they lost me halfway thru this pretentious “epic.” Somebody has supposedly discovered the remedy for baldness and they want to steal it and sell it to the Swiss for a bundle. It takes two hours to get to that spot in the movie. The movie is trying to be “too cute”…every few minutes it jumps around…five years, three years, 18 months forward, 4 years back…Jesus…I was getting dizzy from all the pretentious jumping around in time. Why can’t these filmmakers today stop trying to be so cute and confusing and just tell the story as it happens? Occasionally a flashback is OK, but I completely lost track of what the hell was going on. When the lights came up, I asked my guest and the people around me and EVERYbody was equally confused. Why do filmmakers do this? The only point I can see is to attempt to elevate what you know to be crappy material into something that’s so confusing, the audience will just think they’re too stupid to figure it out, when in reality, they know that the Emperor has no clothes.

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