Crush

Rating:
Summary: My Favorite movie
Review: This is a great movie. I love it. It is just a perect chick flick.

Rating:
Summary: A movie to be missed
Review: This movie had potential to be at least enjoyably entertaining. However, it's potential was never realized. It is unthinkable that a woman (Andie McDowell as Kate) would stay friends with a couple of jealous and cruel "friends", particularly the one who is almost directly responsible for the death of her much younger fiancee. Are women really this pathetic, I certainly don't think so. The movie annoyed me to no end. Don't waste your time...

Rating:
Summary: I Was CRUSHED!
Review: This movie is one that if you are a woman,you will enjoy. Crush will induce emotions and start one to really think about friendship and how dangerously controlling it can be if their is no respect. I loved the music that went along with the movie and the plot was full of unexpected twists and turns. Three professional women, single, in their 40's are friends is a beautiful english countryside town. One of these three women falls deeply in love with a very handsome, charasmatic, sensous, caring man. His downfall? He is years younger then she. Instead of being happy for her, the other two scramble their lives so that it is their complete mission to wreck this beautiful relationship between a man and a woman. Unfortunatly, they will stop at nothing. Crush keeps you in tow until the very end, and I would suggest keeping a box of tissue handy. Crush will evoke many feelings, and shows the dismay of what base friendship is: cruelty, jealousy, disrespect, and irreversable pain. This movie will move you to realize that there is so much more to friendship and perhaps it will allow one to realize that respect is a crucial factor in any friendship. There is an almost amazing transformation of characters and surpising amount of forgivenss and healing taking place. Crush will keep you wondering until it's perplexing conclusion. Andie MacDowell and Kenny Doughty have an amazing on screen charisma, and Kenny Doughty is a very handsome young British actor full of life, acting as "Jed" he did an excellent job portraying this young man. I loved it and will defintly look for more movies with Kenny Doughty in them!

Rating:
Summary: Involving
Review: This movie was a wonderful, touching and involving time. I really loved it. While it was tragic, it was also energizing to me and I was really glad I had seen it. I am ordering several copies to share with a couple of my friends.

Rating:
Summary: Quirky chick comedy turns dour
Review: This quirky chick comedy tries to take itself seriously, then has second thoughts and reverses itself, losing all credibility in the process. Kate (Andie MacDowell) is a forty-something headmistress of a private school. She and her friends Janine (Imelda Staunton) and Molly (Anna Chancellor) spend much of their time drinking and telling ribald war stories about their exploits with men. When Kate takes a tumble with twenty-something Jed (Kenny Doughty), their fling turns into a romance that turns a bit too serious for her friends' sensibilities.

Their plot to break up the lovers goes terribly wrong, creating a rift between Kate and her friends. Serious melodrama ensues as the light hearted comedy becomes ponderously morose. Then suddenly, inexplicably and incongruously everything is fine again and it is like nothing ever happened. The story is cute in the beginning, but loses believability after it makes the first somber twist. The melodrama is realistic, but the reconciliation is utterly implausible.

Andie MacDowell delivers an excellent performance. She is light and breezy in the romantic parts and forcefully emotional in the dramatic scenes. She conjures a believable character, but the script makes her look loopy because she makes so many obviously foolish choices. Imelda Staunton steals the show with a droll presentation. Staunton is unabashedly honest and blase as she delivers one outrageous zinger after the other. Anna Chancellor is adorable as the police chief, and she looks like a little munchkin next to the towering Staunton and MacDowell, creating constant visual comedy by contrast. Kenny Doughty is mostly window dressing, a Brad Pitt clone without many lines. His entire job consists of being sexy and irreverent, which he accomplishes without much trouble.

This film is destined for a long run on Lifetime. It will play a lot better with women than men. Despite some good performances, the screenplay leaves one rolling one's eyes in disbelief. I rated it 6/10. Good for a girls' night out.

Rating:
Summary: The sisterhood is terribly flawed
Review: Three woman in their forties bemoan their lack of long term relationships. One a head mistress of a very proper English, school (Andie McDowell), another a doctor and the third the head of a police squad.

The movie starts out making it quite obvious, these women are somewhat questionable in their thought process, in the sense they are quite content to dish out the rules and then break them.

These three women, get together to bemoan their lack of relationships or how pitiful they are. However, it doesn't take too long for you to realize their shallowness in all but their relationships with one another is why there is such a lack. Though they don't say it, men are the enemy or the trophy.
The character who is a doctor is clearly the motivator in many of the issues. She is quite calculating in her need of a man, a rich man. She leads the other two, who are only too happy to follow in her search for pity. How else would she have an audience.

However, the other two woman are careful when they have a chance encounter, they don't want to surrender their private affairs to the group for examination. But the doctor is relentless in her pursuing these facts. In many senses, it is clear she is jealous and is hiding it in the guise of concerned friend.

Andie McDowell's character gets involved with a much younger man, in fact a former student who is now 24, over 16 years her junior. It is clear this young man adores her and her female friends especially the doctor are fit to be tied. First they don't take him too seriously and then try to trash his reputation with her, when they feel threatened. The doctor here too is the prime motivator. But the young man is on the level. Then when it seems she is really getting serious so do they.

The results are not predictable in some ways. I won't go further here to avoid ruining the movie for you. However, what struck me what the shallowness of the woman, especially the character Andie McDowell plays. The acting was excellent, it was the character she played that was shallow. If you watch it you will see what I mean. This is a fine example of the control one individual can exert over a group.

Rating:
Summary: Total waste of potential
Review: To team heavyweight british actresses like Imelda Staunton and Anna Chancellor with accomplished Andie McDowell in a romantic tragicomedy must have seemed like a good idea, and, indeed, on paper, 'Crush' sounds like a solid, entertaining movie.

Shame, then, that in reality, it's a mindless, pointless serving of over-emotional claptrap, full of boring characters and histrionic situations. It's like someone took the stereotypical British reserve and tried (hugely unsuccessfully) to blend it with mawkish sentimentality normally associated with Hollywood blockbusters of this ilk.

Kate, Molly and Janine are all man-trashing, wine-swilling best buds, and when Kate finds romance with a man 20 years her junior, her 'friends', convinced this is a bad idea, do everything in their power to attemot to convinve her otherwise. The plot goes from predictable, to ridiculous, and back to predictable again, with very little room in between for anything worthwhile or redeeming.

MacDowell, Staunton and Chancellor are very fine actresses, so why their performances cannot save this terrible film from the festering recesses of Mundane is something I still haven't worked out. They each give decent turns as their respective characters but thanks to pedestrian editing and a ridiculous plotline, their performances are overshadowed.

It's partly the fault of a plot that isn't sure if wants to be a romantic drama, a screwball comedy or a portrayal of the evil nature of humanity. Why would Chancellor go so far as to seduce MacDowell's new lover in order to prove his unsuitability? Why would Staunton stay happy as a clam inthe background, offering neither advice nor caution to either of her so-called friends? All the good acting in the world couldn't save these huge idiosyncratic discrepancies from themselves.

The script is merely pedestrian, and the direction, forgettable. Even the most ardent followers of the 'Chick-Flick' genre will be hard-pushed to find any redeeming features in 'Crush' to warrant spending your hard-earned cash on it. Avoid.

Rating:
Summary: Schizophrenic Dramedy That Peters Out
Review: Watching "Crush" is like seeing a really pretty house from the distant roadside, only to drive up and realize it's actually a hastily painted shack that somehow lured you over. The first half is reasonably engaging, as we follow the anxious exploits of a 40-something headmistress (played with sincerity by modeling's most famous plainjane, Andie McDowell) who falls first in lust and then in love with a man 15 years her junior. Their romance survives a series of trials and tribulations, including the general disapproval of the locals, but not the interference of her suspicious friends, one a sweet but mousy cop and the other a pushy doctor whose mean-spirited plan to out the boyfriend as a philanderer leads to senseless tragedy. Getting a handle on just what the movie is saying is tough--on one hand, it's about eschewing convention for true love, but, alas, that never actually happens, as the romance ends abruptly. There are the expected and cliched nods to sisterhood, motherhood, and the joys and pains of living, as well as a creepy subtext that men are really only necessary for sex and procreation. (Driving the point rather clumsily home is the fact that the doctor, a masculine horse of a woman, comes to realize she doesn't need men at all; her character also plays into a rather ugly sexual stereotype.) There's nothing particularly wrong about the performances, cinematography or the score of "Crush," but the film suffers from relying too much on semi-realized moments of female bonding to make up for a story that goes off in several directions without really getting anywhere. In the end, "Crush" wants to be a "chick flick," with some tears and some laughs (and even a happy ending that feels forced); the problem is, in the end, that's all that it is.

Rating:
Summary: What a ride!
Review: Whew. I laughed my butt off until Kate's friends plotted to destroy her relationship. After the fallout from that I cried and cried. The love between Kate and Jed was so pure-so real. Incredibly acted and writtten. It really felt like someone had really died. I was incredulous at Kate for forgiving her friends. Didn't seem that it should've ended that way. So all in all-a crazy mix. Very funny and very heartbreaking.