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Hope Floats

Hope Floats

List Price: $19.98
Your Price: $17.98
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Beautiful movie
Review: Sandra Bullock, Harry Connick Jr. and Gena Rowlands star in this touching movie about finding your footing. Birdie (Sandra Bullock) is mortified to learn on national television that her husband is having an affair with her best friend. She leaves town with her daughter Bernice and they go to Birdie's hometown to live with her mom. Birdie soon realizes that not much has changed, the small town is still buzzing about her. The movie follows a series of events where she has to change and grow and find herself...and the hope to find life and love again. The movie was poignant and funny, but also very touching in many scenes. This is one of Bullock's best performances in my opinion and one of her best movies.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: I'm not what I once was; but neither are you. You're shorter
Review: This is a terrific, see it again and again film. Sandra's character is going through so much change--some self-inflicted and some forced upon her. This movie proves it's never too late to learn who you really are, or who you were meant to be. Your fate will find you, even if you THOUGHT you had other plans. Excellent things to say about your past behavior biting you in the butt--Polka Dot being head of the job-finding agency--but Birdie takes it in stride. She takes her knocks and we watch every moment. Mother-daughter relationships, resisting love, giving in, seeing things for what they are... all covered right here. Connick delivers a solid performance. Worth seeing!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: True Texas
Review: I usually hate movies about Texas because they always portray as a bunch of hicks and we're not. I commend this movie (cause both Sandra and Harry are Texans) for FINALLY portraying Texas as it truly is. It's about damn time. I think Harry and Sandra work amazingly well together in this movie and that shows. The movie teaches society a lot in 2 short hours, none of which I'm gonna go into but you'll just have to see it to believe it. Twinkles.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good, but cheesy
Review: "Hope Floats" is a typical family drama. A young woman, played by Sandra Bullock, finds out that her husband is in love with her best friend...on a nationwide TV show. As a result, takes her daughter and moves back to her hometown, a small place in Texas, called Smithville. Living at her mother's house, she soon loses her nerves. Right at this moment, the attractive cowboy Justin comes along to win her heart.
What can I say about this movie? It's definitely entertaining and very well acted. Especially Gena Rowlands (as mother) and Mae Whitman (as daughter) are over the top.
But somehow something is missing in "Hope Floats"...maybe it's just a bit too American for the taste of an average European.
Nevertheless...if you like this kind of movies, you should take a look at it. It's no mistake.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Real nice movie.
Review: Ok, It's gonna be short: this is one of my favorite movie!
Great Sandra Bullock, great country music, and a nice story. The story is also taking place where real life is: nice country town, my way of seeing the real America.
I'd rather see this kind of movie than stupid action-gun type of films. Too bad, it's rare to see that in the movies theatres, so you should see it if it's not already done.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Cry every time
Review: As a child of divorce I know how it feel to hate the one person that you should love the most! Thinking to one that broke the marriage is the hero while the one that is in pain is the villian. This movie brings me back every time. I wish so much that my mother has a much strength as Berdie did in this film. I can watch this movie over and over just to listen to the music it contains. The soundtrack is one in a million. You can play it through and through and enjoy every song on it! I would recommend this movie for any woman that has every had her heart broken, ever been a child of divorce, or ever wants inspiration to move on in life and accomplish great things when they seem most impossible!!!!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good Sunday Movie
Review: Wow first let me say I read the other reviews here for this movie and have never seen anyone so thoroughly disect a movie with such venom as the one recommending Lucas. If you don't like the movie just say so but, there are some of us out there that prefer people movies over futuristic space movies none of us will ever probably live to see. Yes some of the movie was weak and the little girl need a whole lot of discipline but over all I loved it and would watch it over again and again from time to time. Not my most favorite of Sandra Bullock but not garbage either. I recommend...While you were sleeping and Miss Congeniality. Im sure I misspelled that.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: SANDRA BULLOCK CHARMS...HARRY CONNICK, JR. SIZZLES...
Review: Forest Whitaker's directorial efforts pay off, as he presents the viewer with a solid, though predictable, romance. The ever charming and coltish Sandra Bullock gives a strong performance as Birdie Pruitt, who has just found out on national television that her husband Bill is having an affair with her erstwhile best friend, Connie. Shocked, she is left to cope with this very public betrayal.

Birdie takes their daughter, Bernice, and leaves her husband, returning to her small town roots in Smithville, Texas, where her mom, an eccentric but lovely lady, wonderfully played by Gena Rowlands, still lives. As a teenager, Birdie had been a big fish in a small pond, a popular high school cheerleader who had ended up marrying the high school star quarterback, Queen of Corn three years running, and the envy of most of the young women with whom she grew up. She now finds herself returning home with her tail between her legs, her fairy tale life having taken a decided nosedive.

While home, some of those who remember her manage to get their digs in. One person, however, a sensitive and sensual good ol' boy, Justin Matisse, played to sexy perfection by Harry Connick, Jr., remembers her with fond affection, as he has loved her since they were in high school. He is there, just waiting to pick up the pieces.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: an old-fashioned, well-constructed, fable
Review: "Hope Floats" is a surprisingly conventional romance, a throwback to the old-fashioned, well-constructed, fable of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl. The genders are changed around so that the woman is abandoned and feels without hope, but otherwise one wonders what director Forest Whitaker must have been thinking this time around. Whitaker, who turned in an edgy performance as a hostage in the sharply-focused "The Crying Game" and evoked spiked effectiveness from the vindictive women in "Waiting to Exhale," makes a pit stop with "Hope Floats"--a picture designed to offend nobody.

There is some aspiration for satire and contemporary relevance in the opening scene, one which highlights the vulgarity of current daytime talk shows and especially the senselessness of those who agree to appear on them. On the Tony Post (Kathy Najimy) program, Tony introduces a young woman (Rosanna Arquette in an uncredited role) who tells a nationwide TV audience that she is having an affair with her best friend's husband. Why she chooses the media to make the announcement is anybody's guess. We meet husband Bill Pruitt (Michael Pere) and his wife Birdee (Sandra Bullock) on the TV set, and at that point Whitaker inexplicably cuts away from what could have been an opportunity for productive lampoon.

Birdee and her small daughter Bernice (Mae Whitman) move to the small-town home of Birdee's mother, Ramona Calvert (Gena Rowlands), and the backdrop is formed for Ramona's bid to match her depressed daughter up with a handsome builder, Justin Matisse (Harry Connick, Jr.), whose attentions, she believes, will heal her daughter's ennui.

The theme of "Hope Floats" is, as the title suggests, the idea that the sun comes out tomorrow, that every cloud has a silver lining, so pack up your troubles in your old kit bag. Small-town life is glorified: it's where the soul can heal, far from the neurotic pressures of the metropolis. The story's development is as hackneyed as its themes.

The movie's chief attribute is a stellar performance by Mae Whitman in the role of angry, isolated little girl who holds out for her father's return and who blames her mom for turning away her dad's love. Obviously no feminist, Bernice pouts throughout the film, making faces at Birdee's suitor, Justin, and cries her eyes out when her dad seems unwilling to return to the fold. This is really Bernice's movie: for her, a heartbreaking story of a gifted child who is picked on the school's bully, Orange Julia (Sydney Berry) and who, like her mother, gains an early lesson about the meaning of life. As her mom ultimately teaches her, youth is not the golden years of unalloyed bliss but rather "childhood is what we try to overcome."

A sentimental touch is thrown in from left field, as we meet Birdee's dad, Harry (James N. Harrell), who is afflicted with Alzheimer's and cannot recall the faces of his own family and appears unable event to speak.

The picture's dialogue is of this nature:

Grandma Ramona, in pushing her daughter to get back into circulation: "Do you think behind every chance there's another chance and another chance and another chance?"

Husband Bill: "People grow: they change."

Birdee: "I know that I am not what I once was."

With elements of soap, sitcom and seasoned surroundings, "Hope Floats" is redeemed only by the opening scenes burlesquing the talk shows and those featuring young Bernice anguishing over the loss of her daddy's attentions.

Rated PG-13. Running Time: 110 minutes.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: nothing awful, nothing great
Review: I've become a Sandra Bullock fan in recent weeks and have been watching a number of movies that I skipped when they were on the big screen because they just didn't seem to be my cup of tea. Finally, I got around to "Hope Floats."

Frankly, I found myself baffled to read that Bullock considers this one of her better movies. It is as predictable as one of the Harlequin romances that you see for sale in a grocery store. Too much screen time is given to her cute little daughter. Her co-star exuded the charisma of a sack of fertilizer. He was handsome in a Harlequin hero kind of way but that was it.

Another fault that works against it is that Sandra Bullock is too beautiful for words in this movie. Every time one of the characters told her how awful she looked, I found myself thinking, "Are they blind? She looks great!" A woman like that would be turning heads everywhere she goes. Bullock did a much better job of muting her good looks in later projects like "Murder by Numbers" and "Miss Congeniality."

Still there are a few sweet scenes like when she puts on a show to cheer up her sad little girl or when she dances with her father. Nevertheless, I hope she continues to play to her strengths and do characters like the one that won my heart in "While You Were Sleeping." She can leave inferior material like "Hope Floats" to the B-list actresses and the Indie film makers.


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