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Sorry, this movie sucks

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Blistering performances.

For some reason the period around the 1920s and the early 1930s was this great flowering of artistic genius.In Mexico City you had Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and their circle of artist and intellectual friends, which you can watch in the great film by Salma Hayek "Frida" I actually went to Frida Kahlo's neighborhood in Mexico City because I wanted to see her house and the house where Trotsky was killed, but it was closed that day.In London you had the Bloomsbury Group with people like Aldous Huxley, mark Gertler, Virginia Woolf, Carrington, Lytton Strachey etc. Which you can watch in the great Emma Thompson film "Carrington".In New York you had Mrs. Parker and the Algonquin Roundtable. Most of these people above interacted in different ways often in Paris where Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dali, Piccaso, Somerset Maugham, Aleister Crowley, Cole Porter, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin et al held forth in Monte Martre and the French Riviera.Everyone in this film is great and sometimes I think I was just born too late to hang with all these brilliant (and sometimes very unpleasant) people in so many countries.I've read a lot of Dorothy Parker's work and she has a great feminist voice that couldn't be suppressed. Many don't even know they are quoting her when they are. I just read a review of the Johnny Depp movie "Libertine" and someone stated that the actress showed an emotional range from A to B, which is a directly stolen Quote from Parker." Yes, she was drunken, cynical, disillusioned, suicidal etc. but she was and is also great.This movie is a whose who of actors. A lot of people don't even realize that Cyndi Lauper is in it. It was an early movie of both Gwenneth Paltrow and Heather Graham etc. etc.Watch it and love it.

As a bio of the witty writer Dorothy Parker, this film is a dud. We have JENNIFER JASON LEIGH, correctly attired in period costume and hairdo, but rattling about in scenes of overlapping dialog and barely discernible comments being muttered by her under her breath. A striking performance? I don't think so. Leigh strikes out here, just as she struck out when she attempted to win plaudits for her Catherine Sloper in WASHINGTON SQUARE.Nice period atmosphere, sets, costumes and music can't make up for an utterly aimless script that is as empty as the babble going on among the sophisticated literate circle Parker was a part of. She gets some nice support from a cast of competent players but since the whole film depends on understanding what makes Parker tick, it's got to be called a failure.Parker deserved better than this. Hopefully, some day someone with a sense of how to bring her to life will do so with a script that can make us sympathize with the characterization instead of the sketchy view we get here. Nor does it help that few of the characters bear any physical resemblance to the people they're portraying. Did they know what Robert Benchley looked like?

I am a fan of many of the writers who flit in and out of this movie, but I confess I don't know much about their personal lives and habits (except perhaps for Benchley, and Thurber who is only barely mentioned in this film). This film gives the viewer a good sense of what it must have been like to be part of the wildly creative crew that surrounded the legendary Algonquin Round Table, but a very confused picture of Dorothy Parker's life. Only someone who already knows her story, and can keep her various husbands and lovers in order, can piece this mish-mash together. And none of the performers are strong enough to seem like anything more than walk-ons dressed as famous people. (The "gang" scenes work because of the fast pacing; the movie drags when we spend time with the individuals.) According to comments recorded here, Miss Leigh is doing a good vocal impression of Dorothy Parker. Maybe so (I've never heard Parker), but Leigh's delivery is so totally annoying that it's enough to drive the AUDIENCE to suicide. Is she trying to do Hepburn on downers? Sometimes her mannered accent veers toward Transylvanian.Throughout the movie, Parker herself denigrates her little "doodad" poems, but that's all the film offers us of her creative output. We never really find out about the contents of her books and plays, and how she ended up in Hollywood (and what she wrote there). After a few of her doggerel verses, they become trite. I began to wonder if people think these poems are funny because they know they're SUPPOSED to be funny.I'm sure there's probably a good movie in Mrs. Parker's life, but I don't think this is it.

This movie gave a very revealing account of Dorothy Parker and her rapport with the denizens of the Algonquin Round Table. Done in flashback, this movie is easy on the psyche and filled with ascerbic darts that are bounced among the members of the Round Table. One could feel the pain felt by Mrs. Parker as she fights to survive as a writer, and a person, searches for a meaning to life, and wonders why true love is as elusive as masterpiece poetry and short stories roll from her pen.