Watch Blow Dry For Free

Highly Overrated But Still Good

The first must-see film of the year.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

The annual British Hairdressing Championship comes to the town of Keighley. Phil (Alan Rickman) and her son Brian (Josh Hartnett) run a barbershop. His ex-wife Shelly (Natasha Richardson) and her lesbian partner Sandra (Rachel Griffiths) run a beauty salon. Defending champion Raymond Robertson (Bill Nighy) dissuades Phil from competing. Brian is taken with Raymond's daughter Christina (Rachael Leigh Cook) and joins Shelly who secretly has terminal cancer. This is a British satire. Everybody is playing it up as wacky hairdressing. There are some great Brits but Rachael Leigh Cook and Josh Hartnett stick out as sore thumbs. They are obviously trying to get some buzz going with a couple of hot young Americans. The problem is that I just can't get over these two youngsters trying for a British accent. Sadly, it's unnecessarily distracting. Whereas the story itself is amusing at times. I didn't have any big laughs. It's more cute than funny.

I've seen this film probably four or five times, and I love it more each time. I sought out Blow Dry because I love Bill Nighy, Alan Rickman and the late, great Natasha Richardson ... but it took me ages to find the DVD because it had these two random American kids on the cover.I was puzzled because Richardson, Rickman and Nighy had obviously been relegated to sub-plot which seemed incredible, but I watched it anyway. In the event, the marketing became only more baffling. I can only assume that the publicists played on Josh Hartnett and Rachael Leigh Cook for the American market, but in doing so they must have put off an awful lot of people like me - and surely Richardson at least carried plenty of weight in the US? And Nighy and Rickman are hardly unknowns!Anyway, now that I've found it in spite of the marketing people totally missing the point, I can review it. Blow Dry is whimsical, gentle and funny - and I mean that in the best possible way. It's a British comedy in the best tradition, understated, warm and centred solidly in the very ordinary lives of very ordinary people.Bill Nighy is predictably surreal and steals every scene he's in, but handles his role as the devious, dastardly but ultimately vulnerable and really quite likable villain of the piece very well. Alan Rickman struggles a little to portray his character's bitterness and hostility at first, but as the character warms up he comes into his own. Given his character's back story it must have been something of a task both for Rickman and for the writers to avoid making him utterly pitiable, but they managed it and Phil comes out the hero, still hurting but beginning to move forward with life in totally non-pathetic fashion.The screen belongs, though, to Natasha Richardson. The relationship between Shelley, played by Richardson, and Sandra is brilliant; totally convincing but not in any way more of an issue than it should be. There's a brief moment of surprise when you realise they're a couple, but it's written and played so well that you very quickly accept it and it becomes simply part of the story. Richardson's balancing act between pathos and comedy is finely-tuned and very admirable; the fact that she's dying is never forgotten, but neither is it allowed to overshadow the plot or stifle the comedy. For one of the best examples I have ever seen of good, simple writing skilfully delivered, watch Richardson's scene with the doctor in which her character learns she is terminal; it should not be possible to be that sad and yet funny at the same time!My one complaint with this film is the casting of Josh Hartnett as Phil and Shelley's son, Brian. Rachael Leigh Cook is non-descript and suffers from being on the same screen as Bill Nighy, but at least they just let her be American even if she was a strange choice in the first place. Josh Hartnett, meanwhile, should never have been allowed anywhere near this film, and all the line-cutting in the world (and you get the impression they cut as much as they could get away with) can't prevent him from ruining what should have been some of the finest scenes in the film. The scene about halfway through in which Richardson's character reveals to Phil and Brian that she has cancer and is dying should have been a deeply moving showcase for the talents of Richardson and Rickman, but the viewer is thrown completely out of the moment by Hartnett's utterly appalling trampling of the Yorkshire accent - which, in spite of its awfulness, still seems to have been absorbing enough to prevent him from actually acting at the same time.Aside from this utterly bewildering casting choice, Blow Dry is a fantastic film - I could rave about it even longer, but your time would be better spent just watching it.

The British hairdressing championships are coming to Keighley and it just happens to be the town where Phil (Alan Rickman) lives. He used to be the champion until he wife Shelley (Natasha Richardson) left him for Sandra (Rachel Griffiths). Oh, My! Now, he is just a barber (gasp!) and wants nothing to do with Shelly or the championships. Problem is, there is no one else in town that can represent it.A family reunites and we get to see some of the finest British actors.I just hope my hairdresser doesn't see this and get weird ideas. I don't want to come out with green spikes!

This movie constitutes little more than Simon Beaufoy attempting to continue his run of luck after 'The Full Monty' by presenting another 'down-to-earth' ungainly comedy/drama set somewhere in the impossibly bleak north of England, evidently a place where nobody has any hope or individuality. The film is uniformly and off-puttingly low-lit throughout, presumably a directorial decision but possibly the failure of sufficient electricity or sunlight to reach a positively medieval Keighley.Generally speaking, the decision to cast Josh Hartnett was so ill-advised that watching his performance in this film, and hearing his lamentable Dick-Van-Dyke-style attempts to mimic a "Northern" accent, is almost enough to cast a shadow over his other work (which has generally been of a high standard).Alan Rickman has no more excuse for his mocked-up accent which is ridiculously exaggerated and spoken with a clichéd hairdresser lisp, the combined effect of which will leave anyone from West Yorkshire either laughing out loud for the full running time or feeling somewhat insulted that this debacle was ever put onto film.Differing opinions over the casting aside, it is unlikely that many will find this movie very funny. This seems absolutely reprehensible in a would-be comedy. Love or hate Beaufoy, 'The Full Monty' was a genuinely funny film with a good selection of big-laughs. However, Blow Dry's humour, where it exists, is facile and normally pokes fun at the supposed oddities of working-class culture. Opportunities for humour are overshadowed by the frequent lurches into confrontational and embittered 'realistic' scenes which play out like poorly scripted 'Eastenders' exchanges.The half-baked hair Dressing theme is actually more-or-less incidental to the contorted but occasionally well-worked plot of former lovers, professional rivalry and long-lost childhood friends, and is nothing like as interesting as the strip-club milieu of The Full Monty. It could, one suspects, easily have been exchanged for countless others without rupturing the proceedings too much. The actual 'competition' scenes are a chore to sit through, consisting of the usual hastily-assembled montage sequences focusing on only one or two competitors. Rickman's credentials as a hairdresser seem less convincing than his accent, if that is possible.Amidst the usual cohort of British actors is Rachel Leigh Cook, who looks quite appropriately lost in the movie, probably wondering, like most of the audience, how Hartnett and she became embroiled in all of this. The only scene of any significant originality in the movie, in fact, is that in which Cook chooses to cut off all of her hair to escape from the whole competition circuit - again quite uncannily mirroring audience psychology.In retrospect, it can be seen that the late 90s and early 00s saw a glut of these 'provincial' comedies that were set in deliberate opposition to the London of Richard Curtis' 'Four Weddings' universe. This had a polarising effect so that mainstream British films, and especially comedies, were either set in working-class locations akin to Royston Vasey or else in an unreal city of Whitehall and Anglo-American relationships. Some such productions, like 'The Full Monty' or 'Brassed Off', were good films, others, like this one or something like 'The One and Only' (which was little more than a promotional film for the North East) were terrible. British comedies have become more sophisticated in recent years, and are no longer satisfied with such stereotypes.