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Just perfect...

Expected more

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

I was quite curious about this film, mainly because I've been a big fan of Stockard Channing for a long time. I've always liked her in a any role may it be the First Lady of the United States or a witch or just a small town wife. One of the most underrated actresses of all time. She never disappoints, no matter how dry or imperfect the script or material she is given, she always delivers.Which is pretty much all I can say about this movie.First off, and remember this is all in my own opinion, the lead characters playing Kate and Sam bugged the heck out of me. Sam, the little imp that he is, sleeps his way into Sheila's (Stockard's character, a big PR boss and a very Devil-Wears-Prada-esquire woman with claws to match) bed and company only to meet a young girl his age and later decides to dump his lover-slash-boss. Sheila decides to fire him, knowing she could not possibly still keep him on after their little affair. Along the way in the movie, Sam realizes the girl he's dating, Kate, turns out to be Sheila's daughter.Sam is basically a bit of a cad.Yeah, go figure.And why did Kate bug me? Well, first off, the whole acting wasn't up to par, then again, Sam's wasn't either so moving on. Second, the way she was written, a hardened young-no-daddy-girl-with-too-busy-mommy, was supposed to also be a young activist-esquire girl, protesting to set free some sort of criminal (when scenes without Channing came, I immediately got bored and paid less attention) was played too weak. She went from this tough rebel chic to some bitter, ungrateful (mummy was never around but managed to give her allowance always, typical teen-angst), idiotic girl who lets a boy get the best of her because she later finds out he slept with her mother and lied about it.As far as happy endings go, they're great and swell, but it bugged the heck out of me when she just forgives him, after being given a stolen dolphin, and ride off into the sunset. It's a bit stupid, I have to say, because one: he slept with her mum and two: he lied about it (and three, he slept with her MOTHER--I don't care if he didn't know that prior, but god, can you imagine awkward? I would die).There are a thousand other guys in the world, why would you settle for that? Awkward future ahead.For some sort of activist-esquire type of girl, she sure forgives lying easily. Kate was written too weak, in my opinion.Okay, there, main characters were idiots.Stockard Channing played Sheila perfectly from hard-ass b*tch boss to scorned lover to vulnerable and exposed woman hiding behind a hard mask. She didn't disappoint, along with Anthony Head (who was a delight as Sheila's gay brother) and Bob Hoskins.If you are a Channing fan, worth watching at least, but really, if you're easily annoyed with teen-love gone awry with easy (read: idiotic) fixes, then run. I had fun watching Stockard, but the kids didn't do it for me.Girls, strong headed, level headed ones who easily see through BS might find this annoying, but romantics who love 'grand but small gestures' then you might enjoy. It's pretty basic stuff. Like the graduate, only with sillier kids.Channing fans: watch it, but you might want to fast forward in some areas. She plays her role fabulously, as always.

I thought the plot was somewhat weak and the male character very unlikable. He seemed to be selfish throughout the film and remained so even in the end. I did not find myself cheering for a happy ending. The only character I did like was the struggling mother trying to make it as a singer, but that side story really had no parallels with the main plot. The rest of the story flowed in a very predictable manner and was quite unoriginal. After watching the movie, I felt like I had just wasted my time. I don't recommend watching it unless you have a profound love for British accents and that, that alone would satisfy your time in watching the movie.

It's a romantic comedy, but it's bland as hell as it just lacks story direction. There's many narrative problems -- for a start, Kate is presented as a strong, spiky lady at first (she's campaigning for the release of a wrongly imprisoned person as a sub plot), but then she's accepting of the main character sleeping with his mum and lying about it. Why? Because he gets her a toy dolphin. Not only is that pretty insulting to this films female audience, it's insulting to anybody who's ever had a meaningful relationship. For a romantic comedy to have those flaws is absolutely fatal, and it won't find a commercial audience because of that.Sam's character deserves a punch throughout the entire film - the audience won't like him due to his character journey (he tells his girlfriend he loves her, whilst lying about shagging her _mum_, in the space of 30 seconds). He goes from idiot, to idiot, in 90 minutes. We're defining lack of character journey in a motion picture, here.So, the male and female lead characters are idiots.Amusing, Bob Hoskins turns up near the end to smack Sam about - but the audience I saw it with laughed at the scene. I would have found it far more entertaining if Hoskins had beat him to a bloody pulp.Basically, if older men wrote and directed a romantic comedy, this would be what happens. And it is. Kate goes from being interesting to being a complete idiot of a character within the space of an hour, and it's a real shame. Kate's the worst representation of a protester I've seen in a movie pretty much ever, also, and it's something I found fairly insulting.Performance wise, Amanda Ryan is mostly great, Tony Head absolutely nails his part and Bob Hoskins is Bob Hoskins.The overall opinion I had from this is that they didn't want to another Love Actually, but at the same time they didn't have the balls to make anything meaningful in any other sense. Relationships are complicated and messy, people can be strong, individual and interesting; this is not that representation of life, love or people.

I sometimes get the feeling that the only reason people make films like this one is so that people like me, who like to go to the cinema at least once a week, will have an alternative to the cgi/slasher/American pie formulaic garbage that fuels the multiplexes. In other words fairly pleasant, fairly harmless movies, like Venus, Shameless, Junebug, Waitress etc that fill a gap but, like Chinese food, leave you craving something more substantial within the hour. Hunter and Hunsinger scored a mild success with Lawless Heart and return to the same general area and clearly figure that if outrageous coincidence was good enough for Shakespeare it's good enough for them thus we get a chain of events in which Bob Hoskins, on the strength of an meeting Shaun Eveans for an hour or two and taking a shine to his mother, Lesley Manville, offers Evans the use of a flat in London which leads to Evans finding work as a waiter and catching the eye of PR honcho Stockard Channing with whom he is soon doubling as a gigolo where he in turn catches the eye of a girl his own age who, surprise, surprise, turns out to be Channing's daughter; Channing has never disclosed the name of the father and as Dorothy Parker said you could have knocked me down with a fender when he is finally revealed as Hoskins' brother. With story lines like these you need decent thesping and on the whole that's what we get with the glaring exception of leading man Shaun Evans compared to whom an amoeba with Learning Difficulties would eclipse Errol Flynn in both charm and charisma. Luckily Evans is surrounded by Manville, Hoskins, Anthony Head and Amanda Ryan all of whom help to make the time pass pleasantly enough.