Armand the virtue of movie - the cast. Frances Mc Dormand,Christian Bale, Natascha McElhone. ball of situations, crumbs of humor, slices of Californian life style and music industry. heart - self definition out of others but as product of them. axis - character of Chistian Bale - scale of facts, words and strange world who gives measure of life. story is not original but solution is special. the pool is, in this case, not only a scene but one character, refuge, root, piece of unfinished relationship and kind of solitude. a good film but in strange form. ball of neurosis and fragile escapes, love as mist and place of the other in your existence, its end is just beginning. That is all !

justin-kindy I'm sure those reading this review have read the plot, so there is no need to go into it again. Frances McDormand transforms herself into yet another different character, Jane, than what she has played before, that of a Rock n' Roll producer who liked the 60's and 70's and decided to never leave the lifestyle, and she does it effortlessly and beautifully. That said, her character is a cliché, at best, which probably helped her step into that role. That is one of the problems with this movie. Most of the characters are clichéd caricatures of what we expect to see. In fact, the plot is so clichéd that you know what is going to happen about 10 minutes into the movie. Another problem with this movie is that if the character is not a cliché, it is an unbelievable character. There are two very noticeable and unbelievable deviations from the cliché. One is in Sam (Christian Bale). Sam is Jane's adult son and is the opposite of his mother, having disliked the lifestyle she immersed him in as a boy. He is pretty conservative and has recently graduated from Harvard Medical School. I've yet to see the son of anyone in that lifestyle decide they want to work long hours at a respectable job. Not very believable. But, Bale puts in a fine performance and is very likable and appealing to the audience. In Bale's case, it is not his fault that he is playing an unbelievable character, because he is very believable as a conservative Psych Doc. The problem lies in the writing of what created this character, his history. The second deviation is in Alex (Kate Beckinsale). Alex is Sam's girlfriend who has not only graduated from Harvard Medical, but is currently working on her dissertation. We're supposed to believe that Alex is so naive and has been so protected that once exposed to the lifestyle of Jane and the rock band she is producing, that she loses her inhibitions and ambition that has gotten her this far. Her slouch towards hedonism is brought about, not by Jane, but by her rock band's lead singer, Ian (Alessandro Nivola), who is also Jane's lover. The only problem is that there is no chemistry between Ian and Alex. There are a few witty comments and you can clearly see the actors looking on at each other to show there is an attraction. They don't even try to hide their supposed attraction when Sam is around (also unbelievable). Ian is yet another clichéd character in this mishmash of cliché and unbelievability. See this movie because both Frances McDormand and Christian Bale are masters of their craft and can pull you into any character they possess. But, expect to see them do this in a pathetic story line.

AZINDN If you were privy to the Laurel Canyon lifestyle in the 60s and 70s, this film is like a retro shock with all the old familiar haunts still there, and the inevitable lost generation of 20 somethings wandering the deer trail lanes of traffic to hang with the musicians. At least, this is how the premise of the 2002 version of the canyon lifestyle is reflected. Between the generation of hippie organic mama (Frances McDormand) and her predictably uptight conservative doctor son (Christian Bale) and his uber egghead grad student girlfriend (Kate Beckinsale) are the silences of a parent who did her thing and a son who didn't. Literally caught between them is the luscious Beckinsale, who comes to enjoy the hedonism the mother's world of music and a young lover (Allessando Nivola) present. She likes the pot, pool parties, and 3-somes while her fiancé dallies with the sublimated lust for a professional colleague (Natasha McElhone) who is more his cup of straight-laced tea. His resentment of mom's ability to be cool and productive clash with his inability to make decisions about his own lifestyle choices, a serious wife-in-training, his medical practice, and the possibility of affairs with other women. He is as much drawn to sin and swinging as Kate. The tension of the six characters makes the story of kids and their parents failure to communicate as old as the perennial hills. Great soundtrack with vocals by Nivola and recording sessions are added plus. McDormand is one of the finest character actors around, and she rises to the challenge of taking back seat to Beckinsale's beauty. Nevertheless, McDormand steals the show every time she is on screen. We don't care about the young couple, we care about the three-way between mother, her lover, and her son's lover...that's Hollywood!

MBunge This might have been a good film if someone had been able to say "enough" while they were making it. I'm not sure who's at fault here. It could be a self-indulgent writer/director, feckless producers, meddling studio executives or demanding actors. Whoever is to blame, there are simply too many characters going in too many directions that are too disconnected from each other. Those machinations leave too little room to explore inter- and intrapersonal conflicts that are sparked by plot devices and smothered by too much back story.Sam and Alex (Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale) are a young unmarried couple. He's a psychiatrist and she's his smarter half, going for her PHD in genetics. They move to the West Coast for Sam's new job and have to move in with his complicated mother Jane (Frances McDormand). She's a record producer trying to finish up a new CD with the band of her young boyfriend Ian (Alessandro Nivola). As Alex tries to finish her dissertation, she gets caught up in the rock-n-roll atmosphere at Jane's house and quickly morphs into a hanger on who's attracted to both Ian and Jane. Meanwhile, Sam gets caught up in a mutual attraction with an inexplicably Israeli doctor (Natascha McElhone) at his new hospital. On top of all that, add in a running battle between Jane and a record company executive (Melissa De Sousa) and Sam's attempts to help a troubled young man with a mother who's like the anti-matter universe version of Jane.Laurel Canyon isn't poorly directed or poorly performed and none of its individual scenes are poorly written. The film as a whole, though is overstuffed and undercooked. The characters have to room to breathe, the relationships have no time to grow and the overall story is never able to get anywhere. Sam and Alex's relationship is barely established on screen before they start drifting apart and since there's no way to be really invested in them being together, there's no drama in seeing that union strained. Sam and Jane are supposed to have a troubled and distant relationship because Jane is a self-centered free spirit who never really parented her son. But their family history is never more than hinted at, Jane spends most of the movie behaving in relatively appropriate ways and Sam and Jane probably spend less time together on screen than Alex and Jane. The movie tells us there's a lot of disappointment and regret between mother and son, but never explains it and barely displays because the story spends so much time on so many other things.There's also about as much depth to Ian and Jane's love affair as the average couple in a porno movie. They're together because the script says they're together and because there's nothing to that connection, there's no emotional resonance when Ian and Jane get involved with Alex. You know such a threesome is wrong but it doesn't feel wrong because you don't feel anything about any of the characters. It's really just titillating watching the sexy Kate Beckinsale romp around with the equally sexy Alessandro Nivola and the handsome Frances McDormand.Someone needed to sit down and figure out what was the point of this film. Is it about a young couple finding their love challenged by completely unfamiliar surroundings and behavior? Is it about a mother and son getting over their unpleasant past? Is it about a sheltered young woman discovering a new lifestyle and having to decide what kind of person she is? Is it about a young man who has everything he thinks he wants but then discovers something he wants something else? Laurel Canyon tries to be all of that and more. The result is that it ends up being about nothing.This certainly isn't an aggressively terrible movie, though the ending falls completely flat because the story is too busy to properly build up to it. Watching this film, though, is an ultimately unsatisfying and unmoving experience.