sfreitashaley I can see why the Farrelly brothers pulled out last minute. Had nothing to do with conflict with the producer (who was fantastic Effie) at all. They witnessed a product that was not worth selling. Matt & Ben have jumped the shark with this and should stay with acting. He was not the right choice from the get go. I thought you two were smart. Clearly not by this choice. HBO is lucky to have a producer like Effie..... Leisure Class sucked. You could predict that Jason had no idea what he was doing from the interviews. He was a pompous child who focused on squinting eyes than the flow of the story. It sucked, he sucks and project green light has jumped the shark. As Billy Crystal said "it's just not funny."

edwagreen No matter what others might say, I found this to be a very good film as it deals with relationships and how the truth ultimately comes out, in order to save the day.It is also a story of revelation and ultimate redemption. The film also sports an outstanding performance by Bruce Davison, as the senator who tries to live life among the elite, but when things start to come out, he reveals himself at the end as quite a character to boot. It is by far his best performance since him nominated performance in "Longtime Companion."The picture starts off quite comical with an off-the-wall brother suddenly appearing at his brother's engagement party. The latter is marrying into society and into a political family as well. He has hidden his true identity and has totally reinvented himself.The appearance of the brother begins to erode all that and with drunken evening pool parties, a near car crash and the ultimate revelations of the Davison (Sen.Ed) character, you know that the engagement shall not exactly bring forth marriage.The role of the women as rebellious, snobbish, intellectual and power-seeking are well revealed here.

Nicole of ArchonCinemaReviews.com The Leisure Class is the film green lit by the fourth season of Project Greenlight, this year produced by HBO and won by neophyte filmmaker Jason Mann.For those of you unfamiliar with Project Greenlight, it is a competition produced by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck (and previously co-produced by Chris Moore who was inexplicably absent this season) in which one winner gets to make a movie. The applicants are typically burgeoning cinema creators or drowning creatives who long ago took the safe route of a standard job. After a hiatus, the fourth season finally returns after a ten year lull, and this time New York film student Jason Mann won. Initially Mann was to direct a film written by season one winner Pete Jones called "Not Another Pretty Woman" but after some finagling, Mann won over HBO and was able to direct his own project, The Leisure Class.I'm a huge fan of the heart and premise of Project Greenlight – give someone, who would otherwise not have a chance at breaking into Hollywood, the opportunity to make a movie. There is something interesting about watching these bright eyed individuals learn about the indie film maker's experience dealing with a studio, a la getting thrown into the deep end. Without fail though, you end up cheering for the Greenlight winner and inevitably form a bias in your experience of the final project. In an effort to truly watch the film with favoritism, I refrained from watching the series after episode two and skipped right to the movie.The premise for The Leisure Class is not complicated in anyway, a British man named William is about to marry into an 'old money' Connecticut family. This happy occasion is turned on its head when William's eccentric brother turns up and the truth of William's pedigree and intentions can no longer be hidden.The Leisure Class as a film is riddled with problems from start to finish, which makes us shudder at the thought of the state of Not Another Pretty Woman, the initial screenplay which was to be made. Character development, acting, plot, tone, structure, cinematography, production design, editing – basically everything needs work and feels like a rough first draft that should never see the light of day except as a canistered film on a shelf.If you pick away at all the physical imperfections, what comes down to it is The Leisure Class is a weak script. The pacing is terrible, unbearably slow and monotonous at the start, with bouts of fleeting and nonsensical mania. The core events of the film do create a substandard plot, but the dialogue and transitional occurrences to get us from one main plot point to the next are absent. Tonally, The Leisure Class is off-putting, jumpy and abrasive while being equally pointless.Yes, the actors could have brought more to their roles than what was there on paper, especially the feebly written females, most notably Bridget Regan who plays Fiona, but that minor fix would not have been enough to save the film. The two leads, played by Ed Weeks and Tom Bell, who are the heart of the film needed significant guidance based on their performances which a more experienced director would have noticed or edited around. Their banter, which seems excessively ad-libbed at times, needed to be reined in considerably so that the core structure of the film was retained. Listening to the dialogue, you long for the characters to get to the point, patiently waiting for the movie to start, which it never does.It seems as though Jason Mann was given every opportunity to succeed and utilize this film as a catalyst for his career and exemplification of his talents as a film maker. Based on The Leisure Class, Mann needs to go back to the basics of exciting and compelling story-telling before jumping into filming.Please check out our website for full reviews of all the recent releases.

mannin11 -- and his name is Jason Mann. Paraphrasing a line that has no purpose at all in the witless screenplay, one has to wonder why, why, why the execs at Project Greenlight caved in all the way to this petulant, whining, no talent (alleged) writer/director. THREE MILLION DOLLARS and this is what they ended up with? One's heart bleeds for Effie Brown, who expressed reservations all the way down the line and was double crossed and vilified for acting like a concerned producer. Let's get this out of the way and address the color situation. Effie wanted a person of color (albeit Asian, half of a male/female duo) to be the chosen one/two and was overruled on the basis of color being in the casting of the movie, not the choice of director -- and it ended up with a black chauffeur as the only person of color in the entire movie (which Effie overruled as condescending.) And to all those dicks who said he didn't get paid, believe me, he got paid. So would a male/female combo have been any less professional and WASN'T IT ABOUT EFFING TIME a woman was included on the roster of Project Runway directors??? Every movie begins with the screenplay and this one sucked bigtime. Right from the start Jason Mann expressed virtually no interest in making this movie, which immediately surfaced with his submitting his own script in place of the one he was hired to direct. And turning around at the awards ceremony and demanding the writer be fired and the movie be made on film, which would add a hundred grand to the budget? Wasn't three million enough??? Endless, endless arguments on the importance of film over digital when the movie just needed to get moving! And Peter Farrelly, as one of the mentors, dropping out two or three episodes in? Was he sighting the iceberg looming on the horizon ahead of the Titanic? Did he recognize that he was dealing with an obsessive no-talent who wasn't worth the time and effort? But getting down to the movie itself... From the very first scene, which flounders all over the place and has misplaced camera positions, the script gives no solid intent on the way the story is going to unfold. Everything but the kitchen sink is tossed into the mix and the characters seem to be stick figures with no flesh and blood. Given their due, the actors all seemed to be talented but the material they were handed was god-awful. The characters were simply empty vessels without form or substance. Was anybody convinced that they really existed? How on earth could HBO have handed over three million dollars to commit this thing to film (not digital -- oh, shut up, Jason!) The story, what there is of it, blunders on with scenes that serve no purpose or make sense -- what was all the twittering between the two brothers that was improvised -- and looked it? Did Jason expect the British accents to make it funny? I'm a Brit and I didn't find the scenes funny at all, merely silly. Not offensive, just plain silly. And the clumsy segue into the swimming pool scene, that was dumb as a brick, and the car crash that Jason wanted to rival the Hindenberg disaster on a limited budget -- and, and, and..! No wit, no humor, no indication of talent behind the camera.One could go on and on about the deficiencies of this movie, directed by someone who should never, ever be allowed to direct anything else (on film or digital!) but the saddest, saddest conclusion of all is that this entire three million dollar debacle may most likely endanger the possibility of Project Greenlight ever surfacing again and giving other, more talented, young directors the opportunity to gain a foothold in the business.Summing all of this up, Effie was right and she deserves a medal for all the crap she put up with in the making of this movie. All the negativity she has received for trying to steer The Leisure Class to a successful conclusion is totally undeserved. She did the job of producer in aces and was bludgeoned into the ground for it. If HBO pulls the plug on future Project Greenlight productions then it wouldn't come as a surprise and the blame for it should be placed right where it belongs. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and what Jason Mann cooked up was totally indigestible. Let's hope he hasn't screwed it up for everyone else.