Ron Thornton
There is something nice about putting on a movie and never having the urge to skip and jump forward. If you want to feel good, wrap yourself up in a story like a warm, familiar blanket, and listen to the amazing tones that is the voice of Morgan Freeman, this is very pleasant way to spend a couple of hours.A man who has lived life and with the ability to describe it vividly finds himself spending the summer in temporary quarters...where he learns to heal, to recover, to influence, to teach, and to love again. The dialogue is spot on, and while Freeman can make a recitation of the phone book sound wonderful, the lines he delivers with that voice that was created by God himself (hey, I saw that movie, too) give this pic a great foundation to build upon. In the end, you can analyze the stuffings out of it, but it comes down to whether a movie makes you feel good and that it was time well spent. It does.
SnoopyStyle
Monty Wildhorn (Morgan Freeman) is an alcoholic wheelchair bound Western writer who has stopped writing. His nephew Henry (Kenan Thompson) gets him a place to stay in Belle Isle for the summer. The place is next door to recently divorced Charlotte O'Neil (Virginia Madsen) and his three girls Finnegan (Emma Fuhrmann), Willow (Madeline Carroll) and Flora (Nicolette Pierini). Finnegan loves to tell stories.I hoped that Rob Reiner retains an ounce of originality but feared that this would be sadly uninspired. This ends with too much of my fears coming true. These are great actors doing their best. The story has its share of eccentric characters. I really like Freeman with Fuhrmann. This could be a sweet kids movie especially if it concentrated on the girl instead. It's depressingly predictable to have the May to December romance. With such great actors, this has the opportunity to be good but the material doesn't have much meat on the bones.
Claude Gardens
The story is well written and the actors are great. Thank you. I've watched it 3 or 4 times now and still enjoy every minute of it. It speaks again of being family even with strangers who come into your life and bring you joy but not on the initial meeting. You can never judge a book by its cover is so true in this situation. How many times have you met someone in passing and have remained friends for years? We can all relate to that I think. Morgan does an outstanding performance as being a bitter man after his wife's passing and does a great job of turning the page on his life with a little help from his nephew who keeps pushing him in a subtle way to get over it.
OJT
I enjoy most kind of movies if they're well made. And director Rob Reiner has done a few I liked quite a bit. it's been some years since his heydays ("The bucket list" in 2005, "A few good men" in 1995, "Misery" in 1990, "When Harry met Sally" in 1989). But I wonder if this is a sign that he's getting too old.This story should have all ingredients to make a great feel good movie, and starts off OK, but I'm afraid to say that the praises it gets here in other reviews are quite far off. This is just like a mediocre TV-flick, and though it's well played by most actors, it's tediously boring, slow and misses the mark that a feel good film should have.Morgan Freeman is good as always, and Virginia Madsen is good, but here they had almost nothing to work on. The script is very thin, and a film like this should push the nerves like f.e. "Driving Miss Daisy", "Pay it forward" or "Good Will Hunting" if they are to deserve a rating on almost 7 here on IMDb.I can see Rob Reiner probably didn't have the best writing material to work with here, and I wish him luck with "And so it goes" which are due next year. He's got a great cast there, and the writer Mark Andrus succeeded with "Life as a house". Good luck, mister Reiner!
AD
