If you want to see a movie about building a house, watch "Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House" which is still more relevant (and funnier) after 70 year than this movie is after three. Blandings shows the strain building can cause on a couple--while being realistic, smart, and very funny.
I teach writing workshops, and this is a script I will show students as an example of what not to do. Don't make characters afterthoughts that go through motions so your plot can happen. Don't have plot holes so big that virtually any person in the audience may think, "Wait, that doesn't make sense, if they'd simply xxx there'd never have been this problem..."
And even a movie that starts with an "idea" should be able to make that idea clear. Here, it's so strained in every possible way that you have to wonder what the original idea was.
Was it that architects are egomaniacal liars? Was it that mismatched couples shouldn't design a house? Was it, perhaps that a client should not sleep with her architect (a time-tested tradition) and possibly have his baby (the last minor issue never being addressed).
If the vision was to stack of lack of logic on top of a dearth of emotion, then they succeeded with flying colors (speaking of colors, I did like the way the CGI house was painted and the mural at the end, but you can simply jump to the end and save yourself from the rest.)
I'm sure everyone involved worked really hard, but without a good script to start with, it's like building a house without a floorplan.
We'll start with the couple who are so completely mismatched from the start there's no reason for them to have gotten together, much less to be together. She's an artist, he's a number's man with no artistic outlook much less imagination. The numbers man would clearly have done more research on the architect than was done in this case, so the entire ending is unbelievable--not that anything else is that believable to begin with.
Then there's the architect so transparent in his motives that a single Google search would have revealed his "secret," not to mention the fact that he'd designed this house 15 years earlier. And a house itself where the entire first floor is devoted to the staircase and disregards not only any practical use, but also windows on the beautiful lake view.
The house they build makes as little sense as the story they built around it. Take the end (please). Why have the characters have changed so drastically as to be unrecognizable? The numbers man is suddenly sensitive to his wife's artistic nature. The wife seems to now have a busy art career while her formerly workaholic husband tends the baby. WHY? We don't see them change, we just see them magically different as if it's suddenly a different movie. That's not a character arc, that's Deus Ex Bulldozer.
So, go watch "Mr. Blandings Builds his Dreamhouse," a movie that lives up to the potential of its subject with characters, relationships, charm, and humor that actually makes you laugh.
I teach writing workshops, and this is a script I will show students as an example of what not to do. Don't make characters afterthoughts that go through motions so your plot can happen. Don't have plot holes so big that virtually any person in the audience may think, "Wait, that doesn't make sense, if they'd simply xxx there'd never have been this problem..."
And even a movie that starts with an "idea" should be able to make that idea clear. Here, it's so strained in every possible way that you have to wonder what the original idea was.
Was it that architects are egomaniacal liars? Was it that mismatched couples shouldn't design a house? Was it, perhaps that a client should not sleep with her architect (a time-tested tradition) and possibly have his baby (the last minor issue never being addressed).
If the vision was to stack of lack of logic on top of a dearth of emotion, then they succeeded with flying colors (speaking of colors, I did like the way the CGI house was painted and the mural at the end, but you can simply jump to the end and save yourself from the rest.)
I'm sure everyone involved worked really hard, but without a good script to start with, it's like building a house without a floorplan.
We'll start with the couple who are so completely mismatched from the start there's no reason for them to have gotten together, much less to be together. She's an artist, he's a number's man with no artistic outlook much less imagination. The numbers man would clearly have done more research on the architect than was done in this case, so the entire ending is unbelievable--not that anything else is that believable to begin with.
Then there's the architect so transparent in his motives that a single Google search would have revealed his "secret," not to mention the fact that he'd designed this house 15 years earlier. And a house itself where the entire first floor is devoted to the staircase and disregards not only any practical use, but also windows on the beautiful lake view.
The house they build makes as little sense as the story they built around it. Take the end (please). Why have the characters have changed so drastically as to be unrecognizable? The numbers man is suddenly sensitive to his wife's artistic nature. The wife seems to now have a busy art career while her formerly workaholic husband tends the baby. WHY? We don't see them change, we just see them magically different as if it's suddenly a different movie. That's not a character arc, that's Deus Ex Bulldozer.
So, go watch "Mr. Blandings Builds his Dreamhouse," a movie that lives up to the potential of its subject with characters, relationships, charm, and humor that actually makes you laugh.