User Reviews

Katie (Andie MacDowell) is the head mistress of a school, Molly (Anna Chancellor) is the doctor and Janine (Imelda Stauton) the chief of police in a small England town. They are above forty, best girl friends and are together most of their vacant time. They like to dispute the most unsuccessful and unhappy affair with the local men in the week. One day, Katie meets Jed (Kenny Doughty), her former student and at least sixteen years younger than she and they fall in love for each other. She hides this love from the locals and her two friends do not accept such a situation. In order to avoid a spoiler, I cannot comment further than that. This movie has one of the most irregular and confused screenplay and direction I have ever seen. It starts as a romantic comedy, then goes to a free dramatic tragedy, goes to a comedy and ends mushy. The unnecessary tragedy in the middle of the plot does not fit to the movie. Further, the circus in the marriage of Gerald and Kate is ridiculous. If the viewer expects to watch a comedy or romantic comedy, will be very disappointed, and if he expects to see a drama, will be also disappointed. My vote is six.

I enjoyed the first two thirds of this movie, and hated the last third. Every movie has a message and this one was: Good friends stick together no matter how badly they behave towards others or themselves.

Andie McDowell - in a performance I liked, because she seemed to have dropped her whiny, self satisfied, airs of previous roles - is a headmistress of a private British Public (ergo private) School, who has two close girlfriends who meet and trade "men" stories in order to win chocolate bars as a prize for the best story.

One is a cop, played pluckily, by Imelda Staunton. The other is a Doctor, who is angry, foul mouthed and cynical; and as it turns out: spiteful.

At a funeral Andie runs into an old pupil of hers, some 16 years her junior, who happens to be the Organist. Before the re introductions are barely over they're shagging in the Cemetery. This is the kind of movie this is. Hedonism is King, or is it Queen? She decides that this is a "man" story she'll keep secret from the girls, but it's soon out and they are not pleased. The Doctor seems jealous, while the cop seems concerned by the age, and class difference. Although why a cop should pull the class difference issue is beyond me! ***********************SPOILER***************************** When Andie makes the decision to marry him, the friends pull out all the stops to divert her, to no avail. (At this point I said to my wife: "I bet they (the writers) kill him off). Sure enough the Doctor convinces the cop to have her video her seducing the boyfriend. Andie walks in on the seduction, which unknown to her has failed, and storms out. In the ensuing fight, she kicks him out and he is run over by a truck while sitting in the road trying to put his boots on.

That's the first two thirds, and it's not bad. The lines are often witty, if a little to self consciously so, but it seems as if we are going to attack the May - September love affair issue head on. It is not to be. The message is instead to be about how friends make up after screwing one of their own. Which would be fine if there had been a serious attempt to do so. Instead the serio-comedy goes all comedy, and darkly so! Andie walls herself off from her friends and then in a colossal show of thoughtless dishonesty she sets up the school's vicar to marry her. By this time we have seen her get sick and know she's pregnant and assume she is, perhaps, seeking a "father" for the child through subterfuge. As it turns out Andie has not only become deceitful, she has also become stupid, as she is unaware she is pregnant! The friends decide to intervene again, but this time for a good cause. No matter that Andie has set a man up for an emotional crash, but now her friends add poison to the gruel and have her "arrested" at the altar, by none other than her cop friend and her willing bobbies.

Off they go to the Doctor's office where the pregnancy is revealed and in a quick, unconvincing scene, all is forgiven. A bad taste in the mouth is the ending! People behaving badly and stupidly and learning not a wit from it!

This film was choppy, incoherent and contrived. It was also an extremely mean-spirited portrayal of women. I rented it because it was listed as a comedy (that's a stretch), and because the cover said Andie McDowell was acting up a storm in it. She wasn't. I'm a gal, I watched this film with two guys, and we spent an hour afterwards exclaiming over how bad it was.

WARNING: PLOT SUMMARY BELOW! RAMPANT SPOILERS!

The movie starts out with a fairly hackneyed plot about an older woman who takes up with a younger man, to the severe disapproval of her two jealous single girlfriends. They want her to marry a boring guy their own age who is kind of in love with her. But she's so happy with her oversexed puppy that you're rooting for them to stick it out, and sure enough, she decides to marry the guy. But her harpy girlfriend, aided by the wishy-washy one, sets up a plot to trick our heroine into thinking the guy is cheating on her. It works. She has a fight with him, he runs out of the house and is crushed by a truck (Remember the movie's title?) So now he's dead, two-thirds of the way through the film. And although our heroine is a school headmistress who spends her time watching over girls, she apparently forgot to use birth control and is pregnant.

She's already broken off relations with her girlfriends, because they were so unsupportive. Alone and pitiful, she decides to marry the boring guy. Did I mention that the boring guy who kind of loves her is a minister? She had asked him to marry her to the young guy (nice, huh?), but now she tells him she'll marry him, and apparently he has no objections to being dicked around in this fashion. But her girlfriends rescue her at the altar and take her home, where they not-quite-confess that they were mostly responsible for the love of her life getting smushed. She has the kid. In the final scene, they leave it in a crib inside her house while they go out on the porch to drink, smoke and be smug. I kid you not, it's that bad. I left out the part about the cancer red-herring and the harpy's ridiculous lesbian moment.

This film is a calculated attempt to cash in the success of Sex in the City and Four Weddings and a Funeral. In fact, if they'd called it Sex at a Funeral, they might have done better at the box office.

But the film falls between two stools and can't get up. The characters spout improbably bright dialog, but never act in any way remotely recognizable as human. One arbitrary, senseless action follows another to advance what passes for a plot, and one soon tires of the falsity of the whole enterprise.

Andie MacDowell gets points for acting her little heart out, but the performing honors are stolen by Imelda Staunton, as of all things, a police detective (don't they have a height requirement over there?). Ms. Staunton seems unable to make a false move. Would that we could say the same about the writer-director.

If Notting Hill annoyed you as being bogus, stay away from this one. Phonus bolognus on the half-shell.

This starts off bad, what with the three women acting like simpering junior high school wussies sitting around giggling with their gin, endless cigarettes and a caramel chocolate treat for the one who tells the best 'man' story, and then it gets worse -=- spoiler alert =-= what with Andie's character falling for the young organ player who used to be her student when he was 14 (she's the headmistress of an English school, believe it or not), only to have him destroyed thanks to her bitch-from-hell 'girlfriend' . ..and then from there, it's basically unwatchable claptrap: she forgives her 'friend' and has the organ player's love child and the 3 women end up as they started, drinking more gin and smoking more cigarettes blah blah blah. Andie's character throws the caramel chocolates out in the street, in a pathetic attempt to symbolize growth. Have mercy.

Was really enjoying this film until Jed died. Totally unnecessary and ruined it for me. GRRRRR!!! Not that keen on Andy McDowell or Anna Chancellor, but was decent enough film and Bill Paterson and Imelda Staunton are always good. Could have had a better ending.

I watched this film last night for the first time. It was airing on one of the HBO Channels. To be honest I was pleasantly surprised. I wasn't sure at first where they were going with it as the movie progressed I became more and more interested. Thinking at first if this were an older man younger woman scenario, no one would care. I also wasn't sure about Jed's character and what his motives were as well. I like Kate's (Andie MacDowell) friends did not want to see her get hurt and yet being older myself I understood. BUT friends can be sometimes dangerous especially one who masks envy for concern.Once I realized that however young HOT Jed was he was sincere and I believe truly fell in love with Kate, making the outcome even more tragic. On a lighter note one aspect of his character that I found sexy is when he would take the gum out of his mouth before making love to Kate. It was sexy at best! I liked Andie M. in this due to the fact that her character was someone I could relate too. The romantic who I gather had not experienced real romance up until meeting Jed (Kenny Doughty). When she would smile thinking of him in the most inopportune places I thought yes indeed I know that feeling. This is not a great movie but it is a good one and refreshingly what it feels like for older women trying to find love and having a movie in this era portray that.

Andie MacDowell's facial expressions are great again in this movie. When you enter 40 and have been single for a while (or all your life) you may feel you are wasting away. The movie is a sweet reminder that love can be found just anywhere if your antennae is acutely active. I liked the quick sexual encounter, which must be out of character for a normally reserved school teacher (MacDowell). Her ex-student is cute enough, still carrying a crush on his teacher for so long.

There are some parts that I thought rather unrealistic or unpractical, though. For example, at a scene where the other women's jealousy override and a scene was set up to make Andie MacDowell dump the young man, would a mature police officer (the other friend of MacDowell) allow her friend to do such a sinister act? Is it so easy for anyone to not stop in front of a car? Of course accidents happen all the time, but I hoped to see the heroine get happily married with the first man she got involved with (that was the hardest part to believe!! For such a beautiful woman to stay single for so long??)...

Maybe the movie producers are aware of the fact that many romance between an older woman and a younger man do not last for long. Beside they know that a happy ending would not appeal to the public, especially to jealousy women over 40, who are waiting some miracles to happen. The sad ending with a glimpse of hope for the sad woman who lost her true love is sweet, but if the man continued to live, would that last? For how long? Nobody knows. Nonetheless, it's a movie to make you want to watch it again sometime later.... a year later maybe.

I know it is 2005 and many of you have probably already seen this movie, but it is my first time seeing it on Lifetime. I thought it was a pretty good movie until I begin to see what was really happening between Andie McDowell's character (Kate) and her friend, Anna Chancellor's character, (Molly). At first I thought Molly was just bitter against men because she had been in a number of crummy marriages, and while that may be part of the problem, the real truth of the matter is that she has a HUGE "crush" on Kate. This explains the lengths she goes through to keep any man away from Kate. Molly is a lesbian whose loyalties lie with women (which may explain the failures of her three marriages) and her lesbian tendencies come out at near the end of the movie when she kisses the other woman at the medics party. This confirmed for me what I had been suspecting all along that Molly was a gay character in this movie and she wanted Kate from the beginning. Molly is very domineering and controlling with her friend Janine in whom she has no sexual interest, but rather she uses Janine as pawn to help constantly interfere in and destroy Kate's relationships. Molly initiates the breakup of any love interest Kate may express in a man and being Kate's doctor, she also has access to Kate's body. The director was very clever in very subtly showing/hiding this lesbian aspect/triangle of the film, but lesbianism is the fantsy of most males, even directors. As we can see, love between women is not always a pretty or sexy sight.

This is a movie that held great promise but lost the plot somewhere down the line. I would have liked to have given it a 5 because of its sad shortcomings, but decided a 6 would be more fair, given the following things it had going for it:

• The music score fit the film perfectly and it was cleverly used in an engaging manner, both for comedic relief and for drama. - Well picked actors for the roles, the result being a very convincing and beautifully comprised picture of a British small-town. - Pleasant to watch, with delightful attention to detail.

Unfortunately, these redeeming points are not enough. The film left me feeling cheated. Why? It was not brave enough. The movie would have been far more meaningful had Kate (Andie MacDowel) and Jed (Kenny Doughty)been *allowed* to stay together as a couple. By killing Doughty's character, the makers of this movie took the easy way out. They showed the world once again, that yes, it is STILL a taboo for older women to date younger men. (While of course it is perfectly acceptable for old men to date girls barely out of school, a theme prominent in movies for decades now) If Kate and Jed had remained together, in the face of all the adversity that they were having to face in the plot, the movie would have delivered a powerful message. As it stands, by killing Jed off, the movie became a bland, run of the mill movie about... what exactly?

This is not unlike what happened this year with Brokeback Mountain. If the plot of the movie revolves around gay people disaster will follow.. Because Hollywood is not ready to portray happy, normal, healthy gay couples. (Nor an older woman-younger man relationship, apparently) A serious disappointment. Surely, this is not the middle ages?

SPOILER: The young lover, Jed, is kicked out by the spinster, Kate (Andie McDowell), because she wrongly believes that Jed is having an affair with one of her two catty girlfriends. Kate thought she caught them en flagrante delicto. Kate throws Jed's shoes out the door. Jed reluctantly leaves, and then sits in the middle of the road to put his shoes on. Then he gets run over ("Crushed", one of the meaning of the title) by a truck. And dies.

"And then he gets run over by a truck." Can you imagine a screenwriter actually submitting a script with this plot element? Up to then, its a comedy that intends to be frothy, but lacks any real fizz. Everybody but Jed is just annoying. And then they kill Jed, and everybody's sad, until the end where the gals learn to love one another and be supportive, instead of destructive. I give it 2 ugh's.