Reviews

It's terrible and not funny movie : bad acting, bad jokes...so many ethnic clichés, although if the writer would have made a movie just with the second part and in a more subtle way it could have been better. It was very successful in France and as a French girl I'm totally not surprised, it just shows how bad we are with dealing with people of immigrant descent. We automatically become very much out there, and just to show that we are OK with it, we have the need to make bad jokes and to use a lot of clichés. I went there with my husband and we were both very surprised to hear people laughing out loud ...did I mention the bad acting ???

Well I was so excited when I rent this movie, just because the plot line seems nice, and there was a high score on IMDb. Also and especially because I love books, I love writer's stories on screen, I love love stories and I love Jennifer Connelly. But this movie was so full of clichés, so predictable in all the love stories that are described from the beginning to the end. Plus the books or stories they write don't seem that great, however they have no problem to be published. For me this movie was overrated, and maybe that is because US movies terribly lack authentic low-budget and simple movies...so when an American viewer sees a movie that only SEEMS to be simple, authentic, he/she tends to think it is great and special without giving it a more profound analysis...while it's actually kind of boring and cliché...I have seen much better with lowest rates.

I will start as explaining, as opposed to many other people commenting this movie : I'm a young French woman so unrelated to American history and I watched this movie as a foreign person. I DO NOT GET ALL THE HATE ABOUT IT! First of all it is a movie, and for me very typically American! Do not take me wrong but a lot of American movies especially when it's about history love to make it more dramatic, more Manichean, that is what makes American movies entertaining! This time it's an African American perspective and that is why it disturbs most of the viewers! When I read all the critics, it's so ridiculous: "not all blacks were slaves, not all whites were slaves owners, black panthers were also violent, etc." Yeah duh! Don't you think we know that??? It's not the point of the movie, the purpose of the movie was to oppose the life of a black servant (actually sorry but for decades Blacks were mostly employed as servants) and some of the MOST memorable episodes or persons of the black history in the US (slavery, segregation, civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. etc.) at no point it was against whites! It's part of the violence of history, of our worldwide history, but yes we know, thank you very much, that everything could be more complicated in real life than in a movie! Actually I was pleased to see that there was whites participating in the civil rights movement in this film, also the Black Panthers were definitely portrayed as violent, as the KKK (again duh!) then at the end, there was this Obama part, some will see it as propaganda, which to me is also dumb. Of course a black butler working in the White House for decades would be just excited to see a black president!! even we as french people were amazed so can you imagine what it would be like for him?? The thing that I did not like was maybe the fast changes with administrations at the white house again it was to follow the African American history evolution, but..I also did not like JFK and his wife : not believable! But to sum up : entertaining and moving! definitely not boring...

I give it a 5 for the fact that it is entertaining, but I think this movie made in 2002 just benefited from the post-Amelie effect! It's not well played, the scenario is quite poor, and sometimes rather silly. Although it's not the worst thing in this movie, as a French lawyer, I realize it's very inconsistent ( especially the legal/criminal aspect). If you wanna see a good French movie about this kind of story you should rather watch Anna M ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0814659/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 ) It's also with the great Isabelle Carre but this time SHE is the crazy one! and she is amazing, the movie is more subtle and profound.

I watched the Big Bang theory essentially because of its high score on IMDb, although since I give it a 6, it shows that I find this TVs show overrated, and definitely not as funny as the other comedy TV shows out there that have also such a high score. But what makes this TV show also not so great is the laugh tracks. It's way worse than in the 80s/90s, plus even if the production proved that it was not a laughing machine, it doesn't change anything. There are literally loud laughs after every sentence even when it's just an ordinary and trivial sentence! It's distracting and annoying. And it's loud, plus we do know when to laugh, we don't need to hear more laughs than actual jokes. I actually realized that many fans are also annoyed by that, can't blame them. Otherwise, it's entertaining!