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livingdebRobin and I requested "Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School" (2005) from Netflix even though the reviews mostly range from mediocre to bad because it has a great cast and and the preview looked fun.
We enjoyed the story and enjoyed watching the movie but it's not the great movie that it could have been. There were a lot of interesting characters but we didn't quite get to know most of them well enough. And it's probably not good for watching over and over because some of the scenes are too uncomfortable. You can have a scene where unpleasant things are happening but it's still pleasant to watch because there's humor or the characters are charming. That didn't quite happen in parts of this movie.
And the editing could have been better to make it easier to understand what's going on.
Still, you get to see a man making bread, a one-word answer guy get motivated to use all kinds of conversational skills, odd strings of curse words, a totally cool van, the game "British Bulldog," a twelve-year-old making smoke rings, the use of cell phones by non-spies, a craftsman house covered in baking soda, passing over a double-yellow line, and a little dancing.
And we kept talking about the story, so we watched the director's commentary to find out more.
I recommend this movie if you are willing to suspend disbelief to watch an interesting story. Make sure to play the game called guess which word the one-word-answer man will use to answer this question. It's easy and fun! (Except some reviews say it's a totally predictable over-the-top sappy movie. Maybe if you know the whole plot ahead of time, it's totally predictable. But if you just remember it's something involving dancing with good actors, it might not seem so predictable. John Goodman. Robert Carlyle. Mary Steenbergen. Marisa Tomei. Plus a lot of other people in smaller roles.)
We enjoyed the story and enjoyed watching the movie but it's not the great movie that it could have been. There were a lot of interesting characters but we didn't quite get to know most of them well enough. And it's probably not good for watching over and over because some of the scenes are too uncomfortable. You can have a scene where unpleasant things are happening but it's still pleasant to watch because there's humor or the characters are charming. That didn't quite happen in parts of this movie.
And the editing could have been better to make it easier to understand what's going on.
Still, you get to see a man making bread, a one-word answer guy get motivated to use all kinds of conversational skills, odd strings of curse words, a totally cool van, the game "British Bulldog," a twelve-year-old making smoke rings, the use of cell phones by non-spies, a craftsman house covered in baking soda, passing over a double-yellow line, and a little dancing.
And we kept talking about the story, so we watched the director's commentary to find out more.
I recommend this movie if you are willing to suspend disbelief to watch an interesting story. Make sure to play the game called guess which word the one-word-answer man will use to answer this question. It's easy and fun! (Except some reviews say it's a totally predictable over-the-top sappy movie. Maybe if you know the whole plot ahead of time, it's totally predictable. But if you just remember it's something involving dancing with good actors, it might not seem so predictable. John Goodman. Robert Carlyle. Mary Steenbergen. Marisa Tomei. Plus a lot of other people in smaller roles.)