Primary Colors
John Travolta is a politician who lays it on thick to everybody, but somehow is still likeable. The movie jumps around, switching main characters in a nearly jarring way. Shit piles on the main characters over and over, new characters enter unexpectedly, exit unexpectedly, fade out and return with little rhyme or reason.
Even with all these little naggling things that should make the movie hard to watch, it is enjoyable until about the 2 hour mark. At that point, the story is held hostage by a character that seems to think that they're taking a moral stand, but really they're just... Trying to force other people to do what they want them to do arbitrarily. This character eventually commits suicide, completely destroying everything that the movie had been building toward.
In a way, it makes this movie about the idea that shit happens that changes everything, but it feels so forced and un necessary that it turns a movie that would have been simple fluff into a pretentious drag.
The Edge of Love
This is a movie about poetry. Some of the dialog between characters is poetry, even. This not a good way to write dialog, it makes the characters' speech sound un natural and un wieldy. What's more, one of the main characters is a poet, who is married but is screwing a friend of his. When his wife meets this person, she befriends her and seems to be fine with the two having sex. One scene I interpreted to be a sex scene filmed without any sex would imply that they have sex right in front of her and she doesn't care. Artists living bohemian lifestyles are fine, but that fact that the wife acts jealously and then suddenly is cool with everything is never really explained. The worst scenes involve this guy reading poetry to the two women.
I'll learn to live with it.
might conveniently be in the city when that's screening so I'll definitely try and see it, the tickets will probably still be selling on the day probably.
