Le Week-End (2014)

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Simply Perfect

hyped garbage

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Pretentious drivel. How on earth did they manage to spend so much making this film? Absolutely nothing to recommend it - not even Jim and Jeff's great talents could drag it beyond the banale.

An absolutely wonderful film. Watched it on valentines night with my wife and we both found it poignant, amusing, engrossing and sometimes all too real. It realistically showed the trials and tribulations of any medium to long term relationship... especially one where any magic that had been there is starting to slip, the kids have left and the cracks that have been papered over start to re- appear. Actors excellent especially Morgans (jeff Goldblums) son. A realistic portrait of long term relationships. A nice way to spend an evening.

My wife's son recommended this film to us at lunch yesterday, saying it's quirky, it's funny, it's sad, a delight, in short. I should have remembered that ten years or so ago, Jonathon was telling his mum and me that the new live-action "Scooby Doo" movie was the best film ever. At least then he was only 10 or so. If I had my choice today, I think I'd take old Scoob anytime.This film is such twaddling nonsense. An ageing Brummie intellectual couple who grew up in the 60's return to Paris, the scene of their honeymoon years before to have a time, get over some recent disappointments and perhaps rekindle their marriage. Over the course of the weekend they will run out of a swanky restaurant without paying, visit the graveyard of Beckett and Sartre, hook up with an outre old American college friend of the male, deliver embarrassingly candid speeches of self-hate and adoration at dinner in front of strangers and finish up by doing a funky dance routine in a little café after they have their passports confiscated for welching on their hotel bill. Pretentious ils?Speaking mostly in sentences with language and phrases used by I'd imagine about 1% of the population, the film touched almost new depths of inanity, boredom and irritation for me. Maybe the director thought he was being clever in giving us a sophisticated, Paris-set witty French comedy of the sexes with the twist of two sexagenerian not-so-innocent English tourists abroad. Clever, never. I also got nothing from the acting of leads Broadbent and Duncan and as for Jeff Goldblum's camp American friend, quel dommage! The soundtrack of cool jazz, mixed up with Nick Drake only put even more distance between me and what I was watching.I didn't smile, never mind laugh during the whole film, I only winced and wished for it to end, which it didn't soon enough. And as for the next time Jonathon tells me to look out for a film, include me out!

This movie is like an unofficial 5th entry to the "Before..."-series (which I truly adore) by Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke. However, I really hope that the real one, if we get it around 2030 will be better quality-wise. "Le Week-End" could not convince me. We have a couple, who on their 30th wedding anniversary, travel to Paris. I rarely ever had the feeling that they were truly in love with each other. Okay, you could bring up as an argument that after 30 years things aren't that emotional anymore and just return to normal, but sometimes their actions looked downright as if they really only wanted to hurt each other. Comparing this to another performance from 2013, June Squibb in Nebraska (a truly great film by the way), she was certainly rough, but you could always feel that she still loved her man. And that is totally missing here. They seem as if, in real life, they would have been divorced long ago.Jeff Goldblum, who I am usually a great fan of, could not really convince me here either. He has the biggest supporting role. People who know him know that he almost always walks the fine line between great authenticity and almost too extreme behavior. Sadly, here he occasionally crosses it. Nonetheless he is fun to watch as always and is responsible for some of the highlights of the film. Still it was difficult to decide if he was actually a likable character. The one person that definitely was not likable here is Lindsey Duncan's character, who not only lacks subtlety, but behaves really horribly in some situations, such as when her husband falls and she tells him to be a man or when she tells her husband of 30 years that she is gonna go out with a younger man that night.The husband is a bit of a likable victim from start to finish. We find out about his career or nonexistence thereof, his marriage struggles, his health concerns and it all culminates in a great monologue at the full table near the end with people all around him. The whole party is a bit dull though and could have been made much more interesting with all the characters who were the guests there just working as forgettable background actors. Most of the dialogs were written in a convincing way, but there were several scenes which had no real purpose at all, occasionally didn't even fit the characters such as the randomly included pot smoking scene. The final silent walk down the stairs was probably intended to be powerful by the makers, but it left no impression on me at all. It rather felt contradictory to all the hullabaloo that happened minutes before.This film tries to be loud and hip on so many occasions, instead of going for quiet subtlety, which really could have made this work. The frequent sex references (talking about it, moaning...) were mostly more embarrassing than funny and felt also included randomly without any real purpose, just in order to get some cheap laughs.Director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi reunited here seven years after making Venus (starring the recently deceased Peter O'Toole), but judging from the outcome and the quality of "Le Week-End" all the sparkle in their collaborations seems gone. Not recommended.