All I Wish (2018)

Fresh and Exciting

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

By the end of "All I Wish," the viewer has the feeling of having just watched a play in the theater that is overly declamatory and phony. The film's structure is that of a sequence of birthdays in the life of a middle-aged woman. The action is punctuated by a series of soliloquys spoken by the principal characters, as they stare straight into the camera and wax philosophical about their pretentious and rather ordinary lives. But the curtain call for this stagey experience leaves an audience slack-jawed because the work was so bad.The film was intended as L'chaim, or a toast to life! We learn from the bonus segment of the DVD that the screenplay was twelve years in the making until Sharon Stone took charge of Susan Walter's script and evidently changed the romantic concept from young love to that of a pair of middle-aged characters. Stone's character Senna is described as "a raisin in the sun," an odd image drawn from Lorraine Hansberry's famous play about a hardscrabble black family in Chicago in the 1950s. By contrast, the characters of "All I Wish" are carefree Los Angelenos, moving in the circles of wealth and fashion in what appears to be the 1980s (no cell phones). As the relationship of Senna and Adam develops, it was difficult to find it plausible that the erratic, creative fashion designer would connect emotionally with a fastidious attorney. The relationship never seemed credible, and it was a stretch to think that the act of marriage would be so significant to Senna that it would tear the couple apart. It was just too hard to find anything that these two characters had in common.Much of the dialogue seemed forced and artificial with lines like "We all feel inadequate. It's the American way." The most memorable role was that of Senna's mother, as performed by Ellen Burstyn. In the DVD bonus track, Sharon Stone correctly identified the "luminous beauty" of Burstyn that she is able to elicit in almost any role.From the DVD interview segments, the film was described by the writer-director as a "second act romantic comedy." Unfortunately, both the romance and the comedy were flat. And by the end of the second act, there was not a wet eye in the house at the final curtain.

The chemistry between Sharon Stone and Tony Goldwyn works pretty well here, but I'm wondering, as other reviewers have mentioned, why first time writer and director Susan Walter chose to initially present Stone as a 46-year-old? Since Goldwyn is soon to be 58 in real life just two years her junior (as Stone is 60) , wouldn't it have been even more real and effective to start out presenting Stone's character Senna as a 56-year-old woman, who ages per the film's main premise. She is still so vivacious and beautiful that, at least in my mind, this would have enhanced the film even more.Overall, I thought parts of this movie were charming and effective while other parts fell flat and were just not believable. Also, the characters were too surfacy for my tastes and never really developed fully. So, a mixed bag for me here and only a fair rating.

I loved this movie. I do not understand the bad reviews and the audience rating here on IMDB. I found this movie so refreshing a change from all the big budget hoopla out there. Something for we lovers of real life being depicted in film and novels. That All I Wish works to the extent that it does is a testament to its star's incredibly appealing performance, in which she seems looser onscreen than she has in years. Given the relatively rare opportunity to showcase her comedic chops, Stone more than lives up to the challenge, somehow making her character's quirkiness charming rather than irritating. Goldwyn, looking relieved to be playing something light after years of melodrama on Scandal, is also enjoyable. All the characters in this film just have chemistry as a cast. I can't get over how great the acting is in this movie and how it could be so enjoyed by such a critic of romantic comedies.

An aspiring fashion designer struggles to find success and love. The story cuts into her life once a year, always on the same date: her birthday. A Little Something for Your Birthday packs a great and talented cast of actors like Sharon Stone (Total Recall, Basic Instict), Tony Goldwyn (The 6th Day, The Mechanic) and Famke Janssen (X-Men Trilogy, Taken Trilogy) and with a Cast of those big names the end result is rather disappointing which is an uneven romantic, comedy, drama that hardly does anything that we haven't seen before with lot's of predictable plot recycling and a Sharon Stone who hasn't made a decent film since the 90's. Overall not a film that i would recommend to be honest. (4/10)