Bittersweet (2008)

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

The introduction to this movie is so bad that I was angry at the director ten minutes or less into the movie, for his self-indulgent portraits of countless couples, pairs of babies, and contrived cute photography of small children. Perhaps a department store baby photographer could learn something from this amateur introduction before the title of the movie, before the name of the film. Or, perhaps I should have taken warning at the point that the title finally is shown on screen, in 'artful' minimal cartography, at the left most side of the frame, something that was new in the fifties. And then there is the boring music. After a scene in which two teenagers, or college kids, maybe, are lounging on the floor drinking a pint of Jack Daniels, (label shown carefully over and over again, by the way) the scene changes to a dance club disco like scene with pounding, very annoying music, the camera shooting from the floor and then from angles that only a contortionist using a hand-held could manage. At this point I fast-forwarded, hoping to make sense of something, only to find one of the couples in the toilet, the female at the throne, head deep into it, tossing up whatever she had ingested that night. This was the point at which I had enough--not because she was vomiting, but because my own stomach was turning over with impatience for the movie to get started. I lost hope and gave up, cowardly leaving my wife to deal with this; just I used to leave her to deal with boring guests at our dinner parties. My wife, a woman of extreme patience with drivel and small children, tells me that basically the writer-director Greg Levins was attempting to dissect the mystery of love and relationship, the chemistry of mutual attraction, and the failure of the magic that ends relationships.