Rules Don't Apply (2016)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Wow! Such a good movie.

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

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.

In my view, Rules Don't Apply is pretty much the perfect example of a movie that should have been incredible but settles for pretty good. There's a lot to like here. The film is well acted, decently paced, flush with aesthetically pleasing period detail and is bolstered by the real-life intrigue of the enigmatic Howard Hughes persona. However, despite these strengths, the film is held back from greatness by a clunky, unfocused narrative and a lack of resolve.Let's start with the good. Really my main takeaway from this movie is that the beautiful Lily Collins needs much more work, particularly in lead roles. She was subtly brilliant in her performance, always drawing your attention on screen and causing the viewer to wonder what is going through her head as her character tries to adjust to a new Hollywood life and deal with both the eccentricities of her mysterious employer and the nuanced chemistry between herself and her platonic as necessary driver. Alden Ehrenreich, who first drew my eye years ago in Francis Ford Coppola's underrated gem Tetro, was typically solid and relatable in his role of an intensely quiet and somewhat solitude hard-working young everyman who overachieves into an important behind-the-scenes position, and Warren Beatty placed an interesting and satisfyingly alien spin on his portrayal of Hughes.The film was also a joy aesthetically. We get everything from multiple decades of period detail to classic Hollywood to filming locations all over the world, early era plane rides, etc. There were a couple excellent and memorable camera pan reveal shots and the film overall felt well directed and well paced. The presence of a very nostalgic, romantic and lovely tune performed by Lily's character Marla really also goes a long way to bolster the period feeling. The movie also offers an immediately interesting premise, combining a Hughes biopic of sorts and giving us a fairly unique spin on the old romance story love triangle cliche.Despite all of this, one can easily be left feeling like the film doesn't know where it wants to go throughout the movie. Once all of the main characters are initially fully thrown out there and the metaphorical curtain is lifted on the mystery of Hughes, the film struggles to draw a clear narrative. Is this Howard's story? Is this Marla's story? Is this Frank's story? Each main player doesn't have enough time devoted to their part of the story for the audience to really connect with the characters, despite very solid performances. Entire important subplots, especially around Frank's character early on, arise and are dropped almost out of thin air. The film starts strongly, focused on Frank and Marla, and unfortunately blossoms into a sweeping and unfocused mélange of the some of the later business controversies and events of Hughes' life, practically brushing aside Frank and Marla's more relatable characters for most of the second act of the movie. Anyone who has seen Scorsese's incredible Howard Hughes epic biopic "The Aviator" would be disappointed by the skimming and vague approach taken here to the Hughes story, which almost feels like it was plopped right into the middle of the film in an attempt to beef up the narrative. Basically, this movie either needed to either be another hour longer and more developed regarding Hughes' exploits and reasons for how he ended up to be so enigmatic or it needed to retain this length and pacing but to spend more of the meat of the movie focusing on its younger stars. Without giving away any details, the ending of the film left me feeling a bit cold and disinterested, which seems to clash a bit with the actual message of the resolution. This is one of many tonally jumbled moments throughout a film that does mix some comedic moments and upsetting dramatic realizations together well, but also never goes the extra mile towards being hilarious or devastating.Rules Don't Apply was still an enjoyable watch for me overall. If you are a fan of any of the three leads or just generally like retro Hollywood period films, it's worth a look. I give the film a lot of credit for trying something completely different with the narrative and tone and recognize the winking connection to the film's title. At the end of the day, it just felt like it needed another gear and a more focused narrative to me, but it had its charms. Your mileage may vary. 6.5/10.

The two lovers in this semi-fictional tale of Howard Hughes, his girl friends, and his bodyguard, are Alden Erenreich, who begins as a driver for Hughes and works his way up to chief cook and bottle washer, and Lilly Collins, a young naif from Front Royal, Virginia, who has put her education on a back burner after being put "on the hook" to Hughes and brought to Los Angeles for a screen test for a movie that will never be made. Their features are such that at time, if you squint properly, it seems that Leonardo de Caprio is kissing Elizabeth Taylor. We follow their careers in parallel.Warren Beatty, the producer, has brought a fine cast together and put them to work in a sentimental but successful comedy. The character holding the entire massive thing together is Howard Hughes himself, played to the bone by Beatty. He makes no attempt to capture the historic Hughes, the kind of extreme obsessive-compulsive that only great wealth can permit to exist without alarm bells ringing all over the place. Instead, Beatty gives us a loud. cheerful, reckless, clumsy, impulsive, and funny Howard Hughes -- always worrying that somebody's trying to "put me in the nut house." The best illustration has Beatty sitting alone in a darkened theater, listening to some Gofer read back his letter to some law enforcement agency. The letter is about a missing cat that belongs to Hughes' new wife. So we watch Beatty entranced by his own vulgar demands about a man with his resources and the disappeared cat, while Beatty twitches with delight and nods his head emphatically to underline the points his letter is making, perfectly satisfied with himself.I won't outline the plot but I'll say that it alternates between mostly understated comedy and sober softheartedness, with comedy predominant towards the beginning and emotionalism at the end, leading us to two happy lovers departing Hughes and misleading us to one Hughes and one lost love.That the rules don't apply is a reassurance given by Erenreich to Collins, who is concerned that the rules of Hollywood require her to give it up despite her stern Baptist upbringing, but of course the rules don't apply to Howard Hughes either. The notion of freedom from norms is caught up in a simple and tune written by Collins, accompanied by rather nifty lyrics. It's not so much that the rules don't apply. It's that to a great extent we make our own rules except for biological imperatives. We all grow up, grow old, and die. And there are several references, in the lyrics and elsewhere, of lost youth and fearful age. Of Collins it has to be said that she's right purty. Her features and gracile physique lend her an adolescent quality that's appealing.I admire the film especially because it lack the usual dumbed-down quality that afflicts so many Hollywood productions these days. Good job.

Mostly not about the familiar tale of Howard Hughes, really more about the chaos that the super-rich too often rain on those dogged souls around them. Nice writing, great dialogue, a real roller-coaster. A situation is created in the first few minutes, and another at the one-hour mark, that are exceptionally well resolved in the last 15 minutes. That final arc, very cleverly plotted, with its perfect dialogue, every single word of it, and four slowly growing realizations, has had me watching it on the recorder half a dozen times. A small marvel. Great to see Alec Baldwin and Ed Harris in small parts and Matthew Broderick in a bigger part. I've seen all three repeatedly on Broadway in some of the funnier roles created - Broderick in The Foreigner was THE funniest I've seen, period. Also Taissa Farmiga, recently very funny on Broadway (with Ed Harris) and almost unrecognizable here.Thanks to Warren Beatty's kind writing, Alden Ehrenchreich and especially Lily Collins are the real stars of this movie.They have the most screen-time and some impressively funny scenes, sad scenes, confused scenes, angry and mistrustful scenes, and (surprise surprise) in-love scenes.Both have shown themselves wide-ranging previously in other roles. Alden Ehrenchreich really handled well the magic addressed against him in Beautiful Creatures.Lily Collins (daughter of Phil Collins) as a fiery princess acted Julia Roberts and Nathan Lane into the shade in Mirror Mirror - her training to become a dwarf warrior is another scene worth multiple re-watches.Her dark-eyed even look and confident voice and general lack of any fear have reminded some of a young Natalie Wood or Elizabeth Taylor. She would be so right if anyone ever makes another Ivanhoe. Especially a funny one.

Warren Beatty is and always will be a futurist in the film industry, only on par with Stanley Kubrick, David Lean, in his ideas and performance. This picture is atypical of many of his biopics including Bonnie and Clyde, Bulworth, Bugsy and Shampoo. What is common with all of them is the sense of humor Beatty brings to the project. It is in that light that you must watch this movie, Beatty's take on Howard Hughes, that era in Hollywood, and the mores of the time. Annette Benning, one of Hollywoods most terrific actresses, is not seen nearly enough in this movie. Ms Benning always gives a fantastic performance especially in my favorites American Beauty, and Being Julia. Lily Collins is actually pretty good in this picture. Former pictures featuring Lily was Mortal Instruments, a movie based on best seller by Cassandra Claire. Her performance in the Disney film Mirror Mirror was just typical of most of the young actresses who have worked for Disney. Rules Don't Apply features new talent along with seasoned actors a great mix, which is quite successful here. This movie will be one to watch more than once to capture the brilliance of prose and innuendo.