An average movie

Since I enjoyed both previous movies made by Wayne Kramer, ‘The Cooler’ an underrated and overlooked gem and ‘Running Scared’ a somewhat overrated but still pretty cool cult classic, I was definitely eager to check his following directing effort. This time, the material was once again really interesting and he had a massive cast at his disposal. Basically, it is one of those hyperlink features with various tales more or less connected with each other. Unfortunately, except for one very good segment, I thought the whole thing was rather underwhelming. Indeed, there was this very good bit about a teenage Muslim girl who wrote a heartfelt but very controversial essay about 09/11. Since she is just a teenager, she obviously didn’t fully realize the awful repercussions this essay would have on her family. This story was powerful and really heartbreaking and even though some of the other stories were rather interesting, none of them reached the intensity displayed in this segment which surprisingly didn’t feature any of the big name actors. There were a couple of things that also bothered me in this movie. First of all, Ashley Judd had one really messed up eyebrow (probably the result of some bad plastic surgery) and she looked half-astonished each time she showed up. I know, it was something rather trivial but I thought it was really distracting. The other thing that bothered me were all those nude scenes starring Alice Eve. Don’t misunderstand me, she looked really stunning and I really don’t mind nudity in a movie. But what was the point to show her not once but maybe 4 or 5 times completely naked? I thought it was really gratuitous and actually really exploitative. To conclude, it is a flawed movie and apparently Harvey Weinstein has recut the movie without Wayne Kramer and removed 30 minutes, but even so most of the stories were not compelling enough. Still, since I’m myself an immigrant, son of an immigrant, it remains a dear subject to me and I think it is worth a look.

6/10