- I love a good meta moment that sums up the entire film without knowing it. There is a scene where Eric, the obnoxious 28-year-old billionaire asset manager, and his wife are having a post-performance dinner after a show she’s gone to see. She says something about how the theatre was not filled with that many people and that five minutes after the performance started, it became immediately evident why: it was terrible. She must have gone to see this film, which at least four people walked out of at our screening.
- I’m not sure what would compel one to make this film now; the world does not empathize with billionaire businessmen who tanked the economy four years ago, no matter what kind of self-induced downward spiral they put themselves into. I don’t expect that the audience is supposed to sympathize with this guy on any level, but as an audience member I need to at least empathize with him in order to endure the film’s 108-minutes-but-feels-like-150-minutes run time.
- The stylistic choices here are exceedingly excruciating at times. The film starts out with incredibly wooden acting from Pattinson and really awful and stupidly vague dialogue for everyone; it all feels like Stage Acting™ of a poorly written novel, two things I really truly hate. I know this is meant to underscore the changes we see in Eric by the end of the film where he’s unhinged and unpredictable, but it’s incredibly painful to sit through.
- Eric goes through a series of vignettes with individual people in his life, some of which are obnoxious others which have unintentionally hilarious moments. After sleeping with his art dealer (?), he requests that she purchase the Rothko Chapel for him. You know, as you do when you’re a billionaire and think you can buy yourself anything you want. Later, he meets up with a colleague of some kind and after he tells her that there is a measurement smaller than a nanosecond she says “Good, I’m glad!” like she’s genuinely happy that the world is precise enough to afford such a nuanced measurement. I cannot articulate how funny this was without you forcing yourself to watch it, which I do not wish upon you.
- I think my favourite part of the film was when Mathieu Almaric showed up to throw a pie in Robert Pattinson’s face. He called himself an “action painter of pie”, which was fantastic, and then proceeded to reel off a big list of his most accomplished pie-ings, which was also fantastic. In my mind, this was an alternate universe for his character from Quantum of Solace.
- I just… this was just insufferable and the less I can talk about it, the better I will feel. We literally knew nothing about this going into it, aside from the fact that Robert Pattinson was in it. We wanted to see Snow White and the Huntsman but it wasn’t playing at the theatre that has a Coke Freestyle machine and, let’s be honest, we really just wanted to use the Freestyle machine. SO DELICIOUS.
Categories: 0.5 Stars