View from the Top" is such a misfire that you have to wonder what has happened to it during the year or so it has been sitting on Miramax's shelves. Harvey "The Butcher" Weinstein has probably been at it with his infamous scissors once or twice by now, as it only clocks in at 87 minutes.
But believe me, it's the longest 87 minutes in recent memory.
Even if Harvey trimmed it down into a very short film, say, a 30-second TV ad, there's still not enough material to make anything worthwhile. The actual TV ad resorts to using a dance number from the closing credit outtakes, proving that they couldn't find 30 seconds worth of good material in the film itself!
Writes Roger Moore from the Orlando Sentinel:
The script is patronizing and banal and doesn't cover any ground that David Spade didn't explore in those three minute "Buh-bye" "Saturday Night Live" sketches of the early '90s. Droll observations about how the working class live and entertain themselves play as if they were written by an alien. Or by some rich film school kid who's never held a real job in his life.
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It's not that Paltrow can't play cheesecake. But why on Earth should she want to? The woman has an Oscar, charm to burn and one would hope better opportunities than this. Shame on Miramax for ever arm-twisting her into this, and for not running it straight to video when they realized how bad it turned out.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette chimes in:
That gas mask you just bought for the lovely new war? Take it along and try it out on "View from the Top" -- a real stinkeroo of a romantic comedy from Brazilian director Bruno Barreto.
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Something's really wrong if you can't get laughs out of Mike Myers.
And Bruce Kirkland from the Toronto Sun continues the war analogy:
View From The Top, Gwyneth Paltrow's gushy airline stewardess fable, should have been declared a no-fly zone and left in the hangar.
Instead, like a wounded mallard duck, this tawdry romantic comedy is trying to take off more than two years after it was first shot. A crash landing is inevitable.
The movie is tired and old -- and now I don't mean the two years of fussing over whether it should have been released. Even though this story is set in the new millennium, View might as well be 50 years old, because it naively and/or stupidly reflects a state of being from another era.
The Newark Star-Ledger, well...
Ladies and gentleman, please fasten your seatbelts. We are about to begin our descent into Hollywood.
And it is not a pleasant trip.
Faked and forced, "View From the Top" is strictly scrapings from the bottom, full of characters who go nowhere and twists that ever happen. Watching it, the pressing question isn't What Happens Next but simply, How On Earth Did This Happen?
The cast itself telegraphs the plot. Gwyneth Paltrow is the Good-Girl Heroine, of course; Christina Applegate is the Bad-Girl Friend. Mark Ruffalo is the Non-Threatening Nice Guy and Rob Lowe the Slightly Dangerous Charmer; Mike Myers is the Comic Relief and Candice Bergen the Slightly Scary Rich Lady.
With actors cast this strictly to type, who even needs a screenplay?
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Perhaps one day some Hollywood researcher will find the black box to this movie, and the mistakes that led to this disaster can be reconstructed. Because it didn't need to be this bad -- even if the story would make more sense set 30 years ago, and Paltrow is the least likely actress to play a cutely trashy cowgirl. (What, Reese Witherspoon was busy?)
Finally, one last Boat Trip comment, just because I can, from Mr. Cranky:
"Boat Trip" is the kind of movie tailor-made for bilking unsuspecting foreign nationals out of their investment money. You have to feel for the poor fools who ripped the little paper tab from the bottom of the "become a Hollywood mogul!" sign and proceeded to turn over a significant chunk of the retirement fund to have their names listed as "associate producers" of this floating fiasco. There's little hope of legal recourse, however, because technically, a movie got made, right? And technically, it even had an Oscar winner in it, right?
Thanks for the article, very helpful information.
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