August: Osage County (2013)

[ladyevenstar22]

this thread is rather negative! pfffff

 

i love it  I LOVE IT I LOVEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE IT!!!!! A+++

 

LONG LIVE QUEEN MERYL    

 

its just beautiful , i'm rewatching it again its  like awesome , the dialogue the acting the story OMG i was so involved in the film i was talking back at them , pausing because   OMG no wayyyyy!

 

i love cumberbatch in this , his scenes , i fell for the character, i fell for most of them even as i disliked them , they're pretty despicable some of them but gah they are so alive so real, i know people similar like that !

 

i know what its like to be the quiet one in a loud family that's pretty blunt even they say hurtfull stuff 

i know about dysfunctional families , aren't they all a bit dysfunctional in their own way 

i know a couple like charles parents where you wonder how the heck are they still married? 

 

 

the dynamics and layers to each of them , i love how barb tells her mother there is nowhere to go in the field then at the end of the film she stops her truck and smiles ruefully at the field as the irony probably hit her where was she going , there was nowhere to go and so she turns around to go back home 

 

the father who commits suicide reminded me of Mr Bennett in P&P who comments about Mrs B nerves "they've been my companions for so long" (something like that)

 

barb and her husband had some great lines "surely you must have realized when you started porking pipi longstocking you were due for some self-righteousness ..." 

 

i loved the sisters interactions

 

so many secrets : why they kept that secret , its awful to find out that both mothers knew what was going on or suspected it and yet said nothing and let them go on ! and then to drop the bomb on ivy like that how can someone be so cruel! 

 

man ivy and little charles just about broke my heart they were like an anomaly of normalcy among the crazyness, and tornado meryl left no prisoners DAMN  such violence in such a peaceful setting of plains as far as the eye can see!

 

my fav quote is when ivy says "i can't perpetuate these myths of family or sisterhood anymore we're just people ,some of us accidentally connected by genetics random selection of cells"

 

WHAT A MOVIE!!!!!!!!!

 

ps: i once read this american novel about some family drama where these two cousins who had never met (parents were estranged) fell in love and found out after when the mothers met , they broke up and were so miserable that after a decade more or less and failed subsequent relationships they met again and said fuck it got married moved to haiti and adopted a kid there and lived happily ever after! (memory fuzzy on details)

 

and i'm down to last 5 mn again , impressive i've never watched a movie twice back to back on my laptop 

Edited January 11, 2014 by ladyevenstar22

[baumer]

While watching the film, it dawned on me.  This is the Sawyer family, except they are educated.  Who is the Sawyer family you might ask?  Well, let me tell you about them.  They used to work at at slaughterhouse in Texas.  Then the slaughterhouse closed down and one of the members of the family runs a gas station, the other hitches rides home and while in the van that picks him up, he cuts a guy in a wheel chair.  Then the grandfather is essentially a dying old man who has the skin of leper.  The creme de la creme is Leatherface, who kills youngsters with a chainsaw.  Yes the Sawyers are the family from the 1974 film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Meryl Streep is about as mannered as the sawyer family.  If she'd had a retarded child, in a different universe, he surely would of had a chainsaw.  

 

August Osage is terrible on so many levels.  Characters in here yell and scream and berate one another.  Why you ask?  Why is Meryl so mad and vitriolic in every scene?  To the best of my knowledge it's because she didn't get a pair of cowboy boots for Christmas when she was 10 or 12 and her mother was mean and she has lived a very rich life with the house the size of a small palace.  And she thinks her kids are spoiled and all kinds of other reasons.  Her sister is also very mean and foul tongued.  This all leads to one scene, ONE SCENE that I could stomach and kind of like and that was a scene in which Chris Cooper tells his wife off and explains to her that they have been married for 38 years but if she continues being the acerbic, bitter fucking bitch that she is, that they might not make it to 39.  It's a very well written scene and it feels like it's from a different film.  Because the rest of the writing is silly and cryptic for the sake of being silly and cryptic.

 

Julia Roberts (Barbara)and Ewan McGregor (Bill) play a separated married couple who find it in their stupid minds to go to the family funeral for the sake of appearance.  We get hints of why they have separated (probably because Barbara is about as crazy as her mother) but it is never told to us exactly why he felt the need to go hook up with a younger woman.  This story in the film illustrates how weak the writing is.  There's a scene where their daughter (Abigail Breslin) is caught outside smoking up with her aunt's (Julliette Lewis) fiance (Dermot Mulroney). He has started to feel her up and the maid sees this and blows the lid off it.  Chaos ensues and when the daughter is confronted by her parents, she gets very angry at them and hurls insults at her father.  Barbra slaps her and then Bill gets made at her and decides that he is taking their daughter back home.  So yes, Barbra is in the wrong here.  That makes perfect sense.  (sarcasm)

 

The biggest problem with this film is that none of the characters are really likable.  Juliette Lewis looks and sounds like a heroine addict and Meryl Streep runs off into a field for no reason.  Sam Shepherd has a girls name and he banged his wife's sister years ago and now the two cousins, who are actually brother and sister, are in love with each other.  There's nothing to like about the film.  Nothing.

 

3/10

Edited January 15, 2014 by Christmas baumer

[baumer]

I've been thinking more about this film and I could really go on for pages and pages bashing it.

 

For fun, here is some more ridiculous stuff that happens in the film:

 

Meryl's character yells at her grand daughter for calling her mom a liar.  And yet in the scenes previous, Meryl's own daughter is telling her to shut the fuck up and so on.

Meryl over acts the shit out of this role.  I like Meryl, she's great in everything but the smoking, the wheezing, the coughing, the profanity, the dancing (oh my god the dancing), it's just screams LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME.

There's a scene where Julia Roberts tells her sister to eat the fuckin fish, eat the fuckin fish, eat the fuckin fish and so on and so on.  It was like a scene out of Mgnolia where Julianne Moore swears at a pharmacist for 5 minutes.

Meryl implores Julia to pull over, she then pukes and then runs into a hay field.  Why?  No idea.  But it must have been a good idea to the director to film Meryl and Julia running together.

I don't (just like Chris Cooper's character) understand the reasons or the motivation for meryl's anger.  She's angry in the beginning, mean in the middle, and pretty much a bitch right until the end.  Is it really because of the cowboy boots?

Juliette Lewis stays with a guy after he hit on her 14 year niece?  Really?  Are there women out there really like that?  And it can't be because of the money and the security.  She was a very successful real estate agent so she's not lacking for cash.

Sam Shepherd's in it for 2 minutes and then kills himself.  Or so we think.  We never really get much more of that story.

 

It's one of the worst films with a big cast in it.  This to me, is like Movie 43 is to a lot of you.  Just plain stupid and completely unnecessary.  

[Gopher]

Cooper and Martindale were the only saving graces for me, really. Those two are character actors who understand the nuances of their characters and how to convey them. Unlike Streep who approaches every scene (except her last few) like DDL's slamming of the desk in Lincoln. 

 

It's despicable how flat this movie is. I imagine in pre-production a Harvey Weinstein telling John Wells to just direct what's on the page and give Streep and Roberts their Oscar reels. In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Mike Nichols' camera acts like a character in the adaptation, weaving in and out of scenes and actually giving moments urgency. There's nothing like that here. 

[Sam]

LOL, reading Baumer's review is certainly way more interesting and entertaining than watching this movie.

[Ezen Baklattan]

What the hell did I just watch? It's two hours of yelling and screaming by people that are hardly likeable at best. Cooper, Nicholson, and Martindale are the only really decent performances, while Streep and Roberts make Mila Kunis in Oz The Great & Powerful look subtle. Cumberbatch, who I generally love, is the sheer definition of miscast. Not to mention that these characters overreact in one scene, criticize each others' overreactions, and it just keeps repeating. The film started off as passable, but as things got gradually more mean spirited, it became borderline unwatchable.

 

I think the post-dinner fight scene sums up everything wrong with the movie. It's people overracting for no legitimate reason, and the presence of film constrains the ability to show emotions like actors on stage can. The actors go for emotional intensity, but in the film, it comes off as overdone, while it may have worked in the more intimate arena of the theater.

 

Imagine if this was the family in You're Next. Maybe that would have been better.

[Deep Wang]

This movie...What the fuck.

[DeeCee]

Is the play actually good?

[4815162342]

Is the play actually good?

 

It won a Pulitzer Prize so clearly some people thought so.

[riczhang]

It won a Pulitzer Prize so clearly some people thought so.

 

And the Drama Desk and the Tony. And Time proclaimed it as the best play since Miller's seminal classics. 

[Ezen Baklattan]

I'm sure the play is great, but either this was poorly made or it shouldn't be turned into a film at all. I'm guessing that it's a mix of both, but I'm leaning towards the latter.

[DeeCee]

Has anyone seen the play?

[riczhang]

Has anyone seen the play?

I've seen it 4 times. Once at the Steppenwolf in Chicago, where the play started. Once on Broadway and the West End each and once when my sister's school did a production of this. 

 

Uhm, I actually thought that the film did a very good job at adapting the play...... I thought that all the nasty energy and family dynamics for the most part stayed intact. Not as good as the play because a lot of the storyline had to be shortened, especially with Mattie Fae and Little Charles. But, overall I thought that Streep and Robert's performances as Violet and Barb were my favourite renditions and really carried the film, especially since a lot of the support has been cut. 

 

But, I still can't get over the fish scene. Julia was all sorts of awful in that scene.

[tawasal]

Damn I thought I was gonna hate this after hearing so much negative revs about it, but I am in love with Streep's perfomance in this and Roberts. 

[ShouldIBeHere]

Liked this movie a lot... none of the characters are likeable... and somehow that made it charming.

 

Streep's role should have been played by someone such as Sally Field... but at least she actually acts here and does not do a parody as she did with Thatcher.

 

Roberts is amazing though... and really took me on that crazy family weekend.

 

Works better on stage - but this is quite good.

 

B

Edited August 8, 2014 by ShouldIBeHere

[darkelf]

Worst movie of 2013.

 

3/10 just for Chris Cooper and Julianne Nicholson

[Films]

I loved it. The acting was fantastic (especially by Meryl and Julia) and the script was great. Really loved itA

[ladyevenstar22]

jeez baumer the movie really got a reaction out of you lol

 

better that than it leaving you indifferent , i find as a movie fan nothing is more dreadful than a film that leaves you completely cold and can't elicit a positive or negative reaction in the viewer!

[bartonfink]

Intense performances, hilarious yet bitter and suffocating atmosphere, uncompromising conclusion. Reminds me of something like Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill's works. Really like this description of miserable life.

[Ezen Baklattan]

Honestly, the movie doesn't know if it wants to be serious family drama or an absurd farce of melancholy and overt dramaticism, and the film being stuck between these two really hurts it.