darienwerfhorst

This was probably the funniest movie I've seen all year and also one of the most poignant. The director could have really taken the pi&$# out of these guys and made us laugh at them, and I thought that that's what the movie was going to be about, but it wasn't. It's about two guys who never stopped following their dream and if that sounds corny, well, somehow it works.

I did laugh, hilariously at times, (The manager spelling the name of the town they are in in Sweden with her bad English was a classic) but I also really felt for these guys and wanted them to succeed....even as I realized that they were a bit delusional for keeping on the same path for 30+ years, I also had to admire their tenacity and passion.

I highly recommend this human, funny film.

Was just okay. What an amazing cast. What a potentially great story of a caper gone wrong.

I think part of it was the writing...I'm all for a non-linear approach but the way they did it it kept repeating segments, and not from a different enough perspective that it was interesting.

Another part was just the relentless humorlessness of it...every great tragedy has humor and every great comedy has tragedy. Don't believe me? Think of the toilet scene in Pulp Fiction.

The sound mixer should have been shot. The music was way too loud, dramatic and repetitive, and it muddied the dialogue a bit.

Okay yes you get to see Marissa Tomei naked and that's very nice and a great bunch of actors (Amy Ryan! Albert Finney!) ...but I had the sensation of being in a car with a bunch of people where I'm the only one who sees the imminent car crash and keep shouting and nobody's listening. And no, that's not a metaphor for the plot of the film itself, just the experience of watching it.

Firstly Marion Cotillard was great. She really moved like an old woman in the later scenes, and inhabited the decrepit voice and moves of Piaf. She will be nominated for an Oscar, but probably won't win because of the whole foreign language issue (only a handful of actors have won Oscar for foreign language performances) Having said that, Edith Piaf's life was such a great story and yet somehow the writers managed to botch it up. Events come up out of nowhere. Story lines are started and not followed up on. Stories come out of nowhere at the very end. Basically, every rule of good screen writing is broken, and if you are going to be using a format, as this director did, that is not linear and floats back and forth in time, you need to give your viewers some clues to hold on to.

As I said, spectacular performance by Ms. Cotillard, but the life of Edith Piaf has epic written all over it and that did not come through in this film.