FILM: Juliet, Naked (2018)
STARS: Rose Byrne, Ethan Hawke, Chris O’Dowd
WHERE: Plaza Frontenac Cinema (Frontenac, MO). Great place to catch an independent film. No stadium seating and the bathrooms are a hike to get to. BUT they make up for that in have great concession choices at different price points. (Love that I can get a hot tea here with about 8 different flavor options.)
PREMISE: Reclusive former rockstar Tucker Crowe develops an unexpected connection with the woman whose boyfriend is his biggest fan.
HE SAID: ….(Would like to see it, but it was a girls night out. So he stayed home.)
SHE SAID: Overall I really liked the film, but I didn’t love it. Rose Byrne is endearing as Annie, and Chris O’Dowd makes a great pop culture professor, but Ethan Hawke steals the show as the aging former rockstar Tucker Crowe whose earlier life seems to be a series of poor choices that stopped his transition to adulthood. Facing up to his past and responsibilities has been a long time coming. Can he move forward or will he remain stuck? Since it is overall a rom-com, the movie does a good job for the first 3/4 of the film making you wonder who is actually the better guy for Annie (if either of them.) It then becomes clearer and choices are made. Probably because the characters are right at my own age, I found the movie very relatable. I’ve spent some time wondering why I didn’t ultimately love the film, and I think it has to do with the choices that are made and then not dealing with some of the fallout of those choices after the majority of the film was about the results of choices from our past. It helped tie everything up at the end, but I think the film did a disservice to itself by not addressing the affect of those choices. SCORE: 6.5 (on a scale of 1 to 10)
Middle-aged @ the Movies 