I don't know jack about Frances, Tilda or Julie, have read rumours about Jessica (there have been some AWFUL pictures of her recently) and Sharon (who, by intelligent design or artificial intervention doesn't look like mid 40s).
It's a strange stance to take right there, about that cast. I mean, the general point is true, but there are clearer examples.
I do think Jessica Lange's plastic surgery looks scary. I wish she hadn't. Sharon Stone looks fine to me. It's when they do the eye-tightening and lip-plumping that they start to slip into the uncanny valley for me. Cheek implants? Man, that just changes your whole face. Don't do it.
I should say that in this movie none of them struck me as Botoxed beyond belief. They all looked old enough to have been with Bill Murray 20 years ago.
It's such a beautiful, wonderful film.
It's such a beautiful, wonderful film.
Yay! I love Bill. I love Jarmusch. I have a fond spot for Sharon Stone and am always disappointed that she never really gets to do good stuff on screen.
I may be talking through my hat, but my impression of Tilda Swinton is that hell would freeze over before she'd undergo plastic surgery to accommodate Hollywood appearance issues.
It looks a little close to a sensitive First Worlder cliché to me
If it's close to the book, it's more like a furious, rage-obsessed first worlder. It's not Le Carre's best book by a long way, but there's a definite sense of a writer rediscovering his sense of outrage at the way pharmaceuticals operate.
David Edelstein, also notes Jessica Lange's face (not unkindly) in his review of Broken Flowers:
Lange plays Carmen, an animal therapist, apparently in hiding from the verbal deception of humans and protected by a hotcha (lesbian?) guard-dog receptionist (Chloe Sevigny). It's a troubling sequence, made more troubling by the way in which Lange has aged. I'm afraid it has come to this with regard to actresses these days: You think, "Nature? Cosmetic surgery? Bad cosmetic surgery?" Only her plastic surgeon knows for sure. But until we have sexual parity (Why should Murray be credible with Julie Fucking Delphy?), we're going to have to grapple with the problem of great actresses whose faces have gone slightly haywire. It's not an issue for the still-youngish Tilda Swinton, whose rural biker-chick Penny is an essay in rage. Her encounter with Murray's Don is ferociously brief.
He also says:
This is the crowning performance in what I call Bill Murray's Loneliness Trilogy, which consists of Broken Flowers, Lost in Translation, and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. In his melancholy, he's funny; in his funniness, he's at sea: The ironic hipster clown has become God's loneliest man.
Hmmmm. I would've put Rushmore instead of Zissou on that last, but that may be less thematically apt since he
does
connect (ultimately) with people in Rushmore. But I have been thinking of Broken Flowers as part of a Late Bill Murray Period series.
part of a Late Bill Murray Period series.
I've always loved Bill Murray, which has sometimes seemed to put me in a very small minority, but his Late Period has really taken him to a whole new level, I think.
In the future, I believe Murray, particularly in his Late Period, will be used as a text book definition of pathos in acting.
I the future
Seany is the future.
Cool.
I've always loved Bill Murray
Gods, yes. I think Stripes was the point of no return for me.