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.

Meta about Grimm:

Twelve Monkeys director Terry Gilliam is furious with movie moguls Harvey Weinstein and Bob Weinstein for scrapping his ideas and undermining his authority during filming of his new Matt Damon movie The Brothers Grimm. The powerful pair first ditched Gilliam's plans to cast Samantha Morton in the lead role in favor of lesser known actress Lena Headey, and then further enraged the former Monty Python star by sacking his cinematographer Nicola Pecorini for working too slowly. Tensions escalated to the extent that Gilliam refused to shoot for two weeks as he was so staggered by what he viewed as the Weinsteins' constant interference. He fumes, "I'm used to riding roughshod over executives, but the Weinsteins rode roughshod over me." But Bob Weinstein insists, "Any film involves the making of 10,000 decisions. If you only concentrate on the few we had issues with, you ignore the 9,997 we left to totally to Terry."

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.