Friday, April 22, 2016

A Beautiful Life (2008)

How bad is it? It's fairly awful.
Should you see it? If you're REALLY cynical, this can provide a dark laugh or two (sometimes intentional).

Those eyes - staring at this photo is more entertaining than the film

This is not the Chinese film given the same title that came out in 2011, but that mistake is how I found this. It's based on a play and tries for both sentimentality and satire, which is probably impossible. It stars the oddly beautiful Angela Sarafayan, whose acting skills are hit-and-miss and has roles for Bai Ling, Debi Mazar and Dana Delaney; one of the worst features of the film is that characters come and go and are disposable. It's about homelessness, sexual abuse, incest, immigrant exploitation, drug trafficking and more... and less. It's overly earnest, formulaic, platitudinous, heavy-handed and unoriginal and the direction is scattershot. It's a mess, occasionally interesting, but overlong even at 82 minutes.

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