Oh yes, she's fantastic in this. Too bad that she didn't have a bigger role to play...
It's a curious thing about those recent James L. Brooks's movies - they all have a relatively good or interesting story to tell, yet they somehow end up being not as compelling as his older endeavors. I suspect that the main reason is that actors he recently hires to play the most important parts are paid a lot, yet they're either untalented/boring (Rudd, Wilson, Sandler) or badly directed/mis-casted (Leoni). I won't say a bad word about Witherspoon's performance, cause I find it quite interesting and committed. So the general problem here is money - he got way too much money to make "Spanglish" and "How do you know?", this invited laziness and bad choices in terms of casting and execution.
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JackBluegrass
9 years ago
...they somehow end up being not as compelling as his older endeavors.
I really agree, anyone who writes Broadcast News is a genius.
But, Brook's older endeavors did include writing 2 episodes of the classic TV series, "My Mother the Car", often called the worst TV series ever.
E pluribus unum
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amormortua
9 years ago
Honestly, I don't really care about his tv work. However it's very interesting to me how the quality of his feature films went down (or, maybe it's equally good, but it's just the public's taste that has changed since "Terms of Endearment", "Broadcast News" or "As good as it gets") in the 21st century. I presume that, what Kirsten Dunst has said in the last interview about the condition of the movie industry, applies also to James L. Brooks:
People don’t need all the money they’re using. That’s the other thing: when you have too much time, too much money, the creative starts to slip away. It just does.
http://www.cinemablend.com/new/What-Wrong-With-Movie-Industry-According-Kirsten-Dunst-86267.html
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