Jack Goes Boating

Deb 7 Me 4

This is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s movie. He produced, directed and stars in this slice ‘o life movie. This is a total character driven movie. Not a lot going on in my opinion. It’s beautifully shot, which is sort of like saying your date has a good personality. In reality, it really has a lot going for it. Everything is there and in place, good acting, great looking environments, credible dialogs and of course it’s good looking. But for me it wasn’t engaging. I wanna be engaged. The actors pass in and out of what might be a great script, but I never really cared what they said or did. And they said and did a lot of things, albeit at a very slow pace.

Most of Redford’s movies were smaller independent kinds of projects, a lot of them turned into big movies, probably because he is good looking. For this kind of small movie, Hoffman is probably the new king of the screen. He’s impressed me in most of his choices since Capote. But in this movie there were a bunch of scenes, maybe too many, where there is a set up, a close up, where the actor can really exercise some subtleties, Sean Penn moments. But Hoffman didn’t come through in most of them. Maybe it was his choice, a further development of the character, but they let me down.

At the end of the movie, perusing the credits for names I know, I felt like I was in some sort of vacuum, just emotionless. Watching this movie wasn’t the best use of my time. But it was pretty good use of Deb’s time. She gets more into the personalities and motivations. She wonders about things and gets involved. I just take what I’m given and hope they give me everything I need to understand why they made the movie. It didn’t have a lot of personality.