What Just Happened (2008)
Rayting:
5.7/
10 26.6K votes
Language: English | Hebrew
Release date: 8 January 2009
Two weeks in the life of a fading Hollywood producer who's having a rough time trying to get his new picture made.
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User Reviews
This film was really poor. I went with two friends and they both really hated the film. People started walking out of the cinema halfway through. Essentially the film is so condescending and self indulgent. I have no doubt that the movie luvvies who are parodied in the film love it. However for the general public it is a real bore. The over loud gun reports. Bruce Willis wants to keep his beard, big deal.Robert De Niro is late for meetings, that's drama.The moments in the film that appear that are meant to be subtle are laided on with a trowel. Big cast real letdown. Still I am sure everyone involved was well paid. And movie critics will over praise the film to feel like they are part of this oh so wacky world.
Fmovies: Watching that film until the end was by far a worse experience than snorting a line of rock salt while having your privates connected to a car battery. Nope, haven't tried the latter but that's the worst experience I could think of at the moment. As some reviewers put it quite correctly, that is not a film intended for general audiences, not even for a cinephile having sat on a festival jury, endowed with an extremely open mind and an advanced understanding that not everything in life is ever perfect. It falls in the category of utter belly-button scratching and, by this, I don't even mean intimist. Okokok, so the acting is good. Yeah, big deal. Talented actors and directors don't make a film stand out if there is no substance to start with and this one's a perfect example of a known fact. It's only redeeming quality is that you could watch it with a force ten hangover and actually forget about your condition.
I love DeNiro, and expect a lot from this film. The movie started out nicely, with great acting, but became incredibly predictable. I just flat out predicted the ending. The movie ended without any conclusion, to any of the plots. And each subplot was more incomplete than the other.
Bruce Willis subplot was absurd, just a bunch of commotion about his beard and then the result and then what? Nothing. It was all about the beard.
The wife and the main character are apparently divorced; we don't see any real chemistry between them. We don't get anywhere with that either except that the two are less intimate in the end. Wow, that was so important to know.
The movie has no moral, no big surprise, no story. It's almost like a fragment of an episode of Entourage, without actually getting to know any of the characters.
What was the point of this movie? Don't trust some Hollywood people? Or that Hollywood is tough? Or that people that get divorced don't get back together?
What Just Happened fmovies. I can applaud the effort here, it really wants to say something, I'm just not certain that the director had the balls or the producer the guts to give it both barrels! Which I suppose is ironic given the subject matter! (Though I don't think intentional) Robert De Nero plays an ailing producer on the decline in the business, he has two ex wives and stress from egotistical stars and their demands, whether it be high maintenance directors or attention seeking actors.
The core of the problem I have with the film is that the main character is completely unsympathetic.
You'll hate him, he's shallow, selfish, egotistical and devoid of any passion. Whilst this may be the point of the character, and I think it is, it doesn't make for a good film! I went away from the film thinking that they were trying to tell me that Hollywood is full of artists, but that the system breaks them down into nothing more that monkeys who turn out dross films that appeal to the mass market because focus groups tell them too.
Well if the artists are going to produce films like this then maybe there should be some editorial control, away from the hands of the artists because this missed, in my opinion, on just about every level.
The film that this will be compared to most is The Player by Robert Altman, a much better film and I highly recommend, the main difference between these two films however is in The Player everyone is in on the joke, Altman never speaks down to the audience and has fun with the story.
Tim Robbins (in The Player) is just as much of a shallow and hollow character and you'll dislike him as much as De Nero in this but because you are included in the joke, because you can see how distanced from reality he has become, by being a part of the Hollywood system, you can feel sorry for him.
Sadly for De Nero in this I couldn't.
I can't recommend this title to anyone but the dedicated film fan who will see a lot of the in jokes about Hollywood, everyone else should give it a miss.
This film was very boring and a perfect example of the current state of things in Hollywood. They think that just by bringing big stars in the movie will have to be a hit.
The actors are not the problem. They did their part. The problem is in the script or rather lack of it. The script is better suited for a 45 minute episode than for a whole movie. That's probably why the movie needed to be padded with long scenes of traveling. Also, the pace is too slow.
My advice to everyone is to avoid this movie. Watching paint dry is equally amusing and you might even get it for free.
Strange feeling for a French person to sit at a Hollywood movie theater to watch a movie about Hollywood. People around me laughed more than me because, presumably, the joke touches a lot of local nerves. The story is introduced by a score resembling the Nino Rota of "La Dolce Vita" but the similarities with "La Dolce Vita" end there. There is nothing new here other than Robert De Niro's performance, the first in a long time in which there is a notable commitment. I found the characters tiresome and far too familiar. I couldn't care less about any of them. The predicament of De Niro's Ben (a thinly veiled producer, writer Art Linson) left me cold. Living the times we're living, to concern myself with this was too much to ask.