Stream it now Feast of Love 2007

 

Beautiful people, everybody finds their love, beautiful setting, and we're all a tribe together.

Do they ever make movies with real people anymore?

As always, Kinnear and Freeman stand out as the amazing actors they are. The story has its faults, but is a very tragic and beautiful drama.

Robert Benton

"Feast of Love" starts with Harry(Morgan Freeman), a university professor, remembering a year and a half previously to a softball game where his pal Bradley(Greg Kinnear), an artist and coffee shop owner, watches his wife of six years, Kathy(Selma Blair), play. After the game, Jenny(Stana Katic), a player on the opposing team, comes to join them. What Harry notices and Bradley does not is that the two women share an instant attraction for each other. As Bradley's marriage goes down the tubes, a new relationship takes hold under his nose in his shop as Oscar(Toby Hemingway), a recovering addict, and Chloe(Alexa Davalos), a free spirit looking for a job, form an instant bond.

Enter Diana(Radha Mitchell) into Bradley's life.

"Feast of Love" is an artistically shot, sporadically erotic but dramatically inert movie that has to less to say about love, then about how afraid most people are to be alone. Take Bradley for instance. He is a charming, funny guy who also lacks perception(weird for an artist) and moves quickly from one relationship to another with abandon, getting serious without knowing his partner. And it is a good bet that he never suspected that Kathy was attracted to women until it was too late. It is either that or the scene where she meets Jenny reinforces the ugly stereotype that not only are lesbians out to seduce heterosexual women but that all softball players and athletic women for that matter are lesbians.(Or is it the other way around. I get confused.) In conclusion, the movie might have had a chance of working if Bradley's storyline had been severely truncated. Plus, no matter how good it is to see Fred Ward in anything these days, his performance comes out of another movie entirely.

I cried.

I laughed.

I screamed.

I decided to pop in Feast of Love when I realized Morgan Freeman (Harry) is in it. One of my hands-down favorites, his 1935 birth year often gives me the chills when I start consuming my daily dosage of entertainment news.

I am indifferent towards Greg Kinnear (Bradley) and the rest of the cast are strangers to me so I thought to myself, if Freeman is in it then it can't be that bad, right?You'll be glad to know that I was.

To summarize without giving too much away, this is a movie where a community suddenly finds their lives intertwined and related in ways they never thought possible with love as the ultimate theme underlying every word and action.

It takes unexpected turns and stops at certain parts a little too long or too short but in real life we all know, nothing is almost exactly the way we'd like it to be, especially when it comes to love.

So...

Is it sappy? Yes.

Is it corny? At times.

Is it worth watching? Absolutely.

One of my favorite lines is when Harry expressed his loathing at the events that have transpired to be a sign of an indifferent and uncaring God/Maker to which Bradley's reply turned my waterworks on faster that dipping my head in a running blender full of Jalapeno peppers.

I will you will enjoy this too.

P/S: Watch out for Toby Hemingway (Oscar) and Alea Davalos' (Chloe) wonderful performances.

A pleasant surprise, with a heartfelt touch ringing even more true than Love Actually.

this is not a romantic comedy!! if you are struggling with your relationship, don't see this! it's mostly sad, depressing and overwhelming to see the situations in these couple's lives.

- Made me laugh and cry. Worth a watch.

Before we get down to business, let me first bring to your attention that I've momentarily altered my rating system to coincide with my lack of... how do you say... oh, yes-- MONEY. Instead of the star-system, instead of the letter-grade system, instead of the fresh/rotten tomato system, each film will be rated according to their economical worth, assuming you pay $10 per ticket admission. So, should I believe The Fast and the 4ious to be the absolute best motion picture of the year, I will rate it a 10, meaning it was worth the ten dollars I coughed up to watch it. However, as Robert DeNiro said to Al Pacino in Heat, "There's a flip-side to that coin." Should I watch X2: X-Files United and be completely dissatisfied with the overall motion picture, I may rate it a 1.50, meaning... you guessed it, "A pack of Red Vines costs more than what that piece of crap movie's really worth. Damn it, stupid, stupid, stupid." Comprende, muchachos y muchachas? Forgive me, I just had Mexican food and I'm feelin' it in more areas than my bowels. Just add a dollar sign to the score and you'll know all that you need to know about my thoughts regarding a film. Forgive me if my reviews start to look more like menus than articles. Now, back to our regularly scheduled program:

Leatherheads: $7.00
Leatherheads, the third film to be directed by George Clooney, is the calm before the storm that never comes. It's light, breezy entertainment filled with zesty one-liners, hay-day slapstick, and... well, football. There's nothing about the film that's heavy-handed, except for the realization of how damn light the entire project is, and in that sense, it's a lot like the team who makes it to the championship game, but loses-- they're still going to Disneyland, winner's be damned, and we're right there with them.


The Ruins: $3.50
There's a richness absent from Scott Smith's screenplay for The Ruins that's more than abundant in his novel of the same name, which raises the curious, abbreviated-for-the-times question: WTF? We've got the same guy who wrote the book writing the screenplay and he still manages to ruin it (pun intended). The film is Cabin Fever meets Hostel in Mexico; the book is Lord of the Flies meets the plant from Little Shop of Horrors. The human drama is diminished thanks to the Cliffsnotes version of Smith's characters (there's not enough good dialogue here to evaporate the memory of silly lines), the "jungle" set is about as authentic as the animated-flora in Horton Hears a Who, and the ending provides a hope no one can really admire as it erases the essence of horror. Yet again we're given a teen-horror flick wherein the best part lies in a single castmate's decision to provide an attractive pair of breasts.


Feast of Love: $6.00
If Morgan Freeman were to provide the eulogies of every departed individual, I have a sneaking suspicion that the dead would return to life. I mean, there's just something about this guy's voice that makes everything seem like it'll be okay... and as the narrator of Feast of Love, he succeeds at just that. As a story about several troubled interwoven relationships, Feast of Love is victorious in bringing to life only about 75% of them. The "young-love" segment of the proceedings is marred by soap-opera scripting that never feels as real as the rest of what's going on. Thank God for Morgan Freeman though (and if we were in Bruce Almighty-Land it'd be the same difference), who, along with the likes of Greg Kinnear and Rhadda Mitchell, manage to sweep up the mess left by the kids of the show. All in all, this is a feast worth digging into, just not without a pepcid tablet on standby.

(** 1/2):

I will say that the film kept me watching because it isn't boring. But, I don't think is a particularly good movie. There is just too much going on here and too many characters that come and go. Not a total waste but I expected something better and not as predictable.