Too much of everything

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Many people do not appreciate dramas like these that portray people as they are, raw, imperfect and perpetually seeking out what's behind door number two. "Life has a gap in it. You don't go crazy trying to fill it." In the case of Take this Waltz, you do. Margot (Michelle Williams) shows us what the possibilities are when the grass isn't greener on the other side, love doesn't fulfill, and what opening the other door can do to your life when the reward isn't greater. Seth Rogan does an exceptional job of not being Seth Rogan. He truly stepped outside of himself for this role and showed more depth as an actor. I genuinely appreciated the film and my only criticism would be Michelle William's unsightly, high school, emo comb over part. The awkwardness between Seth Rogan and Michelle William's character is hysterical and insufferable which makes the film even greater. I love that it is directed and written by Sarah Polley. I can't wait to see what she does next.

This movie is so color saturated as to make it look like a candy wrapper. Because, this movie is candy for cougars and female teachers that lust after their underage male students. Polly is about as sexist as Harvey Weinstein when she depicts men. Either they are 'dogs' or irresistible hotties that women have no impulse control over and must jump on top of. This movie seems to be Polly's way of getting back at all the good men in her life. Polly here makes a thesis why women should dump good men in favour of louses. Generally the movie is a yawn fest. But the icing on the unbaked cake is the ridiculous, over the top, completely unnecessary, overly long sex montage where she spends way too long positioning Michelle Williams in a variety of sex positions while the camera insinuates the passage of time. Polly isn't happy until Williams has worked her way through the Kama Sutra. When I saw this at the theater the whole audience burst out laughing at that scene. Polly clearly needs to visit PornHub more often and perhaps invest in a Japanese bedside toy. This movie is for women that dream of leaving a loving home and family to screw every good looking, underage, poor narcissist or homeless person she sees. The only thing missing here is the canned laughter.

I love cutesy indie films and quirky romance as much as the next millennial. But I really hated this film. In simple terms, Margot, played by Michelle Williams, is selfish and childish, and she throws away a marriage because it's boring. That in and of itself would be a good topic for a film: it is normal for relationships to get boring and individuals to question if they are happy. However, none of Margot's actions are mature, she goes through very little personal growth, and ultimately the film ends with her having a pity-party for herself instead of growing as an adult. The film starts with the married Margot on a business trip. She meets Luke, a handsome stranger that she instantly has chemistry with, on the flight home. They do pointless quirky things and have conversations that are so forcefully quirky that they actually become banal. When they land, she learns that Luke is her new neighbor. Margot begins to wonder if she's truly happy in her five year old marriage to Lou, played by Seth Rogen, while also toying with the idea of a relationship with Luke. Eventually, she leaves Lou for Luke, they have a grand old time, but eventually that relationship also becomes boring and Margot has a self-pity party and the movie ends. Now, for the reasons why this movie is terrible. First off, the quirky rom-com job that Luke has is rickshaw driver. But he's also an artist. Err... wait, not an artist. He's just a painter because, and this is his actual explanation, "I paint for myself and I pay my rent by driving a rickshaw through town like a modern day hobo." He's too much of a coward to show other people his art, so he can't be an artist. This revelation comes right after a pointless exposition about how he understands Margot better than she understands herself and sees that "part of her is not living up to her full potential." Please note that this is a woman he has known for the length of a plane ride and coffee shop visit, but I guess we're supposed to read his spot on intuition about Margot as romantic. This is also just one of many examples of exposition in this film: it seems to be largely incapable of "showing" things and instead just chooses to have characters explicitly outline them.Meanwhile Lou and Margot's relationship continues to be uneventful. Except they too have such eye-rolling levels of "quirky" banter that you quickly lose any investment you might have in their relationship and just hope it ends so you don't have to hear them cutely describe, and again this is true, the ways they want to mangle each other to death. Not a word of dialogue between them feels authentic or sincere. It's as if the script writer had a friend say "Me and an ex used to threaten each other but in a romantic way. You should try that!" The writer was hell bent on coming up with cutesy yet unique dialogue, but the result is not interesting and does nothing to set up a believable relationship between the characters. Margot tries to cheat on Lou multiple times, but at no point over the course of the movie do they actually have a conversation about the state of their relationship, which at most is boring. Lou is not abusive, unemployed, lazy, uncaring, or uninteresting. The reason Margot is unhappy is because she is needy and the relationship has reached the stage where things naturally mellow out and the mundanity of life is the primary part of the relationship. This was the main reason I watched this movie: the idea of dealing with a relationship that has lost it's spark is realistic but also is rarely portrayed successfully in film. I had high hopes for a film that took on such a relatable aspect of life.Instead though, we get a selfish woman who callously leaves her husband only to woefully realize later that this new relationship will also become boring. She regrets leaving her husband, but not because she's experienced any kind of personal growth; it's more of a self-pity where she cries over what she lost and not what she did or the personal flaws that led to her making such a mistake. And, like the intuition that Luke has about Margot, this is all told to the audience via expose instead of shown through emotions and actions. Basically, Lou's alcoholic sister crashes her car and tells Margot that despite the fact that she (the alcoholic) is a screw-up, that Margot is the one who made a mistake she should regret. This film is really bad at showing, not telling which makes it a waste of the medium. In the end, Margot's personal growth moment comes when she decides to go to the fair by herself and has some realization about relying on herself, but ultimately she never grows up beyond "woman-child who doesn't know how to deal with no one paying attention to her." The realistic difficulties of being in a relationship are given nothing more than lip service in this film and ultimately we just watch a woman throw away a relationship because she's too petulant to have an adult conversation with her husband about what she wants and instead chooses to run off with a creepy prince charming bullshit character. It's like this movie was written by a high schooler who really thought that Summer was the bad guy in 500 Days of Summer.

No, this didn't work for me. Slow moving, not romantic, not funny, not charming or quirky (in a good way) mostly just weird and at times making no sense whatsoever. Maybe I should stop watching these Indie films, I obviously don't "get" them.Michelle Williams plays a seemingly happily married woman (to Seth Rogan) who falls for the neighbor across the street. Her performance is good but I never understood her character, there's no real angst in her relationship, she just gets bored I guess. For whatever reason there's also lot of (pointless) nudity from all the women, the shower scene after the water aerobics. Williams is naked a ton; showering, peeing, having sex. More pubes than I've seen in a long time. Sarah Silverman is here too, also naked and unfunny. A lot of comedians in an unfunny jumbled mess of a movie. 7/26/14