Sick Product of a Sick System

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Absolutely Fantastic

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

and i have to believe it was written in even less time.the plot synopsis here at IMDb is good. i wish they'd shot that.what we got instead was a 95 minute film wishing it could be seen as one of those inspirational and affirming movies about a woman who attempts to overcome everything ... with a guitar. that wish was apparently denied.instead we end up with a 21-day film where they must've printed every first take; directed by someone disconnected from the subject ... and the characters ... and even simple threads of continuity ... and written by someone with no apparent expertise or sensitivity to the matter at hand. even the script's bones, even its structure is wonky. and the editor, i have to ask the editor what they were listening to when editing this film? the film's heartbeat ... its sense of rhythm is ... missing. for a film titled after a musical instrument with a character named Melody this pretty standard rhythm of editing idea seems a significant oversight.i have to let the actors off the hook because they seem to offer shallow, thoughtless, stilted although perhaps rushed performances. i kept wishing it would get better as it went along. it just /had/ to, i thought, but it never did.now i can only hope i saved you 95 minutes.

In the first five minutes of this film three big things happen. 1) Saffron Burrows is diagnosed with terminal cancer, given a month, two at most. 2) She's downsized out of her job and then, presumably to illustrate the impact of #2, she makes a collect phone call. Turns out the call is to her boyfriend. How weird is that? He meets with her and spews forth the most inane psychobabble nonsense about needing to find his inner child you've ever heard and says 3) he is breaking up with her.Saffron proceeds to rent a penthouse loft and furnishes it extravagantly using an endless supply of credit cards. She never goes out so she walks around naked and has sex with the UPS guy and pizza delivery girl. Saffron's acting is decent and hey, I like the story now. Then she buys a guitar. It has something to do with the flashbacks we see of her childhood, of course. At this point things become subjective. I'm a guitar snob and am not impressed seeing people fake a relationship with a guitar. Movies have been able to convincingly fake people playing the piano for years (right?) but I've never seen a good fake guitar playing performance. Granted, she is supposed to be a beginner so I shouldn't have expected much but I did anyway. I could let her slide on the fingering and strumming, given her beginner status and all, but I really needed to see an exciting relationship of her body to the guitar. I'm not expecting her to have sex with it, just show me that her body and her soul (that is the point, isn't it?) understand it, know how to move it and move with it and let it move her. Nada.Final verdict: thumbs down. Even if you don't share my guitar snobbery I don't think the film has much to offer beyond a decent performance from Burrows. It's pretty standard (trite and fantastic) "what would you do if you were told you had only a couple months to live" stuff. If playing the guitar is something that you'd do, given that you've got only a couple months to live, the learning curve ought to be really quick. I mean, if you are going to make a movie out of it.

**Spoiler Warning** This is basically a film about Melody, a woman who finds out she has an inoperable tumor in her throat. Her whole life basically collapses as she finds out she has only a couple months to live, her boyfriend dumps her and she gets fired from her job and this all happens in a single day. My biggest problem with this film lies in the fact that it basically winds up being a film more about consumerism than a film about a woman confronting the final months of her unsatisfied life.Once she finds out she is dying Melody leaves her crappy apartment and rents a really large and beautiful penthouse. The rest of the film basically takes place in this penthouse as she basically locks herself in and spends the next 2 months charging up her credit cards by buying things for herself and her penthouse. She starts out by buying the most expensive bed that she can find and from there moves on to expensive furniture, clothes, lamps, vases, food and pretty much everything in between. Her final purchase ends up being a guitar and a huge amp setup with which to play it on.Its just incredibly sad and extremely bothersome that this woman's spends her final 2 months basically being a consumer. The really sad part about this is I actually think there are a lot of people out there that would do the exact same thing. Society has become so consumeristic in nature that I really think that what this woman did would be some people's dying wish. Out of all of the things someone could devote their final months of life to, shopping has to be the absolute saddest choice possible. She could have traveled the world, learned to scuba dive, taken a safari, seen the Sistine chapel, sailed the Caribbean, hiked a glacier in Alaska, taken a cruise to the antarctic, or done whatever other things she wanted to do but never got the chance. To choose to lock yourself up in a Penthouse and shop till you drop is just an incredibly sad way to spend your final months and again it really speaks to the role that consumerism plays in society these days. Some people care more about buying items than truly experiencing life.Its not a bad film, in fact I rather enjoyed it. I was just really bothered by the message that this film puts out there. Then again as I said before there are probably a lot of people out there that would do just this sort of thing if something like this happened to them so maybe it makes this film even that much more realistic. She did learn how to play the guitar, which was something she was interested in as a child, so she did fulfill at least one of her dreams. Its still wasn't enough to make it any less sad.I am not sure if this film was purposely making some kind of statement regarding consumerism or not. I would like to hear from the writer and director regarding their thoughts on this matter. Either way its definitely the prevailing message in this film. I despise the level of consumerism we see these days so maybe I am a bit biased however I really cant think of too many people who would not find this woman's decision on how to liver her final months incredibly sad and pathetic. Our lives are short enough even when we aren't diagnosed with a terminal disease early in life and there are just too many things to do, too many places to see and too many experiences to have to waste our final months shopping.

Adolescent, uninspired movie about a girl who is dying and decides to buy things, kiss girls, and become unbearably shrill.There's no sense of reality here. Seriously, this movie makes the television programme "Friends" look gritty. We've seen this all before SO MANY TIMES. Not a note of originality in the tinny, cliché-ridden screenplay. Pretentious? This movie is so self-important it's almost sickening. It's a lame, boring artistic failure. Some of the supporting roles are well cast. I wish Ms. Redford more luck next time.