Originally Posted by c312

no, no it's not. Saying a movie had no plot is a perfectly good reason to call it bad, in fact, I would say it's one of the []best[/b] reasons to not like a movie. Besides, get off your high horse, people are allowed to not like movies for any reason they want, and when they don't like it, that doesn't mean they are too simple and didn't understand it, it's possible that people just don't have the same interests.

Anyway, there was no plot, it was completely unstructured. Robbers come to his shop, he beats them up, then another chapter started in which ed harris was the problem, then once the ed harris problem was solved, it was the new Ritchie problem, then he went and solved that. It was 3 segments of short problems that he solved with 20 seconds of fighting...I would say it maybe had 3 extremely short, underdeveloped plots smashed together to make a movie.

saying the plot was dealing with his past is ridiculous, the audience hardly learned anything at all about his past except he had mob ties. And if that was the plot, there was no resolution, he killed people, he went home, and his kids gave him dinner, ok, what caused the change in their attitudes? Why did his son suddenly stop hating him? someone already said it was weird how he and his wife were fighting and then started having sex out of no where, it just didn't make sense. He was a schizo? He remembered his past, he said he didn't think Joey would come back again, but then they just leave him off in the end, still schizo from what we know, but he just killed more ties to his previous life, I'm not sure that's what I would call "dealing with it," it's more just completely severing it to try to go back to his "normal" and fake life, which is basically what they did. In the end, the family was back to normal, they had not dealt with their father/husband's violent and mentally disturbed past at all, he had just cut it off from his Tom Stall character even more, he never resolved the issue with his wife or son, they were just automatically resolved when he was killing his brother in Philadelphia (and in the process trying to further himself from his past, instead of actually dealing with it)

Originally Posted by Tripper

Who says any of that "had" to go down...? It's a movie - There isn't an exact science to making films....But to say there was no plot is just plain stupid. If there was no plot there would be no reason for any of those characters....but obviously there was.
I felt it was an interesting character study, and I wondered what It would be like If I had to start my life over for some reason, if I could totally bury a part of me like Tom Stall tried to do.
I think it also made a very good point about really knowing people, and how much you need to know to feel as though you have a strong relationship with someone. If you find out something shocking like Edie did, would it change your view of that person so much you wouldn't love them anymore? Imagine if you found out your dad had lived a past life like Tom Stall's, how would you react? The scene that the film ends on shows that for Tom/Joey's family, it may not be such a big deal after getting over the initial shock....They still love their father/husband, and were willing to try and put it behind them. Alot of the scenes were an attempt to show mixed feelings I think...Like the sex scene on the stairs....Her reaction was two these two men in her husband's body, a mixed reaction.
The whole William Hurt part was, IMO, showing Tom Stall getting closure on his past life...Like he says, he just up and left that life to start a new one, and he left loose ends, hence the visit from Ed Harris...


I don't get your points by any means....I think there was so much plot...