Screenplays have to break new ground today. Most people have seen everything in one form or another and recognize small traits or plots or special effects or any number visual tricks in just about every new movie they see. This is why coming up with a new idea right now is about as difficult for any artist who toils for months to create a new movie idea that has never been seen before. The new movie “Mother” without a doubt succeeds in being as different and as new screenplay idea as I have ever seen. Where it fails is for the same reason, trying to be so new and different that it goes too far and that includes some scenes that are extremely objectionable and completely unnecessary even for a story as insane as this one. This film was both written and directed by Darren Aronofsky and considering the story of Mother, its difficult to imagine why this idea was green lighted by any production company.

The main character of mother is played by Jennifer Lawrence who is a young woman married to Javier Bardem who is a writer and a poet. Very soon, people start coming over to their old house where Lawrence’s character is trying to fix up and Bardem is trying to write poetry. At first a few people come over, including characters played by actor Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer. These people are rude, strange and never listen to whatever Lawrence’s character tells them and this includes going into her husband’s private office. This then leads to things being broken in the house and even stolen. Then of course this trend of people coming over unannounced and uninvited continues and more people come over who are similar to the first two. Then eventually the people coming over are much worse and then the movie slowly goes into insane directions, that mostly make no sense. You start to wonder while watching this strange movie if all of these weird people are aliens or a cult or something, but this very important part of this story is never explained. This film answers the question, when is trying to be different turn into a movie that doesn’t make sense or is objectionable? The answer to this question is for this film the most obvious I have ever seen. With any movie, sometimes less is more and a great example of this is the simple story of the recent great movie “Wind River”, that has also been reviewed on this blog and I do recommend people see as much as I do not recommend anyone see Mother.

Due to the objectionable scenes and ending and the way too insane plot, I cannot recommend Mother.

There are many reasons why writing a screenplay is so extremely difficult. The first that comes to mind is writing a good one or a great one could take months or even a year or more and represents a huge amount of work that most likely, unless you are an insider, will never see the light of day with any producer anywhere. Then as a writer you have to come up with a plausible story that makes sense, not only as to what happens in the story, but also makes sense because it flows into a plausible direction that a real person might actually take in real life. These are the fundamental reasons why “Home Again” fails. Even the title of this movie fails because this entire story has nothing to do with going home again.

The story line of this movie is about an almost divorced woman who turns 40, meets a 27 year old man in a bar, then has an affair with him and because he is trying to break into the movie business and her father was a famous director takes him AND his 2 friends in her home obviously makes no sense. From the very beginning this story is not plausible because why would a single woman who has 2 young daughters invite 3 men in their 20’s into her home who she barely knows, just because her mother, played by Candice Bergen says, “your father would have liked them”. Ultimately if a movie doesn’t make sense from the very beginning, it doesn’t matter what happens the rest of the way. This film seems a lot like a Nancy Meyers movie and that is because the writer director is Hallie Meyers-Shyer, is the daughter of Nancy Meyers, immediately removing any mystery of how a 30-year-old woman got to write and directs a major motion picture at such a young age.

The star of this movie is Reese Witherspoon who has made romantic comedies like this in the past, this one being one her weakest in recent years. The IMDB and Rotten Tomato ratings for this film are low, 5.6 and 32% respectively and this movie does deserve those low ratings.

This is a film that plays more like a B movie that should have went to DVD and never released.

I never thought I would ever see a movie rated as low as the new movie starring Kate Upton, entitled “The Layover”. This movie got a 0% approval on Rotten Tomatoes but I do not agree that this movie was that bad as I would have given it a 20 or a 25% rating. I have seen worse movies than this one over the years, much worse. Of course this is not a good movie, its stupid, the story is dumb and contains decisions and action that normal people would never do. Its embarrassing for the two actresses who play best friends, Kate Upton and Alexandra Daddario who make fools of themselves competing for this one guy they meet at random on a plane. You just have to wonder if these 2 actresses ever read this script or did this movie only to remain in the public eye as an actress or as a favor to a friend or for any number of other bad reasons. With ratings this low, you have to think that perhaps Kate Upton has ruined any chance of having an acting career and then wonder if Daddario has hurt her acting career too severely by making this bad movie. Equally amazing is that the great actor William H. Macy directed this bad movie. What was he thinking? Did even he read this script for this bad movie? Considering how bad this film is, he either didn’t read it or just wanted a movie directing credit and didn’t care how bad the screenplay was.

Fundamentally the story for any movie has to make sense and this movie just does not make any sense. Two very attractive women who have been close friends for years destroy their friendship doing a series of stupid things to either impress or make the other look bad for some random man they met on an airplane. This one central part of the story for this film was never believable, funny or made any sense. The layover from an East Coast plane trip to Fort Lauderdale Florida was diverted to St Louis because of a Hurricane, which also makes no sense. Then, after spending about 2 days in St Louis they all decide to drive 17 hours from St Louis to Ft Lauderdale, just to make sure the plane is not delayed again, even after they were told that the weather had cleared. Four people would never do something this stupid. There are other stupid story lines in this bad movie that also make no sense, but the movie is not worth elaborating too much more about, given all the things that everybody would agree is bad about it.

I saw this movie because of the blog but I recommend everybody else stay away.