Alan highly recommends The Visitor, especially praising the performance by Richard Jenkins:
In "The Visitor" he plays an economics professor late in his career and not really committed to much, who comes to life due to some rather unexpected developments. It is a small quiet film, with great performances from many people, but especially Jenkins. It's rare that I am deeply satisfied by what I consider an 'airplane film'.
Meanwhile, Rondi, while praising Jenkins' performance, exhibits her dripping and undaunted sarcasm at its best and is quite negative about the film,
While The Visitor was a mediocre movie, he was excellent as the protagonist (he was actually "the visitor" to his own life. Deep and meaningful, see?). As I watched I wondered who the hell Jenkins was, and whether he would get the recognition he so deserved for carrying an otherwise middling movie. What's too bad is, it could have been a great movie, if the writer (who was also the director) hadn't decided to make it an anti-war on terror bromide. In this movie, one learns that Muslims are wonderfully liberal and multicultural, they love Jews, everyone taken into detention since 9-11 is innocent, American police officers are just drooling to arrest anyone who comes from a country with a funny name and white people are completely closed and ignorant and don't know a thing about the world. Nothing. The movie was so bloody ham-handed -- had it focused on Jenkins' character's grief and his coming back to life through meeting new people, it could have been saved. And it also had an aspect of Boomer-ish pretension. "Oh, lookey me! I'm 60 now! I'm bored. I'm sad. And even though I have a great job and am well off and educated and have two great places to live, I'm having a crisis! No one has ever gone through this struggle before!" Argh.
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