Reviews

In some ways describing this film as a romcom is misleading there is indeed rom and a great deal of com but for a lot of men the word drips with sentimentality whereas a lot of Going the Distance is a far broader comedy. A great deal of inventive swearing and a certain amount of sexual imagery - I don't remember Sleepless in Seattle having a scene of two men discussing how the angle of one's head seemed to suggest he was giving himself a blow-job! The guys as a sort of chorus is funny as is the steely persona of Christina Applegate, but for me it is drew who carries it,she makes you laugh a lot out loud,she is a good physical comic,watch out for her drunk in a bar- and she carries you through the occasional longueurs of the film. Well worth seeing

I thought the film was excellent on a number of grounds; the acting by the main players was uniformly good,I suppose one could carp about the main Nazi in that it was the traditional mixture of ' jolly fine fellow when out of uniform and with blonde wife and children but nightmare when faced with the Untermenschen in the camp'. The main actor was unknown to me and something of an anti-hero but the gradual emergence of his positive sides was well done.The concentration on life in the special part of the camp where only the sounds of shouts and gunshots penetrate was very well portrayed and the entire film gripped me from start to finish. I suppose there were no amazing revelations apart from the basis of the story but that was more than enough and I recommend it highly

Saw this film today,thought it well made and in spite of longueurs worth staying with it. It might be worth mentioning that the main character has no real saving graces in my opinion and one of his skills as a director is to bring out the overwhelmingly controlling nature of the character, be it the dream of the girlfriend of being buried in sand or the casual way he deals with all in his path. Secondly, I did find the scene with his former girlfriend something of a challenge as it takes a t least 5 minutes to realise that this violent sexual scene is consensual, so for those who are expressing reservations about a film like Red Road and its scene of violent sex, this one is to my mind far more brutal.

Having been led to believe by a listings magazine that this film had'outstanding naturalistic sound design', I should have realised i might be disappointed. I was expecting a slice of Mexican life, character development, perhaps a plot and I must admit a certain erotic content. The result was stunningly boring in every respect. Nothing is explained, we never learn why the event at the start of the film has taken place, the characters are almost totally impassive, deeply unappealing and the sexual encounters, apart from one, have no erotic appeal and indeed very little logic to them. Over the top music, a few symbols here and there, rolling up the flag, a little religion and superstition and such amusing touches as a leitmotiv of incontinence for no apparent reason, this truly was 90 minutes where paint drying would have seemed vastly more exciting. Do not see this film.