The Good Night (2007)

Former British pop star Gary Shaller (Martin Freeman) is struggling with a mid-life crisis. He's writing jingles for his more successful former bandmate Paul (Simon Pegg) and in a troubled marriage with Dora (Gwyneth Paltrow). He starts having dreams about Anna (Penélope Cruz). He learns to connect more with his dreamgirl through lucid dreaming with the help of Mel (Danny DeVito).Jake Paltrow got a lot of friends and his daughter to do his film. His directing skills are not good enough to make this cinematic. Even his visual flourishes lack a sharpness in their execution. The writing is not much in terms of drama. It's an idea looking for intensity. This does have a great cast although it's hard to buy Freeman as a former pop star. It's not his looks as much as his Office persona. On the other hand, Cruz is easily a dreamgirl and cool chick. There is a way to intensify this concept and story but this is not it.

The Good Night (2007)Gwyneth's brother directs a curious but strained movie featuring both Gwyneth Paltrow as the real world lead and Penelope Cruz as some kind of vixen of the lead men's dreams. Now you might wonder what leading man Martin Freeman has wrong with him that he gets to sleep with his wife, played by Gwyneth, and yet he dreams of this other, Latina, woman. This is so filled with simplistic male fantasy, with stereotypes of ethnic types and gender roles, it's sometimes painful.Most of the time you can, hopefully, gloss over this and see pure cleverness (in the footsteps of The Science of Sleep 2006) and layers of reality (a pale version of any Kaufman film like Eternal Sunshine (2004) or the more recent Synecdoche, New York). In fact, you might see the use of the woman's face in advertising as an echo of Red (1994). I guess I'm struggling to find the originality here, which I'm sure is meant to hold it all together.Martin Freeman is likable but a little milquetoast for me, as the locus of the whole movie. Cruz is a relief in leather (the white fur on the beach scenes are total gag me clichés, even as clichéd dreams). I rather like Paltrow the sister as an actress when she is the normal young woman, which she is, but it does force the script to rise up and make their normal coupleness vivid, or trenchant, or comic. It is only slightly two of these. The fourth main character in spurts, besides the caricature that is Danny DeVito, is Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead fame), who is really a great presence, stealing his scenes.Do I say see this movie? Only if there are some aspects here, and some influences, that are up your alley. It's not horrible at all, a kind of back-handed something to say without just saying it tries too hard.

I didn't know anything about "The Good Night" when I turned it on...and I'm still not sure that I know what it was supposed to be about. Martin Freeman (of "The Office") plays Gary, a former pop star now in a pseudo-relationship with Dora (Gwyneth Paltrow). It looks as if his life is truly going nowhere, when he starts having fantasies featuring a strange woman (Penelope Cruz) who appears in advertisements. I think that that was the plot.I assume that the movie must be a look at Gary's being nearly at the end of his emotional rope, but I found it a little too weird to really follow. A movie dealing with this topic that I recommend is John G. Avildsen's "Save the Tiger", starring Jack Lemmon. Maybe I would have liked this one better had they elaborated on how Gary's experiences change his life - if at all - in the long run. Not terrible, but not one that I would recommend above all others.Also starring Danny DeVito and Michael Gambon.

The movie is amazing on most levels. It's actually a vision into a manic depressed soul who sees a light at the end of the tunnel. The light is in the form of the dream girl Anna (Penelope Cruz, who is absolutely stunning once again in this flick).He has a girlfriend that he has burned every bridge but they still have a deep love blanketed with layers of strife and arguments. Instead of working things through the ventures deep into his mind and tastes something in his dreams that he can get enough of. The dreams start taking control and start getting in the way, The entire time he feels that Anna can save him from his own routine depressed life.The movie starts getting a little weird when Anna walks into his life in human form.In my opinion this is a great movie for peering into the mind of a semi psychotic depressed soul. Exactly what a film should do, make you think on different levels.