Alex of Venice (2015)

While I don't mind the acting at all and I think everyone did a great job I think the script is just too...fairy tale as someone said in their review. We have an smart but rather incompetent woman going through hard times when the husband leaves (takes a break) because he's being treated like crap. Although not divorce she goes on to sleep with others while still pathetically doing bad at everything else. She's suppose to be a workaholic but the movie doesn't really show this. She's even hitting on her client, that's desperation and rightfully so.All in all, this movie is a one time watch and forget. I wouldn't expect too much from it. Characters are not very well defined at all. The sister's character is all over the place.

This is a story about a married couple that have started to grow apart. He is a struggling artist and she is a young high-powered lawyer working for a firm. As a result of their paths she mostly works, often long hours and some weekends while he mostly takes care of the house and their son. It is a role-reversal. But one day he realizes that he isn't happy where all this is taking him so he decides he has to leave. For an unspecified time. Their son says he is gone to Santa Fe, where lots of artsy types hang out.This is all complicated by her dad, late 60s or early 70s, living with them and who it seems is developing dementia.Mary Elizabeth Winstead is Alex and her husband is Chris Messina, who also directs, as George. The dad is Don Johnson, actually about 65, as Roger, who gets a part locally in a play but seems to be having trouble remembering his lines.All of these people have issues but they each seem to care about the others, they just don't always know what is a proper way to deal with everything.There is not an "everyone lives happily" resolution here but each character learns something that will surely make the rest of their lives turn out differently.We saw this on Netflix streaming movies.

I would have to say I was quite disappointed in this indie, as I'm a big Mary Elizabeth Winstead fan, and feel she's a most talented actress and always seems to bring an appealing quality to her roles. She stars here as Alex, a driven environmental attorney for Earth Now, and who's currently in litigation to stop the construction of a spa which may be damaging the surrounding habitat.There's just so must Winstead can do here with a script that came across to me as being way too incredulous and nonsensical. For example, Alex winds up sleeping with the builder (Derek Luke) of the aforementioned spa, whom she meets by chance at a local bar. She, nor anyone else, gives a second thought to a conflict of interest with someone she's currently fighting in court with. Huh?Also, when her husband George, played by Chris Messina who also makes his directorial debut here, decides to leave her and their 10-year-old son Dakota (Skylar Gaertner), because he's unhappy being a stay-at-home dad, Alex's father calls his other daughter Lily (Katie Nehra) to come help out with Dakota. No one seems to notice, till much later, that the free-spirit Lily, who "curses like a sailor", may not be the best influence on Dakota.Then there's the father Roger (Don Johnson) who takes a part in a Chekhov play despite the fact his memory is failing and it looks like he will be diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's (for which no one in the home seems too concerned about). To top it all off, there's the anti-male stereotypes that all men are "fill in the blank", a theme interwoven throughout the movie.All in all, although this film has some charm, at times, and the atmospherics of Venice, California are pleasing to the eye, I just couldn't buy into the storyline which, more often than not, came across to me as phony as a 3 dollar bill.

Chris Messina's directorial debut is an insightful look at thirty somethings at the level of of crisis Checkhov penned in his final play, THE CHERRY ORCHARD. The tight ensemble cast is led by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Don Johnson, Katie Nera and Skylar Gartner, Messina giving himself principal cast status without much on screen time. Winstead plays a thirty something environmental lawyer prosecuting a lawsuit which many viewers of the film get the impression has nowhere to go. Her dysfunctional family includes a father losing it trying to get a part in a production of THE CHERRY ORCHARD, a ditzy sister who tries to help but makes things worse, an unhappy husband who leaves without explanation or or warning and a ten year old son who at first feels crushed but eventually figures out all of us go through crises in our lives and the stronger we are to surmount them the better our lives will become. Odd philosophical truth to assign a ten year old character but always fascinating even the eighty or so minutes between opening and final credits and the often single camera editing working well.