The Roses

This movie saved my marriage

**Sometimes I can't even feel his c--- inside me.** Hilarious. So much good dialogue with excellent performances from the leads. Awesome cinema experience, the oldies we're an extra layer of entertainment. _Worth watching_

honest to god this was a 4 star movie before the ending





I JUST WANT EVERYONE TO LOVE AGAIN

Brilliantly acted and very funny.
That said, it's not entirely comedy, it hits surprisingly hard on the topic of relationship breakdowns, the consequences of success and the pits of failure.

Hated the ending though. I know it's based on a book. I know that's how the book ends, but it completely destroys the entire journey of the characters and their relationship.

The Roses is very funny and had pretty solid comedic scenes. Even though it has some depressing scenes, they don’t really match in intensity for me. I still definitely felt very sympathetic for each character and enjoyed the sadder scenes.

[spoiler]The ending was pretty well executed. I feel like it really couldn’t have ended in a better way. All the tension of the final scenes ended by spelling out the story of the character’s complex and winding marriage in an equally meaningful way.[/spoiler]

All in all The Roses is a great modern interpretation of the story.

The Roses is a charming, lighthearted film. Olivia Colman shines in a role perfectly suited to her, and Benedict Cumberbatch is equally well cast. The rest of the ensemble, however, feels more like extras than true contributors. While I didn't buy into every aspect of the story, enough of it is relatable and genuinely funny that it’s easy to recommend.

I continue finding it alarming that hetero rom coms rely so much on the man and woman absolutely hating each other. This is the most "hit you over the head with it" one in recent memory, but we just see these two people who are clearly not compatible with each other form a life together, and then inevitably grow apart for a variety of reasons, only for everyone around them to tell them over and over that it's completely normal to hate your spouse like 30-50% of the time, and to just focus on the good stuff. At the point where their hijinks stray into full blow murder tactics, it really lost me. I think Olivia Colman is one of the most charming women in film/tv right now, and Benny Cumberbatch holds his own, but Theo was so aggressively self centered I couldn't root for him. I did not believe him when he said he wouldn't have let Ivy die after sharing the raspberry cake with her. But then when she comes out and starts SHOOTING at him, I was totally out. These are not the same people that I just spent an hour with who sort of love each other but also can't stand each other. Those two people may have stopped loving or even liking each other, but they wouldn't murder each other.

However, for as much as the story and all those dumb, straight rom com tropes brought this down, I really enjoyed the dialogue, and Colman and Cumberbatch delivered it all excellently. Some of the back-and-forth's are really top notch, I feel like the people at the dinner party who think there's something that's just so charmingly British about the way they insult each other. The movie got off to a great start, I laughed out loud at the opening scene when she says one of the things she loves about him is that "he's got arms" and the whole bit about the armless man documentary. That was all very funny! Unfortunately it's all wrapped around a story I just really didn't love.

"The Roses" is yet another rather unnecessary attempt to revisit a title that some may vaguely remember. This reinterpretation of "The War of the Roses" was definitely not needed. But at least the main ingredient is a success: the two leads, Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman, have decent chemistry together. And I can certainly acknowledge that the film has some amusing moments.

At the same time, “The Roses” is also quite tame compared to the 1989 film. The escalation, which was the clear highlight of the first film, didn’t really convince me. Unlike Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, I didn’t buy that Cumberbatch and Colman’s characters hated each other. Meanwhile, the supporting characters are terribly written. They are not credible individuals but pure clichés. As a result, when the spotlight isn't on Cumberbatch and Colman, the humor falls flat.

Last but not least, the role of the two children in the plot should not be ignored. Screenwriter Tony McNamara apparently ran out of ideas at some point, because while the children play an integral role at the beginning, they are simply written out at some point. One would think that they should have a certain relevance throughout a story about a marital dispute.

Ultimately, "The Roses" entertained me to a certain extent, but it didn't exactly grab me. I would therefore rather recommend the 1989 film.

Like an autopsy: the study of how something once alive died, and just as funny.

This dark comedy with no comedy analyzes the disintegration of a relationship without cringe, drama, or interest.

I expected a dry, witty and biting British comedy but this was written by an Australian and directed by an American so... I'm surprised to hear myself thinking that I preferred the original, which I didn't really like either but at least caught me off guard.

This movie is marketed as an off the rails comedy. It is decidedly not that. It starts out with a therapy lesson that ends up with a flashback. Initially, I thought this was an interesting and sincere way to build some depth and emotional weight to the eventual craziness. It honestly did start out strong with the dichotomy of their two careers and aspirations, but it just goes on. And on. I kid you not, it takes an hour before the movie returns back to the cold open. I actually checked my watch. And this hour isn't funny. There are maybe a few throwaway jokes that got a chuckle out of me. The side characters are absurd caricatures that don't fit into the more dramatic look into a failing marriage, and there are just a lot of random asides with their backstory. And that's the thing, even if I felt like I got duped into seeing a more dramatic movie about relationships, I could overlook that if the movie did a good job in that. But I don't think it really does. There are tons of movies that do a way better job with this type of material. It doesn't help that I think there is very clearly a "right" side in the entire conflict. At least Benedict Cumberbatch is in top form.

The last 20 minutes finally shift into the movie the trailers showed. Except the trailers showed pretty much everything in those last 20 minutes. The movie escalates so fast that it almost feels like a montage. It culminates in an ending so at odds with everything the movie had can building up prior to that. It wants to be a serious relationship drama but also wants to market itself as an absurd comedy. It never reconciles the two. Maybe if the movie had started with the therapy scene, done a quick flashback to see how they got there, and then spent the entire runtime showing the escalating hijinks, it might have worked a lot better instead of saving them for the last 20 minutes. Regardless, as is, this movie is a mess and marketed in a very deceiving manner.