“Nziff At Home – Online will be a true film festival experience featuring world and New Zealand premieres of films each night, and including virtual red-carpet, and filmmaker Q&As and we can potentially invite more international guests to present their films to our festival audiences than ever before using virtual means,” said Marten Rabarts, festival director who is curating his first edition. The Guilt Trip, on the other hand, is amiable, if amateurish.The 2020 edition of the New Zealand International Film Festival will take place entirely online, after organizers conceded that the coronavirus crisis has made it impossible to pull off a conventional festival in theaters. For many, Barbra Streisand stands as the consummate professional. The result is a premise bursting with possibilities, and a very limited amount of actual jokes. Rogen, on the other hand, is a lox, limply lumbering along, taking his character’s defeated nature way too much to heart. We expect a lot from her, but she’s been away from the center spotlight for far too long (we don’t really count her “work” in those awful Fockers films). Of the two, Streisand more or less acquits herself. But Fogelman tosses out random vignettes without the proper motivational linkage, making his often one-note characters into pawns for a jokey jigsaw puzzle that never comes together. Because of its locale-to-locale logistics, we expect a film like this to be a bit scattered and episodic. In turn, such sappy sentiments are overemphasized by choreographer turned chick flick filmmaker ( 27 Dresses, The Proposal) Anne Fletcher. But instead of playing up the pairing, letting Rogen and Streisand riff on things both meaningful and madcap, he goes for the maudlin. Instead, screenwriter Dan Fogelman (best known for some Disney animated films, as well as Crazy, Stupid, Love) uses a real life trip he took with his own mother as a jumping off point. Both smart and sassy, her work in such memorable movies as What’s Up, Doc? could have been matched by an equally feisty turn here. In Streisand’s case, she remains the Me Decade’s answer to those daffy Depression era “dames” favored by Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, and Preston Sturgess. One could easily see him turning his classy co-star into a blubbering mess with his constant pot and penis references. With Rogen, there is the gross-out gagging of the last decade in motion picture humor. It has oodles of potential, but can’t seem to figure out how to use it all. Like Mother without Albert Brooks’ wry wit or familial insights, The Guilt Trip is an unexploded bomb. In making her happy, Andy hopes that something good will happen to him. What she doesn’t know is that her son hopes to reunite her with a lost love. As Andy tries-and fails-to win over new clients, Joyce spends her time in rebellious Jewish mother mode. After visiting his dim, doting, widowed mother Joyce (Streisand) and learning a secret about her past, he reluctantly decides to invite her along. Unsuccessful in his attempts to pitch it to various interests, he is down to his last few dollars when he decides to take an all-or-nothing cross-country sales trip. Sadly, this film is more infuriating than funny.Īndy Brewster (Rogen) is a young inventor who has just come up with a new, environmentally-friendly cleaning product. Juxtapose the aging singer/actress with a marginally hot comedy co-star (in this case, a post-Apatow Seth Rogen) in a road movie about parental guidance - or the lack of same - and watch the ethnically-influenced laughs begin. So how does one explain away The Guilt Trip? On paper, it must have seemed like a solid idea. From her initial musical work in the ’60s to the screwball comedies and romances of the ’70s, her career choices have always attempted to match her well known in-studio perfectionism. Whenever Oscar-winning chanteuse and defiant diva Barbra Streisand decides to grace us with her presence on the silver screen, it’s an event.
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