What a bizarre experience this movie was -- and not in a good way! It began kind of cute, sweet and innocent and showing many signs it would be a meaningful movie well worth watching.However, Elsa has a lying problem. That is, she lies. A lot. And the one person she lies the most to is Fred. Not a good sign. This movie portrays an old woman who is a pathological liar as if it were both cute and romantic. Being an older woman myself, I can tell you that the older I get the more I realize that lying is neither cute nor romantic, and this kind of message in a film really irks me big-time.Then when she tells Fred about her ex (who she had previously said died but who really didn't die, and she got caught in that lie) she told her "sob story" of how he cheated on her and so she went to another country to pay for a handsome young male prostitute, then came home and told her ex about it, saying that if he could cheat on her then she could cheat on him. The punch line was that he said it was okay for him because he was a man. I guess this is the point where we are supposed to say, "Oh good, she is just being a feminist." Ugh.I don't really care to cover anymore of the story except to say that I felt cheated myself -- of an hour or two of my time -- for having watched this ludicrous film which seems to give a moral to the story of it's okay to lie, and oh look, it's even kind of cute and romantic and whimsical and totally okay. Not!

Remake (again) of a much better (latinamerican) movie. Argentinian cinema is (one of) the best industries in LatinAmerica, with some quality movies who have made their way in numerous festivals and even foreign category in the US-Hollywood backed Oscars. From time to time, US-cinema copies the movies, as we saw previously in K-Pax (remake/copy of "Man looking Southeast", which is the worst of these examples. Again, in this case, the US copy has stripped all of the good quality dialogues, and change the sarcastic humor for a more basic low standard jokes, including that translating sarcastic intelligent jokes from Spanish to English is not easy task. Not all is bad, as the good choice of cast with big names make it up for the effort as they do their best to try and save this simplistic version. Getting the latinamerican version with English subtitles is not that difficult, and if not, it's always worth it to learn Spanish, to better catch the many more humorist moments.

I got around to watching another movie I've had in my queue at Netflix for some time yesterday- "Elsa and Fred" is apparently an English- language remake of the 2005 Argentinian film of the same name. Oscar winners, Shirley MacLaine and Christopher Plummer play our titular characters in a December-December romantic comedy surrounding Elsa's obsession with "the sweet life in Rome", as experienced by Anita Ekberg in the 1961 film "La Dolce Vita". I kept thinking something about this seemed very "deja-vu"-ee to me, then realized MacLaine had actually co-starred with the star of that film, the late Marcello Mastroianni, in the 1993 comedy, "Used People". I've read some user comments that MacLaine may have been a little miscast as Elsa, and I never had any issues with that. Overall, I liked the cast and the feel of the movie, just thought it dragged it's feet a bit-?? And one thing- James Brolin as Scott Bakula's father-??? Eh...neh.... LOL Chris Noth, Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden, and George Segal round out the cast.

American remake of the 2005 Spanish-Argentine co-production "Elsa y Fred" casts Shirley MacLaine and Christopher Plummer as single oldsters living next door to each other in the same New Orleans townhouse, each with over-protective grown children, concerns about money and health, and a textbook of cranky-cute idiosyncrasies. Written and directed at a sitcom level, with dishonest characters and offensive sentiment. A good cast flounders; MacLaine tries creating a goosey, unflappable woman prone to giggling and full of neighborly good cheer, but she's covered much of this territory before (there are also uncomfortable parallels to "Used People"). Mildewy romantic comedy opens with a self-defeating first reel involving a not-funny fender-bender (following shots of Fellini's "La Dolce Vita") before settling into an unconvincing give-and-take between the leads. Not a single sequence rings true, the relatives are boors, while the laugh lines fall like wet sponges around the actors. *1/2 from ****