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The Bounty Hunter Chloe Greenberg

By Genevieve Burgess | DVD Releases | July 13, 2010 |

By Genevieve Burgess | DVD Releases | July 13, 2010 |


The Bounty Hunter: “It used to be that a Hollywood Movie Star was a pitch man for his or her own movie. They would stand by their work, and their image was supposed to represent the quality of that work. It seems the opposite now. The Bounty Hunters doesn’t have the “Jennifer Aniston Stamp of Approval.” Her name is there to dupe you into seeing it. The Hollywood Movie believes that all a movie needs is his or her name attached to it. It’s a system borne out of complete and baffling arrogance. There’s an expectation on their part that an audience will follow them anywhere, and that the final product is moot. It’s their name they’re selling, and not the movie. And if the Hollywood Movie Star system is, in fact, broken, it’s not the audience’s fault, it’s the Hollywood Movie Star’s fault for believing that we would blindly follow her into whatever slow-moving, crickety, broken-down vehicle she straps herself into. Credit certain audiences that are finally catching on to this phenomenon. Unfortunately, the studios are way ahead of the game; now they’re selling an old title repackaged for a wide-eyed Millennial audience. Titles are cheaper than movie stars, anyway.” - Dustin Rowles

Chloe: “This is what we’ve paid to see: not just soft-core shenanigans, but soft-core shenanigans with actors of some class. And the woman behind me, she gets to go tut-tut-tut every time someone does something naughty (which is often). And the guy in front of me, he gets to slump down a bit once Moore and Seyfried lock lips (often enough).” - William Goss

Greenberg: “I’ve been fooled again. From the trailer, Greenberg looked like it might be a sort of angry young hipster version of As Good As It Gets. A bitter malcontent artist — well, carpenter in this case — finds unlikely love in pursuing a much younger woman. Instead, Noah Baumbach thumb-gouges our eyes with another misery fest, a keening melancholic dirge of scattered depressive goings-on that’s like rifling through a photo album of small children identifying their horribly mauled parents’ corpses. The film is so choked of any joy you might occasionally laugh like when a dying cancer patient lets out a juicy fart; it’s so fucking arid, you’ll do anything for a giggle. It’s a film about unpleasant people barely existing as they carom from unpleasantness to unpleasantness. Life for those lost in their middle years, still adrift in the sea of “what should I be,” is awful enough without Baumbach wasting our time holding up a maudlin mirror and showing us the dark circles from weeping of our own misery. I can’t imagine that there’s an audience for emo-porn, but I guess people who cut themselves to feel alive probably pick the scabs to rehash the good times. Greenberg is essentially a big-screen version of those breakup poems loners scribble on bar napkins. You don’t show those to other people, you burn them with candles while listening to The Cure in the safety of your own winebox.” - Brian Prisco

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