This is a film that has a good story, two good actors giving solid performances (Ben Chaplin and Nicole Kidman), good cinematography, good editing, good direction and a simple yet clean sound mix. We don't see movies like this come along too often. Simple! That's the best word I can use to describe it, for I am sick to death of the overly fast cutting, super lame "cool" dialogue and music videoish "style" that movies have become lately. Instead, Birthday Girl forgets about all of that and concentrates on the STORY...so much so that you will forget about everything else. I even failed to keep track of the reel changes.

Ben Chaplin is a mousy English bank clerk, lives alone, under-appreciated at work, into porn and a little kinky. Orders a Russian "mail order companion" (Kidman) via the Internet, but gets a little more than he was expecting.

Everything Brad said is pretty accurate. Nicole Kidman etc. were fine, the movie looked and sounded good. But keeping the story "simple" didn't seem to add up to enough. If Nicole Kidman sees the final cut, I suspect she will tell her agent "Don't send me any more scripts from those guys".

BTW: Is there anything Nicole Kidman *can't* do? She was very convincing as a chain-smoking Russian. And if her Russian dialog was dubbed, they did a great job on it. Very seamless.

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- dave
Avoid the meadow...

quote:

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After the last preview, the animated Miramax feature logo played, followed by America and Cinemark (both filthy), then into the feature (i.e. America & Cinemark were on the wrong side of the Miramax logo).

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