ThrillMessage There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Tymon Sutton The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Joseph Sylvers Great character study, carried by Philip Seymor Hoffman. A man's wife suddenly kills herself, and distraught he in turn begins a self destructive lifestyle of huffing gasoline. In order to explain why he's carrying gas around with him, he lies and says it's for remote controlled air planes. After a gas attendant finally calls him on it, he begins a bender/mental collapse induced mission to find a remote control plane competition. Slow paced, but rewarding, and sincere. Though bleak at times it's one of the most emotionally rich looks at grief, I've ever seen in a film. Or wanted to see, for that matter, because the subject disinterested me from the word go. Anway it's a great thing to be proved wrong sometimes.

dharmabride CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILAGE.Philip Seymour Hoffman is great, but the first act is too damn slow and there are story problems: Firstly, the mechanics and experience of huffing gas. No one I know knows what it's like and the movie doesn't tell us. Just seems like it makes everything blurry and eases his pain. One thing I do know is that it causes brain damage, and that leads to slurred speech and a swiss cheese memory. PSH shows us some of that, but only a little. But it wasn't clear to me that he'd never huffed gas before the time-frame of the movie and I spent the first half hour certain that his wife killing herself had something to do with his addiction to inhalants.Two other plot points are problematic: it was obvious that his mother-in-law was the one who stole his stuff (because thieves wouldn't steal all your lousy clothes and silverware and plates and chairs), but we never saw any kind of confrontation between the protagonist and the closest thing this movie has to his antagonist. The actors didn't even speak to each other, it was all left unsaid -- a deliberate non-climax. And finally, the fire. Pretty obvious: if you have a main character who has a close personal relationship with gasoline, sooner or later there's going to be a fire.PSH walks away down the middle of the highway at the end, having learned nothing whatsoever. Not even about his wife's death -- the mysterious macguffin letter isn't exactly banal, but it's cryptic and impersonal and doesn't tell him anything he needs to know. Not why she did it, and not how to live with what she did. It actually tells him to "bear it". I'd walk away too.So in the end, the hero has burnt down his house, quit one job and been let go from another, alienated the few friends and family members he has left, and probably is suffering from brain damage. Wherever it is he's going, it's not going to go well for him. Redemption, if it's in the cards at all, is many year and many stories in the future.In a way this reminds me of Last Days, and of course there's the obvious comparison to Leaving Las Vegas. But unlike the latter, this movie doesn't chart a clear course of deterioration. The hero simply becomes more and more unfocused, and while he does end up worse than when he started, somehow it's not the ultimate endpoint. The story isn't finished. We're just given a little slice of (hellish) life.There are some really unlikable supporting characters -- his boss, who hits on him even knowing how inappropriate it is. And his mother-in-law is a closed book. We know she misses her daughter, but her attempts to reach out to Wilson (PSH) are tentative and unfinished. It's the unfinished nature of these emotional gestures I find so annoying. And in one grand messed-up gesture she steals ALL his things so she can read the famous letter, and it's this loss that sends him into his tailspin at the end.Sure I've got Hollywood-honed reflexes for things like this, and yes it's true that in real life, people's gestures are unfocused, weak and incomplete. But I don't watch movies for Real Life. I want something better. Clearer. I suppose I could acquire the taste for the beats of indie films like this, but as Harry Dean Stanton said in Twister: "It seems to me a person can acquire a taste for just about anything. The question is, why would you want to?" I know I'm showing my middlebrow tastes by griping about it. But I also know these incomplete gestures are what kept the movie from reaching a broader audience.With better editing this could have been a much stronger movie. Speed up the first scenes, explain to us more fully how he gets fascinated with huffing gas -- the movie was so close and yet so far on this point -- the writer and director could have made us understand that huffing gas was (perhaps) a way for Wilson to be close to his wife, the way some people will cuddle a loved one's clothing when they're not there.And finally, when the house (inevitably) bursts into flames? Leave us right there. End the movie at the point where it becomes clear he's not going to be able to put this fire out, and it's going to destroy everything. Just fade to black. Love Liza is a movie full of unanswered questions, so let's leave this one unanswered: does he live or does he die? We don't need to know.BTW why was there even a match in the envelope in the first place? I mean, aside from serving the plot. The dead woman is another cipher. Was it intentional or an accident? Did it means something personal to them? Or did she want Wilson to burn their home down? WTF?

Al Rodbell I watched "Love Lisa" on IFC at home, after passing up actually seeing the recording from our TIVO for weeks. The brief description, something like, " A man sniffs gasoline after his wife commits suicide." just seemed too depressing. As we finally got into the movie, with extra appreciation of Hoffman's acting skills now that he has his Oscar, the first hour or so seemed to be going nowhere. It was looking like just another pretentious artsy production that happened to win the lottery of getting funded.But it was intriguing. We learned nothing about the relationship between Hoffman's character, Wilson, and his deceased wife. And then there is Kathy Bates as the wife's mother, whose character is curiously undefined. She seemed sympathetic but not connected to either survivor or daughter.Yes, this is an "artsy" film, but the question is, was something conveyed by the lack of convention, by not giving any information about the characters that we would normally need for understanding or for empathy? Wilson pain was only manifested in his need for release in a gasoline soaked rag that he inhaled deeply to numb the hurt. And he wanted to soar, like his model airplane that also need the fuel to come alive. The acuity of his pain was only evident at odd moments, like when his business associate indicated a romantic interest in him. His only response was the sharp anguish of being reminded of what he had with his wife, that was gone forever.And Kathy Bates' single line, as she yelled out the window to Wilson, in accusation and remorse, defined who she was instantly. "You had everything" First said about his belongings that she had removed, and then, with passion and pain, about the life he had with her daughter. "Love Lisa" is not "artsy" it is art. It conveyed a great truth, a single truth, through its chosen medium. Entertainment, not on your life! This movie hurts, because it was a tincture of the agony that this man felt as his wife took her own life. It is a hidden hurt, yet it was deep and immutable. He could run, he could dull it with petrochemicals, but he could not make it go away.We know nothing about Lisa, whether she had intractable depression, a fatal disease, or simply a doomed persona that reached it's inevitable climax at that moment. We do not know whether Wilson could have prevented her action. This narrow selective focus on one man which seemed so forced, was exactly what was needed to tell this story, this very true story of human suffering.

robinbirdjay If you are lucky enough to stumble upon this film as I did, your hooked before you know it. It is a movie that appeals to the voyeuristic nature of the human species. When watching it you almost feel like you rented a movie and someonemistakenly returned their home video instead of what you meant to rent. It is not a film that uses any of the usual methods to grab you. For instance sex, action or overt violence. Instead the appeal is in the reality of the story. You see immediately the pain Wilson feels and at no point question why he is going down the road he is. Of course all of this is due to Phillip Seymour Hoffman's incredible ability to be the character he is portraying. This story follows the slow descent into drug use, depression and despair by a man who recently and unexpectedly has lost the love of his life. A few other interesting characters are introduced, most importantly his mother-in-law played by the incredible Kathy Bates. There is a raw and very basic truth to this movie that anyone can see and empathise on the very least.