Alicia I love this movie so much

AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

big-gun Slums of Beverly Hills is one of those movies that can make you laugh and touch your heart within the same scene.The beautiful and talented Natasha Lyonne plays the part of Vivian who, with her brothers and her father (Alan Arkin), skip from one cheap apartment to another trying to stay within the Beverly Hills city limits. Murray (Arkin) likes the schools. Vivian has her own issues to deal with. She hates that they move so much, she hates that they're poor, she hates her boobs. But she likes Eliot (Kevin Corrigan), the pot dealer next door.As if all this isn't enough, enter Rita (Marisa Tomei), Vivian's promiscuous, drinking, pill popping cousin. Her father doesn't know what to do with her, so Murray offers to take her in, if her father will finance a bigger and nicer apartment for them. One disaster follows another as their family situation implodes. Carl Reiner and Rita Moreno have a cameo as Rita's parents.There is a moral to the story. Money doesn't buy happiness. We've all heard that one before. It proves true in this case, as Vivian and her amusingly dysfunctional family do have one thing her rich relatives do not. When all's said and done, they have each other.

Robert J. Maxwell Rich old Carl Reiner asks his poor widowed brother, old Alan Arkin, and his son and daughter to move into a house in Beverley Hills. The daughter, whose biography this more or less is, is the blond and somewhat goofy looking Natasha Lyonne. The deal is that rich Reiner will pay the bills, but poor Arkin's family will have the responsibility of seeing to it that rich Reiner's daughter, Marisa Tomei, who is fresh out of rehab begins nursing school.That's the set up. Poor but happy Arkin and family must care for screwed up Tomei, at Reiner's expense, in a Beverley Hills apartment in the mid-1970s.It's colorful, amusing, racy, sometimes touching, and constitutes a series of sketches with only a fragile framework to hold them together.But mostly it succeeds in what it's trying to do -- provide the audience with a diverting and unchallenging hour and a half. It's like watching one long Jewish joke about family rivalries and the pretensions of the rich.The performances help immeasurably because they're all so fine. I mean everyone, with the possible exception of two or three young boys who don't have much to do except act dumb. Natasha Lyonne is the central figure, not quite cute but nubile, and her expression is generally one of resigned disbelief. Nobody has ever been a better, more bourgeois straight man than Alan Arkin as her Dad. Jessica Walters as a wealthy widow who might consider marrying Arkin as a "companion" -- that is, chauffeur and major domo, is excellent in a supporting role. Even Rita Moreno, as rich Reiner's girl friend, has that toothy, disdainful Patrician smile down pat.Marisa Tomei does nearly perfectly by the role of the rambunctious, pregnant, ex doper. And she has a splendid figure and brandishes it with brio. (Whew.) But not to worry. Despite the jokes about tampons and menstruation and vibrators and "getting your cherry popped", there is only brief nudity, and body doubles are used -- lamentably.I figured it was the usual teen-aged nonsense about how hard it is to grow up -- the pain, the agony, the ontological Angst, nobody understands me -- but it's rather better than that. It has the charm of an old fairy tale.

zetes After falling in love with Tamara Jenkins' sophomore feature, The Savages, a short while back, I have finally caught up with her debut. It's pretty obviously a first film. Jenkins has created some memorable characters and some good situations, most certainly culled from real-life experiences. But the story arc is pretty weak. The film is at its best when concentrating on its protagonist, Viv, played by the wonderful Natasha Lyonne. She's a great character, the kind that reminds me of how few well developed female characters there are in movies. I also liked Marisa Tomei's character, too, for the same reason. The men are considerably less interesting, and there are almost too many of them. I've never been a fan of Alan Arkin, so it was hard to overcome that prejudice here. He's kind of a despicable character, and it was hard for me to sympathize with Viv's unconditional love for her father. It doesn't help that Jenkins fails to resolve the father character's major transgression in the last part of the film, instead just dismissing it. Jenkins also bombs most of her set-pieces, and a lot of the scenes she tries to end on laughs are duds. And the jaunty score really needed to be dropped. The movie is not nearly as cheerful as the music seems to think it is. Overall, I liked the movie. But I am impressed that Jenkins could create the perfection of The Savages after a sloppy debut and nine years off. That makes her sophomore feature even more impressive.

withxception Well, I didn't have a clue what this movie was about. Someone said I would like it, so I gave it a try. The opening scene is the Natasha Lyonne character getting fitted for a bra. I thought, huh. What on earth? A whole movie about getting breasts? And in some ways, it is. But, it's so much more than that.(And for the fellas, you do get to see both Marissa Tomei and Natasha Lyonne topless.) It's a story about a family where the mother is the one who left and the kids are actually staying with the father. In the case, the father doesn't necessarily seem all that equipped to handle them. They are an adult and three kids living in one room apartments and moving overnight before they can get kicked out. But, if you stick with the story, you'll start to see that maybe he's not such an inappropriate father, as he is just a human. Marissa Tomei is fantastic as the black sheep of the family.