Spidersecu Don't Believe the Hype

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Nessieldwi Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

Glimmerubro It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

TonyMontana96 Danny DeVito's dark divorce comedy blends the right amount of laughs with quiet, powerful sequences that show glances of these two people still in love with one another. Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner are very good as the crazy and uncivilized Oliver Rose and Barbara Rose, but it's Danny DeVito who gives the best performance in the picture, playing Oliver's best friend 'Gavin', a likable, helpful and reliable man that favours neither side, DeVito's character tells the story too, keeping it detailed, interesting and even with its many themes that include romance, comedy and drama. The War of the Roses is not the happiest film to watch for those of you that are enjoying marriage, but nonetheless it's a very good picture with some fairly strong insight.

room102 I've seen this movie many times before, but not in a very long time. This is a black comedy about a couple, from the moment they meet, through the little stuff that make them start hate each other and up to a complete war that grows worse and worse.This movie is much darker than I remembered, but it's still very funny - and while it obviously fabricates and exaggerates certain situations, it actually shows how awful a divorce process can be, how two people who loved each other come to hate each other and how the process makes them hurt each other as much as possible. It may be fiction, but it's not very far from real life (in fact, there are WORSE divorce situations in real life).Beautiful cinematography by the great Stephen H. Burum (Brian De Palma's regular DP).

James Hitchcock "The War of the Roses" is a film told using that old literary device of the "framework technique". Gavin D'Amato, a divorce lawyer, is discussing case with a client. Realising that relationships between the man and his estranged wife have become very bitter, Gavin decides to tell him a cautionary tale based on the true story of his former partner Oliver Rose. The film then flashes back to Oliver's courtship of, and marriage to, his wife Barbara. Oliver is highly successful in his professional career and is promoted to a partner in his law firm. He, Barbara and their two children appear to be living the American dream in a luxurious house.Their marriage, however, is not faring so well, and Barbara shocks Oliver when she asks him for a divorce. Although he believes that the marriage can still be saved, he reluctantly agrees, but things start to get worse when the couple fall out over the financial arrangements, especially ownership of the house. Neither seems willing to give way on this point, and they begin to wage an ever-deepening war against one another, seeking to destroy first each other's most cherished possessions and then each other's reputations.The film stars Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner who had earlier acted together in "Romancing the Stone" and its sequel, "The Jewel of the Nile". In one respect Turner might have seemed miscast. The script implies that Oliver and Barbara are around the same age, whereas in reality Turner is ten years younger than Douglas and at 35 was really too young for the part. Barbara, after all, is supposed to have been married for around twenty years and to be the mother of two children in their late teens. This is, however, one piece of apparent miscasting which turned out to be absolutely right. Turner plays Barbara as a force of nature, a sort of deranged fury eaten up with hatred for her husband and absolutely determined to have what she sees as her rights, no matter what the cost. There is no rational reason for her dislike of Oliver; when he asks her why she wants a divorce all can reply is that she has a desire to "smash his face in". At the same time she is sexy enough to make us understand why, for all her spiteful antics, her husband still, in an odd way, is still in love with her- and nobody could do deranged but sexy like Turner as she was to prove in another, later black comedy, "Serial Mom" in which she plays another suburban housewife turned avenging fury. Douglas's Oliver is subtly different. Although he can be just as spiteful as Barbara, we get the sense that he is more sinned against than sinning, a man who has worked hard to provide as good a life as possible for his family only to have his love thrown back in his face by an ungrateful wife. Barbara announces her intention to divorce him when he has just come out of hospital, which seemed particularly cruel. Some of his tricks, such as his insistence in remaining in the house after the couple have split up, seem to be motivated partly by a desire for revenge but also partly by a desire to stay close to the person who has been at the centre of his life for so long. My one complaint would be that he seems too old in the early scenes when he is supposed to be a young student. DeVito is also good as Gavin, desperately caught in the middle of a battle between two people he considers friends. Although it has an ostensibly improving moral about the need for tolerance and mutual understanding in marriage and personal relationships, "The War of the Roses" is essentially a black comedy. It can be seen as a romantic comedy in reverse. Many rom-coms are based around the "Pride and Prejudice" story of how a couple start off by disliking one another and end up by falling in love; this film simply reverses the process. A comedy on this theme could have become very nasty and mean-spirited, but in the hands of Danny DeVito, who directed the film as well as playing Gavin, and of its two stars, it somehow manages to avoid this fate. It is one of the funniest unromantic comedies of the eighties. 8/10

nutolm A nice and partly funny movie, marriage and children, divorce and nasty settlement, a story who opens the way for marriage crisis of dimensions. Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas has played against each other before - like in "Romancing the stone" and the sequel "Jewel of the Nile", and it's hardly a coniciderence they came together for the third time, the couple made very chemistry on the big screen, everything seemed to fit them both.The most funny thing related to this movie, is that Danny De Vito - here with a great performance, also is the man in the director's chair, also had good parts in those movie I mention, and as far as I know, is a good friend of Douglas privately.Is it something we can learn from this plot? I chosen to let the question stand wide open, but it's not unimaginable that such bitterness and desperation in our real life have I read, and seen countless example of several divorces - but of course, here we got presented a drama like a black comedy, for that sake of the entertainment.Maybe most of the movie's situations stroke better those who already had been through their divorces or two, and I'm not sure I will recommend this movie to anybody, it could end up with bad estrangement for the theme - a partly entertaining story of a marriage on the wrong track, but a pretty good movie to watch.