Review - Hanging Up

There's a certain art to the chick flick. Most people write off the films aimed at the female audience as being patched together and not well thought out. However, that's the way I like to think of teen movies, rather than chick flicks. Nearly all teen movies are a mess, just a pretty face or two with nothing behind it. Some chick flicks are like that, but certainly not all.

Hanging Up is a chick flick in every sense of the term- it's a tearjerker with several big name stars (Walter Matthau, Meg Ryan, and Diane Keaton). There's the obligatory adolescent son, Christmas tale, hospital scene, and death. At first sight it doesn't seem like anything special, and I'll be frank with you. Hanging Up isn't anything special. The story is pretty lame when it comes down to it, there's nothing particularly innovative about the camera work, the characters tend to be stereotypical and shallow, and the flashback technique is used one too many times. At first glance, it's a pretty bad movie.

And yet, deep down, if you let all that go, there's something to like about Hanging Up. Diane Keaton isn't all that cool to me- she's just the same old cranky bitch in every role she plays, including in real life. Meg Ryan, though, is really quite sweet, and Lisa Kudrow is amazing. Lisa never ceases to blow me away. She's more than she makes herself out to be, and if she got less roles like in Hanging Up and Analyze This and more roles like in Clockwatchers and The Opposite of Sex, people would just love her to death. If she could spend her downtime from Friends making quality pictures, she'd soon be just as popular as her co-stars in Hanging Up.

Quite frankly, if Lisa and Meg weren't in this movie, chances are I would have hated it. But they bring a depth and life to even the most shallow of roles, and I can't bring myself to knock that.

Grade - C

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