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Stepmom by Chris Columbus
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DVD Cover InformationActor: Ed Harris, Jena Malone, Julia Roberts, Liam Aiken, Susan Sarandon Director: Chris Columbus Brand: Sony Producer: Julia Roberts Producer: Chris Columbus Writer: Gigi Levangie Writer: Jessie Nelson Writer: Karen Leigh Hopkins Writer: Ronald Bass Writer: Steven Rogers DVD: Region Code 1 Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Full Screen Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 2.35:1 Running Time: 124 minutes DVD Release Date: 1999-04-27 Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested) Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Movie Reviews of StepmomMovie Review: Beautiful movie about two very different women Summary: 5 Stars
This movie is very good and very well-acted and very true to life and very beautiful and funny and warm and touching. It's about two very different women, Isabelle and Jackie who are the mothers to these two kids. Isabelle(played by Julia Roberts)is a very modern and fun and beautiful photographer who loves her life as Luke's girlfriend and she's very cool and has a fun style to her. She's the stepmom or will be once she marries the children's father. Luke's ex-wife Jackie is very warm and nice and passionate and kind and wise. She loves her children more then anything else, and is a good mother. The kids are Ben and Anna, played by Jena Malone and Liam Aiken. Anna is a 12-year-old girl who thinks Isabelle is cool once she starts to get to know her. She's still trying to recover from her parent's divorce and is very spunky and smart and has a maturity to her most kids her age lack. She doesn't like Julia's character at first, but starts to once Isabelle lets her wear lipstick and helps with her boyfriend woes and is kind of cool and acts like Anna's age since she's not that old herself. They bond, and form a friendship. She is very smart and mature. Ben is a cute little boy who loves magic and magician tricks and is funny. He likes Isabelle right way, because you see Jackie's dying of cancer and she has very little time left with her children and even though she's good parent Ben starts spending more time with Isabelle and likes her because his mother's sick. Both kids start to spend more time with Isabelle and she kind of becomes their mother once their mother has to enter chemo and go to the hospital for her treatment for cancer. Jackie is angry she doesn't have her kids anymore and feels like she lost them. She wishes she could spend more time with her children before she dies. She tells Isabelle that, or tries and doesn't have much respect for her since she thinks she acts like half a woman her age and doesn't set a good example of what she wants her children to be. Eventually both women sort of come to see the light and set aside their differences and stop fighting and start to have a netural respect for each other, especially as time goes by and Jackie only so much time left on this earth to spend with her preciocus children. THe ending is very not surprising and very touching. I loved this movie, it has a perfect mix of seriousness and humor and it's funny and also very serious and moving. It's such a good movie, Julia Roberts is fun and cool, Susan gives an amazing performance as Jackie and is such a good actress, the kids are sweet and not brats and the guy who plays Luke is just like his character. I love this movie, it's so good and such a great film. See it!
Summary of StepmomSTEPMOM - DVD Movie Though Stepmom was dismissed as a contender in the 1998 Oscar race, it's worth giving a second chance to this rather cogent, sharp-tongued look at second chances. Susan Sarandon's performance as a mom about to be replaced by her ex-husband's new girlfriend (played by Julia Roberts) has a lot of bite, and it's a shame the script opted to marginalize and trivialize her plight in its final reel. Initially, the rancor that passes between divorced mom Jackie (Sarandon) and trendy fashion photographer Isabel (Roberts) rings true, aided by the sincerity of Jackie's ex-husband Luke (Ed Harris) and the emotional plight of their children, who have the most to lose in their parents' divorce. As the drama makes clear, the kids are the real victims in the agony that ensues between old and new love. Director Chris Columbus, who is adept at showing familial chaos (he directed Mrs. Doubtfire and Home Alone) with a sanitized minimum of lingering emotional damage, actually manages to dig a trifle deeper than usual in exploring the jealousy and hurt that occur when the baton is passed between a birth mom and the younger wife who steps into her shoes. Stepmom fortunately manages to touch on that chord--showing how an ambitious woman might feel hampered by the responsibility of children just because she's fallen in love with their dad--as well as the haunting grief that it causes their birth mom. It's an issue that haunts millions of second wives everywhere, and while Roberts conveys the confusion of being taken for granted in the melee that follows, it's Sarandon who walks off with the film. She's relentless in her fury, and everyone else in the film--the generally excellent Harris included--is sideswiped. It's just a shame that Hollywood once again wimps out in the end, solving the problem by giving Sarandon a terminal illness. Instead of allowing Jackie and Isabel's relationship to unfold on something less than a high note, the movie has to quell its best thing with a false payoff because it doesn't know what to do with real life. --Paula Nechak
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