The Anniversary Party
by Alan Cumming
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Alan Cumming, Jane Adams (II), Jennifer Beals, Mina Badie, Phoebe CatesDirector: Alan Cumming
Brand: Warner Brothers
Primary Contributor: Alan Cumming
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Unknown
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 115 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-01-15
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: New Line Home Video
Movie Reviews of The Anniversary Party
Movie Review: The Story of Sally & Joe (and One Really Good Party!)
Summary: 5 Stars
"The Anniversary Party" is one of those small, enjoyable, indie films, that you can watch over and over again and with each repeated viewing find new details, plot points and lines of witty dialogue, that come to the viewer's attention.
In this comedy/drama, we meet Joe (Alan Cumming) and Sally (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who are celebrating their sixth wedding anniversary with a party held in their beautiful, modern, LA home. At first, they seem like the perfect celebrity couple. Sally is a famous Hollywood actress with a distinguished career. Joe is a renown author, who has just gotten the studio greenlight to direct his first movie, based on one of his novels.
The party begins and little by little, we start to meet the guests, who are mostly in the arts or the Hollywood film industry. Everyone has their own professional and personal connections to Sally and Joe, that are slowly revealed. Like most friends and acquaintances, they bring to the party, their own quirky personalities, neuroses and agendas. As the evening gets going, liquor starts flowing easily and ectasy is passed around. This leads to folks opening up and revelations being made about the hosts. We begin to find out, that this 'picture perfect' Hollywood couple has more than their share of marital problems. The couple has recently spent time apart. There have been past problems with both infidelity and drugs. While the celebration of their wedding anniversary was suppose to be a new begining for the couple, it really just serves as a catalyst to bring their problems to the forefront and reveal just how much trouble the relationship truely is in.
This is one of those small movies, where just everything comes together. The film was written and directed by actors, Alan Cummings and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Its' conversational, witty dialogue, keeps you interested and wanting more. The film gives you a real 'fly on the wall' feeling of attending an intimate Hollywood party in a beautiful, LA home.
In addition, the film has a wonderful, ensemble cast, which includes Kevin Kline, Phoebe Cates, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Beals, Parker Posey, John C. Reilly and Jane Adams. These actors have created a really interesting variety of characters, who can be both likable or not. With an interesting cast of character actors such as this, how can you not want to hang around at the party and hope, that it lasts just a little bit longer? Highly recommended!
Summary of The Anniversary Party
Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 05/10/2005 Run time: 95 minutes Rating: RIt's easy to be skeptical when a couple of well-connected actors throw a script together, start shooting their fabulous friends with digital cameras, and call it a movie. But Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming, who bonded in Cabaret on Broadway, have crafted a rough little gem in The Anniversary Party. Influenced by Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Player, it's a devastating portrait of a fragile marriage and a perceptive look at life in Hollywood. The characters are based--to an eerie degree--on their Hollywood counterparts: Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates are a Shakespeare-quoting actor and his retired actress wife; Gwyneth Paltrow is a rising young starlet; etc. Leigh is an actress on the way down, and Cumming, a best-selling author and up-and-coming director, is the sexually ambiguous husband with whom she has recently reconciled. The titular party is to celebrate their sixth anniversary, and revelations about the characters accumulate as the evening progresses from a tense session of charades to an ecstasy-pill-fueled blowout by the pool. The screenplay combines brittle humor with melodrama and consists of more talk than action (as in the Dogme films that inspired it), but the proceedings are rarely less than compelling even if the characters, for the most part, aren't exactly the most likable bunch. As a result, Jennifer Beals ends up stealing the show from the bigger names in the cast simply by emerging as the most genuinely human character--the one who actually showed up to honor her friends' commitment rather than to advance her career. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
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