Rijndri Load of rubbish!!

Spoonatects Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

Stephanie There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

SnoopyStyle Ruth Stoops (Laura Dern) is paint-huffing homeless white trash. She has four kids but doesn't have custody of any of them. She goes to her brother to ask for money and he offers $15. She passes out in public and gets arrested. She's pregnant again. The angry judge overcharges her and she's pressured to get an abortion. In jail, she is befriended by Diane Siegler (Swoosie Kurtz) and her team of religious pro-life protesters. Norm (Kurtwood Smith) and Gail Stoney (Mary Kay Place) bail them out and take Ruth into their home. The Stoneys have two kids, rebellious Cheryl (Alicia Witt) and Matt. They take Ruth to a fake clinic to talk her out of the abortion and make her a media case for their group "The Baby Savers". Ruth struggles with her addition and her aversion for notoriety. Diane is actually a pro-choice spy and helps her get away from the Stoneys. Diane calls in Harlan (M.C. Gainey), her lesbian partner Rachel (Kelly Preston), and other pro-choice activists. Her abortion becomes a national issue, and the two sides bring their national leaders Jessica Weiss (Tippi Hedren) and Blaine Gibbons (Burt Reynolds).Alexander Payne tackles this divisive issue with humor. It skewers both side although the pro-lifers get the greater ridicule. The tricky subject matter is tough to get right and the humor is hard to calibrate. I don't think this is funny for everybody. Laura Dern delivers a complicated and endearing character. The level of difficulty is very high and Payne navigates it with great skills.

essence-71588 There are 49 reviews and no one mentioned the ending credits? Maybe nobody waits for them to roll. The first 1/2 has typical end of the movie music. Then there is the loud sound of a cassette turning over. The cassette she was playing earlier about how to make money plays with lots of pseudo advanced theories about investing money from a small nest egg. Then the tape jams and breaks and the movie ends. Too funny. My Dad picked this movie. Reading the short description given of a comedy about both sides of the abortion debate I was expecting the worst. However it is a dark comedy that pulls off its subject quite well, making fun of everyone. That is rare for a movie made in the last 10 years. A movie such as this works best when the main characters don't come off too stereotypically. The movie only partly succeeds with this. This type of movie is so uncommon nowadays though that I give it a 9.

punishmentpark Alexander Payne's debut feature film, and it's right on the money. Big kudos to the extraordinary performance of the wonderful Laura Dern, which really lifts 'Citizen Ruth' to a higher plan; how she puts both humor and drama into the role of an often deliriously haphazard, but also very headstrong junkie is pure craftsmanship.There are plenty of other actors that make great contributions as well, such as Kurtwood Smith and M.C. Gainey, while other roles are mostly pretty decent to simply adequate. The other main character (beside Dern) in this film is actually really the simple, but no less brilliant baring of a thorny issue, wherein two parties - pro and con - are ruthlessly portrayed. It's a bold choice to choose such an approach, but with the clever way of building up the plot and keeping drama and humor tightly tugging at both ends of it, Payne makes a truly clean getaway. Kudos (again, see my recent review for 'Election')!And finally, it's worth mentioning that the Nebraska settings, the clothing, and the overall (mostly bleak) look of the film really put in an extra ingredient to make this so much more true to life than your average movie. And watch out for those weird little shots, like the one where Laura Dern is checking out her leg in the bathtub, each time with the other eye closed. Cinematographic details of pure beauty!

jzappa Pitiful, bedraggled Ruth is a forlorn specimen of hopelessness with more than a dozen arrests for illegal inhalation. She has just been kicked out by her one-night boyfriend and turned away by her fed-up brother-in-law. The arresting cops already know her name. Now she's told she is pregnant. "You've been found to be an unfit mother four times!" a flabbergasted judge tells her. "Uh-uh," Ruth says. "Two times." The judge charges her with "felony criminal endangerment of a fetus," though submits in candor to drop the charges if she'll have an abortion. The displaced good intentions there are nothing compared to the ideological thicket that Ruth wanders into after her case becomes a national battleground for pro- and anti-abortion groups.Citizen Ruth, the feature debut of definitive contemporary film wit Alexander Payne, a filmmaker of rare intelligence who's on the short list of American directors with final cut rights for their films, is a satire with the reckless courage to take on both sides in the abortion debate. There are no positive characters in the film, certainly not Ruth, whose preferred state is oblivion, and who perks up only when both sides start making cash offers. Whereas almost every film has a market in mind, here is a movie with a little something to offend anyone who has a strong opinion on abortion.Who's left to market this movie to? Perhaps those diminishing figures who have a high regard for movies with audacity and sharpness, and do not demand to be gratified and bolstered by the characters on the screen. Some may find it too delineative to compensate more than a single viewing, but nevertheless a stimulating one-time wonder. Others see more ironic fine points upon multiple viewings. This makes it all the more valuable because what satire must do in order to work is take effective shots at both sides of whatever issue it holds to censure.The movie is an arcade of finely honed satiric sketches. Thrown into jail, Ruth finds herself sharing the same cell with hymn-singing "Baby Savers" who have been jailed after a protest at an abortion clinic. She is promptly taken under the wings of Kurtwood Smith and Mary Kay Place, who bring her home to an innocent milieu, innocent, i.e., until she finds their son's airplane glue. Gail oscillates between worship of life and acid disputes with her teenage daughter, who sooner or later helps Ruth slip away to a party.One of the Baby Savers is Swoozie Kurtz, who uncovers herself as a mole for the pro-choice side, and whisks Ruth off to the wilderness retreat she shares with her lesbian lover, Rachel, who sings to the moon. They organize for Ruth to have an abortion, however already the Baby Savers have issued a national alert, the network crews are camped out in the parking lot, and the national leaders for both sides have flown into Tulsa to make their stands.Shot in Nebraska just like Payne's exceedingly brilliant subsequent films Election and About Schmidt, Payne has a good eye for the character qualities of fanatics with the compulsion to control other people's lives. The leader of the pro-choice side, played by Tippi Hedren, is rendered as so hip and shrewd that you know it's a disguise for indescribable skeletons in the closet. And the leader of the pro-lifers is played by Burt Reynolds as a sloganeering fraud who glorifies the "American family values" crap while retaining a boy toy on his payroll.There is nerve in the determination to make Ruth an unredeemed dope-head whose sole impulse is to go for the cash. Though unjustifiably careless and ignorant as Ruth is, she becomes extremely funny via Payne's fitting of her into such incongruous surroundings as much as Laura Dern's hysterical performance. Attesting herself as a superb physical comedian, the in-shape and gangly Dern lashes and yells her way through the catastrophe that explodes over her quandary. And yet with momentous satirical elegance, this definitive sleeper watches how both sides exploit this oblivious nonentity's soul, or lack thereof, in a variety of endeavors to forcibly convey their stance to the American public. I have misgivings that the two sides in the debate would in reality undertake a bidding war, but that's what satire is for: To take reality and broaden it into farce.The movie sheds light on the ways in which mainstream films condition us to count on formula endings. Most movies are made with the credence that no one in the audience can be counted on to think about more than one concept at a time, at the very most. I'm happily bowled over when it arises that there will be no "good side" and "bad side" in the mêlée over Ruth, and astonished when it seems that the movie will not turn up securely with a resolution to satisfy everyone. Some states of affairs, Payne appear to be contending, just cannot be reconciled to everyone's liking. Perhaps, for some viewers, that will make this not a comedy at all.