Matcollis This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

ConDeuce The movie version of Fay Wheldon's novel "The Life and Loves of a She- Devil" for the most part misses its marks. You would think a movie with this cast and great source material would be a lot better than it is but it's not. Though a film's failure cannot be blamed on just one thing, for this film, the lion's share belongs to the director, Susan Seidelman. Her direction is flat and unimaginative. She shot "She Devil" like it was a TV movie. It certainly looks like it. There's no spark or liveliness to it. It's point and shoot direction. This is acceptable when the actors and the material are solid but here they are not. As good as Roseanne Barr (or Arnold or whatever last name she was or wasn't using at the time) was on her TV show, here she's as flat as Seidelman's direction and since she's the center of the film, it nearly kills it. I think our sympathies were supposed to rest firmly with Roseanne's character Ruth but since she is presented so negatively, we cannot understand why her husband (or anyone) would have been attracted to her in the first place. She comes across as gross and incompetent. There's nothing at stake when she seeks revenge on Bob for leaving her because neither character feels worth the time.The whole movie would have been forgotten if it had not been for one thing: the unbelievable, incredible, tour-de-force comic performance of Meryl Streep. Every single scene she is in is a comic whopper. When she is on screen, the whole movie suddenly jolts to life. Streep's acting skills often rely on capturing the smallest of nuances and in "She Devil" she nails them perfectly. Her Mary Fisher is a woman addicted to the impossible dream of perfect romance. Every word out of her mouth is whispery affirmation of it. She is so good that we end up rooting for her and worse, feeling sorry for her. Streep's best scene (and they are all good) comes about midway when Bob (now cheating on her) comes home late. Streep, on all fours, wags her fanny as she exclaims she's an artist. Brilliant.

thesar-2 Believe it: She-Devil was my first introduction to…Meryl Streep. And say what you will about this movie, I really liked her in this.She isn't just an artist. She is thee artist in Hollywood. From this viewing or many, MANY, more when I was a child, she appears to have taken this role very seriously. Much like when I watched Megan Mullally perform live as Karen Walker at a taping of Will & Grace. Both Karen, and Streep's Mary Fisher are silly roles, and yet they're treated professionally.I appreciate that. And the movie.Now, far from perfect – and I'm not even speaking of the terrible FX (SEE: the house blow up and how Roseanne Barr is nowhere near that,) it's a fun watch. It's fun that Barr's Ruth is not Barr's normal role, like in her – at the time, future – role on her hit TV show. I liked how she had a plan of revenge, or more accurately justice, and didn't have to stoop to lowbrow "humor" as Melissa McCarthy has to do today. In fact, I would back this Ruth over any of McCarthy's ladies I've seen on screen.I digress. Housewife Ruth's husband cheats on her with famed romance novelist, Mary and she devotes her time to tearing down the things that he states mean the most to him.That's it, for the premise, at least. There are a lot of funny moments, good secondary characters, and Maria Pitillo, who I recently reviewed in 1998's Godzilla, and oddly dropped off the Hollywood map 5 years ago. Anyways, I liked how it wasn't straight forward for Ruth. She grew as a person and had to continually improvise and adapt for her plan to work.And Streep's Mary, was a fun watch, especially when you can see she's not the dumb blonde she mostly portrays. Note: the glasses push-up.Sure, it's predictable and some scenes are pretty far-fetched, but it was fun when I was growing up with this as it is today. I liked the soundtrack, some of the lines and the relationships Ruth makes during her journey. And I definitely understand more of what they were saying now, than I did as a kid. Totally recommended.

T Y This movie takes some well-deserved licks. I'm sympathetic to the theme (and deriving comedy from it) but this is just a misfire. For starters in answer to the question everyone was asking when this came out.. No Meryl Streep cannot do comedy. I can't imagine she's ever told a joke.Part of her problem is that as a self-impressed diva, she can't bear to fit herself into the scale of a movie. She's too freaking needy for that. Her self-conscious technique continually takes you out of the world of her movies, and standing amidst the ruins, all that's left for dazed viewers is to fawn appreciatively over her "ability." Apparently this trick got old for her too, and in an effort to develop some range, she began to choose absurdly inappropriate material that only further proved she had no versatility; this, Death Becomes Her, The River Wild. Can she do comedy? No, but she can't do adventure either.On the Actors studio when James Lipton asked what her least favorite word was, Streep sneered "edgy!" Perhaps this is because in her whole career she has only mastered "earnest." She couldn't do edgy if she was holding Lee Strasberg at gunpoint. She's too cerebral. She botches everything but drama.In an effort to say something nice about her, she was good in both Fred Schepisi films twenty years ago; Plenty and A Cry in the Dark.

cen19 This movie was made early on in Roseanne's TV career. The movie character of "Ruth" is not far off from her TV character, i.e. overweight, frumpy, but the movie has a far different plot from her cohesive, despite dysfunctional TV family. In the movie version, she is a doting yet overwhelmed housewife, devoted to her husband, until her cheats on her and subsequently leave her and the kids for a more promising life with a romance novelist.I think this movie has been given a bum-rap by critics. Roseanne is funny, the supporting cast is good, and Meryl Streep is her usual excellent self.This movie is a good one for a rainy day. Highly watchable, hard to fault. Those that expect perfection from any movie with a plot such as this are overreaching.