ada the leading man is my tpye

Palaest recommended

Majorthebys Charming and brutal

Haven Kaycee It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

calvinnme ... and in the end they cook and eat each other, not the dog. That is the long and short of this film and would have made a good epitaph for both of them. Five years earlier, in 1984, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner had teamed up for the wonderful "Romancing the Stone". As for the sequel...we won't go there. Now they have aged a few years and are playing Oliver and Barbara Rose, a couple on the cusp of middle age. The film starts out with Danny DeVito's character, Gavin, an expensive DC divorce lawyer, describing to a client how he should be generous to the point of pain to the wife he is about to divorce. He tells him how the story of Oliver and Barbara Rose changed him from being a cutthroat attorney to what he is today.So the story starts out with their meeting as young people. You know, even from the beginning, the warning signs are usually there, and in Oliver's case, anybody who introduces himself as a genius who is going to be rich and famous someday is probably not going to care too much about his spouse's opinion, and you'd be right.Time passes. Oliver does become the wealthy attorney and the Roses buy the big house in the city. Barbara spends all of her time collecting antiques and keeping up the house. Once her two children get big enough to not really need her anymore, she decides to go into catering - she has become an excellent cook, plus she has cultivated many influential friends through the years in Washington. To celebrate the launching of her new career she buys a monster truck. Oliver belittles her efforts and asks how many hundreds of meals will she have to cater to pay for that truck? You can tell that this is the last of many straws. But it's not until Oliver thinks he has had a heart attack and Barbara feels relief rather than grief upon the news that she realizes the marriage is over.She tells him she wants a divorce. He refuses to believe she would ditch such a wonderful guy as himself. He gets Gavin to act as his attorney and finds out about an old law that allows people to stay in the house while the divorce is being processed. They snipe at each other in a hundred different ways that I'll let you watch and see for yourself.Ultimately, Barbara tells Oliver an untruth, one so horrifying that for the first time Oliver becomes violent. Oliver barricades them both inside the house and they spend the night in actual combat. I'm not so sure he wants to kill her so much as he wants to capture her, because ultimately he wants to keep her. But Barbara's actions leave no doubt she is trying to kill him, because ultimately she wants to be rid of him. In the end they die in the most ironic way possible. With their dying breath he clutches her hand in his, she shoves it away.Basically this is an exaggeration in action but not attitude of your typical divorce story involving any two people who spent decades together and were truly in love once. You can't do what these two people did to each other and not have been madly in love at one time. As they say, the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.Let me say something about the book this film was based upon - Danny DeVito REALLY wanted Barbara to cook that dog. However, people convinced him that Barbara would have lost all sympathy if she had intentionally killed an innocent dog and fed him to her husband as pate. She would have come across as mean not insane. I know that his advisors were correct.One thing not shown, maybe just to keep the audience curious, was - who did Gavin marry? We hear him talking lovingly to his wife at the end of the film, saying he'll be home soon. Remember, Gavin was a player and one that only liked the leggiest of blondes prior to the death of the Roses. I'll tell you who that was - it was Susan, the Roses' live in housekeeper who was going to college part time, was very sweet and intelligent, but seemed to be nearing 40 and was not physically attractive in the conventional sense at all. I think the film left that part a mystery just so you could fill in the blanks for yourself, plus it gives you something extra to talk about after the film.I highly recommend this one.

SnoopyStyle Gavin D'Amato (Danny DeVito) is an expert divorce attorney as he recounts the case that drove him to restart smoking. Oliver Rose (Michael Douglas) met Barbara (Kathleen Turner) as they battle over an antique Japanese carving in the rainy last day of the season in Nantucket. They get together that day. They get married. They have a couple of kids. He becomes a successful lawyer. She gets her dream house. However they slowly drift apart. Little irritants creep into their relationship. He works too much. She gets tired of her empty life. She's angry at him and he doesn't know why. Their fairy tale marriage deteriorates into an acrimonious divorce. Through a loophole, he forces his way back into the house.This is a dark comedy walking a fine line. I'm not sure if it doesn't stray over the line. It is so dark at times that it becomes uncomfortably unfunny. Then it snaps back with big laughs once in awhile. Danny DeVito is pushing hard visually to create something interesting and dark. The second half of the movie is where the couple starts on a course of tit for tat. It hits some dark comedic tones. The two angry combatants are so serious that it's hard to laugh at them. It is really better to see this as a dark cautionary tale rather than a funny comedy.

tieman64 "My fee is $450 an hour, and when a man who makes $450 wants to tell you something for free, you should listen." So says Gavin D'Amato, played by Danny DeVito, a high priced lawyer who kicks off "War of the Roses" by offering a cautionary tale to a man considering divorce. This cautionary tale, of course, is the film we're about to watch. As he is also the director of "War of the Roses", DeVito functions as both the narrator inside and outside of the film.D'Amato's tale is about acquisitions, possessions and the power of money, so the lawyer's early mentioning of cash is significant. In offering his advice for free, however, D'Amato sets himself up as being morally apart from the world he is about to describe. He is a voice of reason, or so he would like us to think.D'Amato's tale? Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas play The Roses, a wealthy couple who first meet at an auction (this meeting place is fitting; the duo battle over objects from the onset). With marriage then comes riches, happiness, big houses, and many garish possessions, the film painting a now familiar Utopian image of late 1980s Reganism. When the passion of romance fades, however, the couple instigate a bitter, violent divorce. From here on, the film becomes a dark comedy, a demented version of "Citizen Kane", each self-obsessed partner blaming the other for their psychoses, and each becoming maddeningly preoccupied with acquisitions, possessions, inventories, objects and artifacts, to the complete exclusion of everything else. As the marriage crumbles, the couple become so obsessed with surfaces (the film takes place at "Christmas", man's festive ode to consumerism) that they conduct a literal, and quite violent, war in their own opulent mansion. Set in Washington DC (military-looking helicopters constantly fly over apocalyptic, DC skylines), the militaristic tone of the movie has obvious, larger ramifications. The capital of the United States is capital. Nothing else matters. Cue much violence and possessiveness, culminating, fittingly, in DeVito directing a biopic of trade unionist Jimmy Hoffa three years later.It's a very good film, handsomely directed by DeVito, whose love for Hitchcock is apparent throughout. Douglas and Turner also do well, chewing scenery left, right and centre. Both have always been drawn to dark roles. Here they satirise their romantic unions in the "Romancing the Stone" movies, in which their both starred, and also a number of their previous films, in which Douglas is typically a yuppie careerist, a greedy scoundrel, a man who's consumed by dangerous women and exhibits drives toward power and success through money, while Turner is typically a femme-fatalle or marginalised woman driven to further exclusion. In "War of the Roses" the duo both play toward these now familiar roles, whilst also laying bare the crassness behind them. The shock of the movie is not that the Rose's rosy marriage fails, or even that the couple are willing to kill to keep their possessions, but ultimately that their marriage was always itself all about acquisition.The film then ends with a dying Douglas putting his hand on a dying Turner. We perceive this as an act of affection, but she clearly views it as an act of possession. Her dying act is to push him away, her body passing unclaimed.7.9/10 – Good but too long. For a more intellectual take on this material, see Olivier Assayas' "Summer Hours". Worth two viewings.

Red-Barracuda A middle-aged affluent couple hit marital problems and start fighting over the ownership of their mansion. This leads to increasing levels of antagonism and borderline sociopathic behaviour.The War of the Roses is very 80's, very loud and kind of fun. If you want a subtle study of marital breakdown then seek it somewhere else because this most certainly is not it. Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner play the warring couple. We follow their story from their first meeting, through the happy early days to the outright marital war that constitutes the end of their relationship. Douglas and Turner are basically let loose on this film to chew the scenery and go cartoonishly over-the-top. And for the most part it's a great deal of fun seeing them do this, as both are very capable actors who can play mildly deranged very convincingly. I felt, however, that the film lost a bit of steam in its final section. As the pair went increasingly berserk in their antics, the film lost me a bit. Having said that, it is a funny film at times and it's quite a bit of fun watching both principal actors going hell for leather. It's probably a film that people going through a divorce can relate to best. It most probably will give them a few ideas.