Year:
2000
Studio:
Miramax Films
Movie:
3/5
DVD:
4/5
Bounce is a
romantic drama starring Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow, who I think
were still dating at the time of filming. It's the story of a selfish,
ego-centric man, Buddy Amaral (Affleck). An advertising executive, he
gives up his seat on a holiday flight to fellow traveler Greg Janello
(Tony Goldwyn). That flight down with no survivors, leaving Buddy an
emotional wreck that takes him a year to recover from.
So a year later Buddy decides that he needs to make sure that Greg's
wife and kids are doing ok. Without telling her his secret past, Buddy
meets Abby Janello (Paltrow) and while helping her out therer's this
mutual attraction. Things progress and Buddy can never seem to bring
himself to tell Abby the truth until finally she finds out. Then we
have the crisis point of the movie and with a couple of redeeming acts
Buddy at least gets Abby to agree to try it again by the movie's end.
Abby as a character seems more interesting than Buddy. She's kind of
neurotic with a good heart. Abby obviously misses Greg tremendously but
continually lies about the fact that he's dead. In fact, she lies all
the time, little white lies to cover up things. Contrast with Buddy and
his one big lie.
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I sort of
agree with Roger Ebert when he said that not showing Abby's
reaction to watching the video was a real cop-out. It would have been
stronger if that scene were there. But I don't think it really hurts
the movie because the audience knows what the scene would be like from
having seen it in other movies.
This is a two-disk DVD set with disk 1 having the movie plus a
commentary track provided by director Don Roos and producer Bobby
Cohen. It's an ok commentary, nothing exception though not particularly
bad.
What I liked: romance, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Affleck.
What I didn't like: Nothing really new here.
Addendum
Disk two contains lots of extra material. There are 47 minutes of
deleted scenes (with commentary), including the scene where Abby and
Mimi watch the video and two alternate ending scenes. A music video for
"Need to be Next to You", a 22-minute behind-the-scenes featurette,
another 20-minute sequence of production crew interviews conducted by
Affleck and Paltrow (mostly Paltrow), a 5-minute blooper reel, and
eight movie scenes with commentary by Roos, Affleck and Paltrow. All in
all the second disk is pretty good.
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