What happens in your life stays in your life
Added 3/24/2009
This is a very solid "little" film in which Ashley Judd and Luke Perry play Pam and Chris, two very outwardly normal looking people.
But Pam is very much a borderline personality and bipolar to boot. Chris is a young cop who is willing to sacrifice everything due to his codependency with Pam. While Chris is at work, Pam drugs and drinks and plays with Chris' gun collection in her panties, and cuts herself. She can't deal with Chris' normal family and runs away from them whenever she's forced to be social.
Chris is willing to do anything---ANYTHING---to help Pam, and so he ends up with a mountain of debt, no friends, and no job. In desperation, he turns to robbing banks. When Pam finds out, she wants to play too, and that's literally how she sees it---as a game. All they really both want is a house with a white picket fence and the requisite middle-class toys, a normal life, but there's nothing "normal" to build on.
NORMAL LIFE questions modern American values and it questions the viewer. What do you want? How badly do you want it? What are you willing to do to get it? Will you sacrifice?
1 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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move over Bonnie and Clyde
Added 3/19/2009
This movie has the force of a borderline personality meeting up with the guy who wants to keep her happy. The personality study is itself the best script.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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sexiest moustache ever.
Added 9/9/2007
this movie was the most touching and brilliant portrayal of a thick moustache that i have ever seen. It really touched me on a very deep and emotional level. i cant get the vision of luke perry's moustache out of my head and its something i never want to forget about. That moustache is this sexiest thing i have ever seen and the biggest turn on. Throughout the movie you grow more and more fond of how beautiful that hairy thing above his lip truly is. The moustache takes on a life of its own and really the director could have written a whole movie all about the moustache and nothing more...im really looking foraward to seeing if there will be a sequal focused only on the life of luke perry's brilliant moustache.
2 out of 7 people found this helpful.
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dynamite story, hitting viewers not unlike a hammer hits a nail on the head
Added 1/7/2007
Perhaps, in NORMAL LIFE, director John McNaughton never
realized his luck in combining the right timing,
assembling the right actors and actresses and the right
story, all wrapped into one movie, considering his other
boring one, Lansky, that was a sleeper, for example.
NORMAL LIFE is quite skeletal in its complexity (or in
other words, is not unnecessarily convoluted), telling a
dynamite story, hitting viewers not unlike a hammer hits a
nail on the head, such is the shock of seeing the
progression of a upstanding, law-abiding police officer
mutate into a hidious, stickup artist, on the word of a
hot, crazed, libido-filled, drugged, delinquent young
chick, played incredibly well by Ashley Judd, known to not
shy away from controversial, shocking and out-of-the-norm
roles.
A Christian friend of mine, having seen this movie,
admitted having cried from having seen it, in dispair of
the damage borne by the man, in an attempt to preserve
that monogamous relationship with Judd, satisfying her
many wants and needs, to the point of sacrificing his own
line of work, and putting his life on the line in criminal
enterprises for profit. Other people loved this movie,
from its originality, all praised Judd's natural feel in
playing the role that she did, and the maturity of Luke
Perry, who very well conveyed to the audience the anguish
and emotional torture endured from this wild ride of
a relationship.
Of course, NORMAL LIFE's ending, condemns the entire
behavior, as it obviously had to, considering the movie is
taken from a real life story, from almost 40 years ago,
in USA.
4 out of 4 people found this helpful.
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Outstanding, if very disturbing, film, but perhaps not everyone's cup of tea
Added 6/26/2006
A week ago I had never heard of this film and stumbled upon it on the Amazon website. I bought it on a whim and was amazed, I found this to be an absolutely oustanding film. The acting performance by Ashley Judd was unbelievable, I never considered her a serious actress until I saw this. She played the role of a `distressed woman' as well as Isabelle Huppert could have done, this was a performance worthy of the finest French actresses, not some lame Hollywood starlet. I can't believe I never heard of this film before, and I'm in stunned amazement that Judd could play this role so well. This is a story about a beautiful manic-depressive woman (Judd) who meets a straightlaced cop (Luke Perry) and they fall in love. Well, Perry's character falls madly in love with Judd's, and in her lucid moments, these feeling are reciprocated. If there is a better, more realistic film about mental illness, obsession, and manic-depression, I don't know what it is. We follow the ups and downs of the characters as they meet, get married, and begin their life together. They begin to have financial trouble due to Judd's obsessive spending, and Luke Perry's character resorts to robbing banks to recover their finances. This is like watching the build up to a train wreck; you know it isn't going to end well. There are some scenes in this film that are very disturbing (like the scene in which Judd shows up to her father-in-law's funeral wearing rollerblades - ouch), and this film won't appeal to everyone's tastes. If you like Huppert (particularly in films like La Ceremonie and other Chabrol films, or Coup de Torchon), you are certainly going to like this. Luke Perry also did a surprisingly good job in this film, although his role was much less demanding than AJ's. A great film, but this will not be everyone's cup of tea, so you should read the reviews and plot summaries carefully before purchasing.
7 out of 8 people found this helpful.
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What happens in your life stays in your life
Added 3/24/2009
This is a very solid "little" film in which Ashley Judd and Luke Perry play Pam and Chris, two very outwardly normal looking people.
But Pam is very much a borderline personality and bipolar to boot. Chris is a young cop who is willing to sacrifice everything due to his codependency with Pam. While Chris is at work, Pam drugs and drinks and plays with Chris' gun collection in her panties, and cuts herself. She can't deal with Chris' normal family and runs away from them whenever she's forced to be social.
Chris is willing to do anything---ANYTHING---to help Pam, and so he ends up with a mountain of debt, no friends, and no job. In desperation, he turns to robbing banks. When Pam finds out, she wants to play too, and that's literally how she sees it---as a game. All they really both want is a house with a white picket fence and the requisite middle-class toys, a normal life, but there's nothing "normal" to build on.
NORMAL LIFE questions modern American values and it questions the viewer. What do you want? How badly do you want it? What are you willing to do to get it? Will you sacrifice?
1 out of 1 people found this helpful.
|
move over Bonnie and Clyde
Added 3/19/2009
This movie has the force of a borderline personality meeting up with the guy who wants to keep her happy. The personality study is itself the best script.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
sexiest moustache ever.
Added 9/9/2007
this movie was the most touching and brilliant portrayal of a thick moustache that i have ever seen. It really touched me on a very deep and emotional level. i cant get the vision of luke perry's moustache out of my head and its something i never want to forget about. That moustache is this sexiest thing i have ever seen and the biggest turn on. Throughout the movie you grow more and more fond of how beautiful that hairy thing above his lip truly is. The moustache takes on a life of its own and really the director could have written a whole movie all about the moustache and nothing more...im really looking foraward to seeing if there will be a sequal focused only on the life of luke perry's brilliant moustache.
2 out of 7 people found this helpful.
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