Before Sunset

[ilovemovies]

This movie opens on Friday so I'm surprised nobody has made one for this movie yet. Anyway, I didn't love Before Sunrise like some people did but I did like it alot and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it and the trailer for this is great so I am definately looking forward to this.

[Professor Steve]

I remember seeing this long ago and thinking it was a cutesy chick flick, but it was decent. Surprisingly, this sequel is reaching some heights at rotten tomato - 100% approval so far with 21 reviews...

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/BeforeSunset-1133662/

[Fisting Ackbar]

I'm planning on checking out BEFORE SUNRISE soon, my appreciation of that movie will determine whether I see this or not.

[Scarface98.9]

I haven't seen Before Sunrise, but I will see the sequel out of curiousity

[sharkstank]

probably on dvd, but i want to see sunrise first

WWWWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[Moviefan1234]

Before Sunrise was good and this looks the same. I'm looking forward to it.

Quick question: How wide is Warner Brothers Independent going to be releasing their movies?

[Lynn7]

I liked Before Sunrise as a rental and I will probably enjoy this movie as a rental too.

I heard Hawke is starring ina remake of Assault on Precinct 13 which was a great (really suspenseful) movie

[Paterfamilias]

I'm looking forward to this one. I loved Before Sunrise. Hopefully they cancapture the same magic here.

[MartinGPB]

saw this tonight in NYC (along with De-Lovely and THe Clearing)--- An absolutely beautiful film-- currently my number 2 of the year (After Eternal Sunshine)-- so true, so relatable, and far exceeds the original

[Raena]

This is a very good movie, seamless in its dialogue and movement and feels like real time. I actually saw BEFORE SUNRISE about three days before it hit the theaters back in 94 or 95 when it came out. So I felt the nine years while watching BEFORE SUNSET.

I don't know why, but while watching BEFORE SUNSET I couldn't help but think about the movie SERENDIPITY because here we have another couple played by Jon Cusack and Kate Beckinsale (spellings anyone?)who are also more than likely soulmates but spent about a decade apart from each other.

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are both fantastic and the wonderful chemistry is still there and has developed even more making me still really want this pair to be a real honest to God couple.

Folks who adore BEFORE SUNRISE will be more than pleased with BEFORE SUNSET. In some ways its even more satisfying than the original.

[TheGodSon]

I just checked out the original, Before Sunrise and I loved it so I will definitely be checking Before Sunset. The original just felt so natural and simple and that's why I loved it. Hopefully this one will be the same.

[flowrchild]

An interesting read from Nypress.com.
I still want to see the movie, regardless of the cynical review.

Here in the middle of the most tumultuous movie year in years, you have to wonder: Why do people go to the movies? With the exception of Eternal Sunshine and The Passion of the Christ, the year's best films so far have rarely stayed around to offer nourishment. Most of them quietly vanish from the scene, their influence an unconsummated promise. Big hits like The Passion and Fahrenheit 9/11 provide distinctive answers to Why? But their success is only the aftershock of media chatter that rocked film culture without improving it. Moviegoers were driven by those critics prejudiced against Mel Gibson and those biased toward Michael Moore; between them, it's been a sorry season for reasoned judgment or unalloyed pleasure. The cultural climate has been so poisoned ("dangerously credulous critics" Gregory Solman says in First of the Month) that viewers were unable to feel inspired or fulfilled by what they saw on the screen. In 2004, it seems that movies bring us together only to drive us apart.

Now comes Before Sunset, a so-called love story that encourages the selfish tendencies of modern movie-makers and audiences. Our cultural divide can be felt in the very concept of this movie about the mutual attraction of two navel-gazers: Ethan Hawke as an American novelist and Julie Delpy as a French environmentalist, the same pair that met nine years ago in Before Sunrise. Not just thirtysomethings, now they're smug thirtysomethings; other people and the outside world do not puncture their intellectual cocoon. Life, as abundantly displayed in Son Frère, The Terminal, Eternal Sunshine, A Thousand Clouds of Peace, The Ladykillers, Strayed, The Dreamers and Napoleon Dynamite, is blocked out of director Richard Linklater's storytelling. And the transformative vision that distinguished The Passion, Torque, Father and Son, The Return, Shaolin Soccer, Greendale, Bon Voyage and Teacher's Pet is beyond Linklater's esthetic. That means artistry is outside the contemporary movie standard that Before Sunset represents.

It's been a fair-to-good movie year thus far anyway: two masterpieces that affirm what it means to be human and nearly a dozen other movies that sustain the media's capacity to show life freshly. The existence of these movies is heartening, but their dismissal by critics (which lessened the films' cultural impact) is nearly cause for despair. People who were reminded by Eternal Sunshine that movies could connect to their emotional lives might have felt a similar excitement from The Terminal and A Thousand Clouds and The Ladykillers. Instead, the adept but trivial cartoonishness of Spider-Man 2 is celebrated with almost patriotic loyalty. That means moviegoers are discouraged from taking movies seriously, urged to prefer "fun" over edification, the ersatz over the true.

This is frightening when you consider how many reviewers referred to the real-life story of the Iranian emigre stuck in a Paris airport as a way to discredit The Terminal. That criticism contains the worthless and hypocritical implication that Iranian experience (and Iranian cinema) is more real than a sensitive interpretation from Hollywood's most conscientious artist. The film's examination of America as both myth and multicultural, class-conflicted reality was cruelly disregarded—as was Patrice Chereau's equation of gay and straight life imperatives in the great, tragic Son Frère. These films elevate cinema from the realm of commercial product. Their artistry is in their lifelikeness. Along with Eternal Sunshine, they make our own personal experiences memorable and valuable by connecting us to others. Spielberg, Chereau and Michel Gondry inspire audiences to think, which is just as important as the way Gibson, Sokurov, Joseph Kahn, the Coens and Andrei Zvyagintsev cause us to marvel.

These filmmakers are the ones who justify movie passion in 2004. They sustain cinematic potential. Even The Dreamers, Bon Voyage and Crimson Gold were reminders that the medium could be interesting without pandering to a sensation-addicted youth market. Bertolucci's film seemed almost embarrassingly out of touch and couldn't muster much of an audience despite its NC-17 hard-sell; still it is especially worthwhile for the way it combined an out-dated, unfashionable regard of cinema with the still-pertinent obsessions of youth. Far from the best film of the year, The Dreamers explicitly evoked the sexual and political essence in cinema and faith in humanity—which too many contemporary filmmakers and filmgoers have forgotten.

Everything wrong with today's movie culture can be found in Before Sunset. Not to exaggerate this pipsqueak movie, but its very "smallness" is symptomatic of the diminished expectations and paltry substance that have become standard. Linklater's screenplay collaboration with his performers enshrines the indie audience's solipsistic taste. Their nonvoluptuous love story reduces courtship rituals to talk—and unexciting talk at that. The woman is slyly aggressive, and the man is abashed about his desperation. Linklater, Hawke and Delpy are not rejecting the screwball comedy model so much as indulging their own lack of imagination. (Any episode of tv's Elimidate or Blind Date tell us as much about how men and women feign and risk.) It's a grim joke that anyone took this method seriously the first time around, and the sequel will feel superfluous to anyone except those viewers vain enough to see themselves in Hawke and Delpy. The sign of Linklater's facetiousness is that his couple comes off as over-sincere and pretentious rather than embarrassingly real.

It's a Sundance fallacy that Linklater (and Kevin Smith's execrable Chasing Amy) gets the precise tone of modern lovers. Loving doesn't change, but how people fancy their attractiveness or intelligence is often a matter of fashion, and Linklater is practiced at hipster intellectuality. (Waking Life was a snooze.) A screenwriter as gifted as Whit Stillman can show how lovers avoid talking about themselves, but all Hawke and Delpy do is parade their obnoxiousness. When he says, "I'm designed to be dissatisfied with everything," and she boasts, "I'm a romantic," it's a meeting of non-minds. This couple and their enabler are really stuck on themselves. By rejecting traditional movie romanticism, they deprive the audience's romantic needs.

Before Sunset's key insult is its pretense of realism. Starting with Linklater's long-take, dollying-camera scenes (a favored trope since Slackers), the eavesdropping technique can only fool the most naive spectators. Linklater's real-time fascination is not fascinating; he insists that audiences acquiesce to his refusal of wonder; he films Paris like Hoboken. There's nothing like that time-stopping illusion in The Terminal where dinner between Tom Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones seems both intimate and surreal. Hawke and Delpy's loquacity never transforms into lyricism. In great romantic films, conversation and wit are stylized into poetry. Reality gets transformed. Actors need to articulate other peoples' genius or, at best, embody complex feelings. These actor-screenwriters just aren't witty enough.

It's easy to contrast Before Sunset with the luminescence of Eternal Sunshine, but the simple fact is, it fails comparison with the most ardent moments of even modest recent films. In Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, Angelina Jolie tells her alpha-male ex, "I'm not leaving because I couldn't kill you. I'm leaving because I could." In Torque, Ice Cube's flirtatious girlfriend silences his macho jealousy with the simple insistence, "I love you!" Such classic expressions of passion represent a good reason why people go to the movies: to see their most complicated feelings clarified, immortalized. But Before Sunset turns complexity to collegiate drivel.

Compare the way Delpy greets her long-gone one-night-stand, saying, "Memory is a wonderful thing if you don't have to deal with the past." It's banal. Her confession, "Each relationship really damages me; I never really recover," is worse. She never gets over herself. A crushingly middlebrow, middle-class egotism ruins all their exchanges. Maybe that's why critics love it. They flatter themselves by approving such bad badinage as Delpy asking, "Would you have written the book if you were fucking every five minutes?" and Hawke responds, "I would have welcomed the challenge." That's disingenuous, or else a pitiful attempt at Woody Allen—not Eric Rohmer.

Without the style to create romantic illusion, the film is left with the persistent vanity of former teen beauties. This aspect of Before Sunset is, at least, poignant. Hawke looks gaunt and wasted; the bloom is off Delpy, yet her acting seems sincere. There's a scene where she refrains from touching Hawke that says more than her chatter. And she ends the movie with an endearing impersonation of Nina Simone's walk. If she'd rather have a real role to play, who could blame her?

[Mad Maggot]

I haven't seen Before Sunrise yet, but I'll try to check it out before Before Sunset's come to my country. They both look like decent romantic flicks.

[dellamorte dellamore]

I loved the first film , and i love little , intimate films such as this , and i like how the conversations in the first is what drove the whole thing , i expect the same from the sequel , def looking foward to it . Maybe they can do this every 10 years or so until they finally decide to hook up for real .

[hunni]

I can't wait for this....I actually came on here specifically to get info about it because up until about a week ago,I was unaware this movie even existed.....and knowing it won't be released anywhere near me anytime soon, I'm dying to know what others thought of it. It's gotten more press than I'd expect from a movie like this...I learned of it through two huge magazines that gave it excellent reviews...Cosmo and Entertainment Weekly. I remember the first one getting not so good reviews.

[SLAW]

BEFORE SUNSET is as the french say, "Le fucking awesome!!". This is an absolutely amazing film by all my standards. Loved it loved it loved it! I'm going to write more extensively on it later this week. This is my favorite film of the year so far. 10/10

[the humble narrator]

10 / 10

I loved this movie. It is as perfect as a film that I've seen all year long. It is extremly well made, and with one of the most daring and great ending that I've seen. My expectations were high, and the movie surpassed them completly. I justs love these characters. My favorite film of the year [number two is Kill Bill - Vol. 2].

[Wildbilld]

Classic 4 Star Rating:
http://wildbilld.brinkster.net/pics/star.bmphttp://wildbilld.brinkster.net/pics/star.bmphttp://wildbilld.brinkster.net/pics/star.bmphttp://wildbilld.brinkster.net/pics/star.bmp

Letter Grade:
A

1-10 Scale Rating:
http://wildbilld.brinkster.net/pics/9.5stars.bmp

[MadsenOMC]

SPOILERS!

Finally saw this. What an experience considering it's only, what, 80 minutes long. Easily one of the best movies of the year. I thought it took a little while to get going. I had to re-familiarize myself with the characters, I suppose much like they were doing as well. But as soon as they sat down in the cafe, I was riveted. The dialogue does border on being pretentious at times, but it always felt honest and real to me. It's hard to put into words the mix of emotions one goes through spending time with these two people. You definitely are forced to harshly examine your own life and relationship(s). I was damn near tears by the end, reflecting on my own life and impatiently wondering what would happen to this potential couple. At first, the ending pissed me off. It was so abrupt and unexpected. But now I think it's perfect. The last lines are absolutely perfect. I can't imagine a better ending. This is truly a moving, beautiful film. Romantic movies don't get any better.

9/10

[ukcats]

Isn't Ethan Hawk in this movie? How is he in it?

[daddiefatsacks]

I may be a little late here, but I just caught this movie no more than 20 minutes ago, and man, it blew me away. It's so real, the dialogue is so real, Delpy is mezmerizing more so than Hawke, and the location and some of the shots were just gorgeous. And how about those last lines delivered by Delpy and the big grin in Hawke's face "I know"



9/10

[neilg78]

Just got this for Christmas and finally watched it last night, as a Linklater fan i knew already i wasn't going to be disappointed. After the great ambigious ending of 'Before Sunrise', i was expecting a similar end to this film and wasn't disappointed. Sometimes the dialogue can lean on the pretenious side but then others its perfect with the exchanges between Delphy and Hawke. After watching the brief making of, i'd personally love to see a second sequel ten years down the road so that once again they can answer the questions we had from the previous movie then hit us with an open ending that lets the viewer decide what the characters fates are. So yeah 9/10

[Moviefan02000]

I, like most of you, adore Before Sunset. It's my second favorite film of the year, We Don't Live Here Anymore being the first. It's definetely recommended to everybody who loves romance films. Sunrise and Sunset are easily the best.

10/10 (A+)