It's official. "Birthday Girl" was officially released today, and I took the liberty of cuting and pasting Roger Ebert's review here in it's entirety. It MAY contain possible plot spoilers for some of you who haven't seen it yet. Though still Ebert does a good job of not revealing too much. He only gave it two stars, however Emma and I will probably see it this weekend regardless and a lot of you guys might too:
(Niall)
BIRTHDAY GIRL
Review By: Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun Times)
"Anyone who orders a mail-order bride over the Internet deserves more or less who they get. The bride may or may not be looking forward to a lifetime as a loving and devoted spouse, but she is certainly looking forward to an air ticket, a visa, and citizenship in a Western democracy.
Would-be husbands who do not understand this probably believe that beautiful women gladly offer themselves sight unseen to men merely because they have mastered such skills as logging on, typing, and possessing a credit card.
Yet hope springs eternal. John Buckingham (Ben Chaplin), a bank teller in a small British town, is a lonely guy who clicks forlornly on the photos of Russian mail order brides and finally orders Nadia, who says she is tall, speaks English, and is a non-smoker. When, at the airport, Nadia turns out to look exactly like Nicole Kidman, you would think John might be satisfied. But no: She is tall all right, all right, but she is a chain-smoker, speaks no English, and throws up out the car window. He tests her language skills in a brief conversation: "Are you a giraffe?" "Yes."
John calls the marriage agency to complain. He wants to return Nadia and get himself a non-smoking English speaker. Nadia keeps smiling, discovers his secret horde of porn magazines and videos, and cheerfully reenacts some of the scenarios she finds there. Soon John is beginning to reevaluate his consumer complaint.
So goes the setup for "Birthday Girl," a comedy that starts out light-heartedly and makes some unexpected turns, especially after Nadia's two alleged cousins arrive from Russia. Alexei and Yuri, played by those two hard-edged French actors Vincent Cassel and Mathieu Kassovitz, reminded me of Emil and Oleg, the two Russians who turn up in "15 Minutes," with the difference that they are not quite as ambitious and sinister; it appears at first they are basically after a free lunch.
There is a curious problem with "Birthday Girl," hard to put your finger on: The movie is kind of sour. It wants to be funny and a little nasty, it wants to surprise us and then console us, but what it mostly does is make us restless. Strange, how the personalities of characters can refuse to match the work laid out for them by the script. I did not much like anyone in the movie, not even poor John Buckingham, and as for Nadia, she has to go through so many twists and turns that finally we don't know what to believe, nor do we much care.
The movie's downfall is to substitute plot for personality. It doesn't really know or care about the characters, and uses them as markers for a series of preordained events. Since these events take us into darker places than we expect, and then pull us back out again with still more arbitrary plotting, we lose interest; these people do not seem plausible, and we feel toyed with. Even the funny moments feel like nothing more than--well, the filmmakers inventing funny moments."
