Brendan-clarke I didn't like ANY of the actors in this film. All of them do their jobs pretty badly. The fault for this probably lies with the director. Essentially, they told a, possibly interesting story, but they did so very incompetently. I was totally incapable to forget that the lead actress was acting. She was absolutely false from start to finish and I found myself strongly disliking her. The movie is full of scenes with Parker facing the camera in a kind of Shakesperean aside which enabled us to hear her poetry. The poetry is OK I guess but was murdered by the wooden acting and the funny voice that Parker was forcing out without a pause. The rest of the movie is just boring and I couldn't bring myself to finish the thing. I wonder if those people were really as tedious and pretentiously awful as they were portrayed as being. I guess I will never know. If you are interested in Parker, read her original work. This film will do nothing at all to endear her to you.

cheshire551225800 For some reason the period around the 1920s and the early 1930s was this great flowering of artistic genius.In Mexico City you had Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and their circle of artist and intellectual friends, which you can watch in the great film by Salma Hayek "Frida" I actually went to Frida Kahlo's neighborhood in Mexico City because I wanted to see her house and the house where Trotsky was killed, but it was closed that day.In London you had the Bloomsbury Group with people like Aldous Huxley, mark Gertler, Virginia Woolf, Carrington, Lytton Strachey etc. Which you can watch in the great Emma Thompson film "Carrington".In New York you had Mrs. Parker and the Algonquin Roundtable. Most of these people above interacted in different ways often in Paris where Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dali, Piccaso, Somerset Maugham, Aleister Crowley, Cole Porter, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin et al held forth in Monte Martre and the French Riviera.Everyone in this film is great and sometimes I think I was just born too late to hang with all these brilliant (and sometimes very unpleasant) people in so many countries.I've read a lot of Dorothy Parker's work and she has a great feminist voice that couldn't be suppressed. Many don't even know they are quoting her when they are. I just read a review of the Johnny Depp movie "Libertine" and someone stated that the actress showed an emotional range from A to B, which is a directly stolen Quote from Parker." Yes, she was drunken, cynical, disillusioned, suicidal etc. but she was and is also great.This movie is a whose who of actors. A lot of people don't even realize that Cyndi Lauper is in it. It was an early movie of both Gwenneth Paltrow and Heather Graham etc. etc.Watch it and love it.

howardeisman I think that this film was meant to be realist and naturalistic. However,there is the reality that this is an entertainment, and the audience has to hear and understand the lines. Supervigilance is required to do this in this movie. Not only does JJL's imitation of Dorothy Parker's speech affectations make the speech and musing of the main character difficult to understand, but the inclusion of background noise, overlapping dialog, and frequent muttering and mumbling of the performers make every character difficult to even hear, much less understand.Since so much of this movie is about legendary people mouthing famous aphorisms, it is frustrating to only hear snippets of their lines. I suppose the idea was to toss these famous lines away to add naturalism. However, without spotlighting the conversations of the legendary characters, however contrived this might be performed, this is just a very sad movie about a bitter, unhappy, self-destructive, unproductive writer. Not very easy to watch nor very interesting.

elducko This movie gave a very revealing account of Dorothy Parker and her rapport with the denizens of the Algonquin Round Table. Done in flashback, this movie is easy on the psyche and filled with ascerbic darts that are bounced among the members of the Round Table. One could feel the pain felt by Mrs. Parker as she fights to survive as a writer, and a person, searches for a meaning to life, and wonders why true love is as elusive as masterpiece poetry and short stories roll from her pen.