Cheap Birthday Girl (DVD) (Nicole Kidman, Vincent Cassel) (Jez Butterworth) Price

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Customer Reviews of Birthday Girl

Underated but stunning, what else is new?
Birthday Girl just proves yet again that Nicole Kidman is the best actress on the Hollywood scene today. In this movie, she pulls off Russian and a Russian accent very believably.
Ben Chaplin is also excellent in this film. He, like this film, may be one of the most underrated actors I can think of. He delievers every line like it's the most vital in the scrip, and it's just moving to watch someone so into their role. The pair have massive chemistry on screen, and you feel it from when they first meet in the airport until the last line.
This movie, about a British man and his mail-order bride from Russia, manages to entangle you in a web of unexpected suspense, dark humor, and erotic romance. Many movies fail at every attempt to mix genres, but it works for Birthday Girl.
This film does take a certain tase, however. This movie plays more like a very well-made indie film than it does a Hollywood blockbuster hit. It has amazing action and runs at a fast pace, which does set it apart from many indies.
If you've seen the trailer for this movie and read about it and think you'd like it, believe me then, you will.

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Birthday Girl: Gift Wrapping of a Second Rate Gift
BIRTHDAY GIRL is the kind of movie that promises to be a light hearted romantic comedy of two dissimilar people meeting and somehow falling in love. For the first third of the movie, director Jez Butterworth delivers. John (Ben Chaplin) is a mild-mannered bank clerk who tires of not having the right woman so he goes on the Internet to find a mail-order bride. Putting aside the internal logical and legal flaw that requires one to actually meet a Russian woman before sending away for her as if she were a fine English pipe, John meets Nadia (Nicole Kidman) at the airport and fully expects the English-speaking beauty that he was led to think was coming. Nadia and John spend several delightful scenes together as the cultural and linguistic differences first trip, then attract them. Beginning in the middle, Butterworth leads BIRTHDAY GIRL seriously astray as he switches tonal gears from the light world of romance to the gritty edge of fraud and violence. Two of Nadia's 'cousins' enter unannounced to complicate John's sedate life with what is frankly an unbelievable tale of kidnapping and bank fraud. As John obeyed the commands of these two Russians to steal money, I was left gasping at his naivete in not informing the authorities. What follows the bank robbery is your standard thriller between a decent but wimpy clerk and two vicious Russian criminals. The ending, which I shall not reveal here, left me raging at the overly forgiving attitude of a schnook whose schnookness was rubbed in his face by a scheming woman who has the audacity to continue to ask for help even after her true intentions are made known. Still, BIRTHDAY GIRL succeeds in engaging the attention of the viewer even after the closing credits. What lies at the heart of BIRTHDAY GIRL is a subtle, if misplaced call to address the issues of loneliness that can reach across far-flung borders that sometimes can result in two people eventually seeing eye to eye.

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nicolehasagift
This Nicole Kidman has beauty, depth, brains and talent. The movie is an ugly portrayal of how mail order brides. Social security number 156-38-3461.