In any case, I would recommend Big Bad Love only to Winger fans who have missed her since 1995's Forget Paris. But even then, I'd recommend waiting for DVD and just skipping straight to her scenes.
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03/29/02
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Big Bad Love (2002)
41
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:58
Fresh:24
Rotten:34
Average Rating:5.4/10
Consensus: A boozy depiction of a struggling writer, Big Bad Love is too messy and self-indulgent.
Theatrical Release:Feb 22, 2002 Limited
Synopsis: BIG BAD LOVE brings to life the characters that populate Mississippi writer Larry Brown's short story collection of the same name. Leon Barlow (Arliss Howard) is a writer with a compulsion to drink... [More]
Starring: Arliss Howard, Debra Winger, Rosanna Arquette, Paul Le Mat
Director: Arliss Howard
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Reviews for Big Bad Love
Arliss Howard's ambitious, moving, and adventurous directorial debut, Big Bad Love, meets so many of the challenges it poses for itself that one can forgive the film its flaws.
02/22/02
Brown's saga, like many before his, makes for snappy prose but a stumblebum of a movie.
02/19/02
Top CriticYou'd be hard put to find a movie character more unattractive or odorous [than Leon].
03/29/02
You can see where Big Bad Love is trying to go, but it never quite gets there.
06/22/02
The film is an uncannily eerie echo of its protagonist -- ravishingly poetic one moment, bellowing with unarticulated rage the next.
04/12/02
Trailer park Magnolia: too long, too cutesy, too sure of its own importance, and possessed of that peculiar tension of being too dense & about nothing at all.
11/07/01
The worst kind of independent; the one where actors play dress down hicks and ponderously mope around trying to strike lightning as captured by their 1970s predecessors
09/26/02
The draw [for "Big Bad Love"] is a solid performance by Arliss Howard.
03/07/02
A chaotic panorama that's too busy flying a lot of metaphoric flags.
01/10/02
A mess, but it's a sincere mess.
08/08/02
It's a drawling, slobbering, lovable run-on sentence of a film, a Southern Gothic with the emotional arc of its raw blues soundtrack.
08/08/02
It all comes down to whether you can tolerate Leon Barlow. I can't.
03/15/02
Top CriticIt is the sheer, selfish, wound-licking, bar-scrapping doggedness of Leon's struggle to face and transmute his demons that makes the movie a spirited and touching occasion, despite its patchy construction.
03/22/02
Makes you wish you'd stayed at home with a book -- preferably one of Larry Brown's.
10/16/03
Far too clever by half, Howard's film is really a series of strung-together moments, with all the spaces in between filled with fantasies, daydreams, memories and one fantastic visual trope after another.
02/22/02
Howard conjures the past via surrealist flourishes so overwrought you'd swear he just stepped out of a Buñuel retrospective.
02/04/02
A respectable mix of piercing human frailty, the tricks your mind plays on you, and the unexpected blows to the ego that force separation and reconciliation.
01/10/02
[Howard] so good as Leon Barlow ... that he hardly seems to be acting.
03/29/02
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