Average Rating: 5.8/10
Reviews Counted: 138
Fresh: 71 | Rotten: 67
What Just Happened has some inspired comic moments, but this inside-baseball take on Hollywood lacks satirical bite.
Average Rating: 5.9/10
Critic Reviews: 30
Fresh: 13 | Rotten: 17
What Just Happened has some inspired comic moments, but this inside-baseball take on Hollywood lacks satirical bite.
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Average Rating: 2.6/5
User Ratings: 11,859
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Inspired by the personal memoirs of Hollywood producer Art Linson, Barry Levinson's fictional showbiz comedy stars Robert De Niro as a struggling movie producer who has just suffered through his second divorce, and slowly finds his soul being ground up in the machinations of the Hollywood machine. Ben (De Niro) is an aging producer whose career was already on a downward turn when his personal life went straight into the toilet. Not only is Ben juggling two ex-wives and a daughter who seems to
Jan 19, 2008 Wide
Feb 24, 2009
$1.0M
Magnolia Pictures
All Critics (138) | Top Critics (30) | Fresh (76) | Rotten (67) | DVD (10)
In some ways, What Just Happened feels like an attempt to, if not make amends for moviemaking myopia, at least show how easily the contagion takes hold.
What Just Happened? is just a plain clumsy movie.
What Just Happened? has already happened and, to everyone but Levinson, that shouldn't be surprising.
The sharpest Hollywood satire since The Player.
You'd probably need a veteran Hollywood psychiatrist to explain Tinseltown's fascination with its own muck.
In What Just Happened, we get a loving tribute to the movie business filled with disdain for the ethics of the people who work in the business.
Precise, smart, and very funny in its specifics but rather clumsy and obvious when it comes to the big picture.
Worth seeing, especially for people interested in the inner workings of the Hollywood machine, but don't go in expecting a laugh a minute.
It's a pungent film about Hollywood power and a useful manual for young producers on how to stay upright in Hollywood or at least, how to lose your soul with grace.
It's not Bowfinger but it's well worth the ticket.
In an era where old rope such as Fast & Furious can strangle the box office, any reminder of Hollywood's clueless cynicism is more than welcome.
What Just Happened, despite an air of crisis, feels sluggish and plodding.
An insider's Hollywood story, Barry Levinson's film lacks the bite of other admired "movie movies", such as The Player, or way back, The Bad and the Beautiful.
I don't think it's particularly funny and I think that's the problem with the film. I think it wants to be funny.
It's a shame that the film doesn't ever really take off into the stratosphere, because so many of the ingredients are funny and revealing. But this is just another case where it was a better read than a film.
A welcome return to form from Robert De Niro, who has not been so proactively reactive on-screen for many, many years.
It's also mercifully free of the kind of phony pretensions to subversion and irreverence that weighed down, say, Robert Altman's The Player.
The film must have great resonance in Hollywood, which loves nothing more than to see its innards hung out in proud dirty linen fashion, but the nebulous structure and meandering storytelling leaves the rest of us a little dissatisfied.
Based on the Art Linson autobiography, this half-baked insider parody tries hard to be madcap.
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More understated than sidesplitting, this biting satire of showbiz offers an amusing enough inside peek at what life might be like in Tinseltown to remain recommended, its mostly inside industry jokes notwithstanding.
More understated than sidesplitting, this biting satire of showbiz offers an amusing enough inside peek at what life might be like in Tinseltown to remain recommended, its mostly inside industry jokes notwithstanding.
Like the perpetual insider crap shoot and big bucks blown on questionable movie fare, Levinson is willing to take his chances on that backroom and behind the scenes pathological reality show drama known as Hollywood.
There are a few other clever pokes at Hollywood, but many of the jokes, including a subplot about a Sean Penn thriller that needs fixing, falls flat.
What Just Happened? Is a unique comedy that has plenty of laughs. The comedy displayed on screen is off the wall, and may not appeal to a large audience, but this film manages to be a lot of fun. I thought the plot, though at times was well thought out, and the story was interesting, and not your average comedy.
September 1, 2011
Super Reviewer
Who cares.
May 4, 2009
Super Reviewer
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