Book Club

4 successful women and 1 is a Federal judge...so far so good. Until you realise one cooks (she has a restaurant), one cleans (she owns a hotel) and the other is a housewife (literally). The plot of the film is for these 4 strong, successful women to read _50 Shades of Grey_ and understand their lives aren't complete until they have a man. Watching _Book Club_ you will be struck by how many white people are on this planet and how few people of colour there are in this film. The only non-white characters in this movie are the help. Yes, seriously. _Book Club_, literally, is an example of everything I hate in movies. Facile characters, stereotypical plots, predictable story lines, mediocre acting, telegraphed jokes, insulting to women and secretly racist... I know my mum is more a member of the target audience than I, but this film just makes me feel sorry for her and the film's public at large.

You want to talk about cast stuffing. Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen in the lead roles with Andy Garcia, Craig T. Nelson, Don Johnson and Richard Dreyfuss as the men that love them...and more including some cameos so clueless and inconceivable you won't even believe it. But this is not a rom-com. It's like four of them, all with some weak sauce, and shoved together hoping you like one of the four. But since the writers can't commit to an idea, you don't commit either. This movie must have been shelved a while since the plot device of reading "Shades of Grey" already seems hopelessly out of date. Frankly, they might have been waiting for one of the leads to die and capitalize on that. I'm certainly not the demographic they were shooting for here, but the audience I was with was. They seemed to enjoy it a bit, but not nearly as much as audiences seemed to like the male version of this, **Last Vegas**. There are laughs here, but you have to really show _patience_ because it takes forever to get there. This is clearly another nail in the coffin of rom-coms. 4/10