风月俏佳人Pretty woman 影评(英文版)

My Review On Pretty Woman
On the surface, the movie follows a standard fairy-tale-style formula of an hooker girl falling in love and being rescued from her old lifestyle. It spins this into a modern update with more relevant themes - mainly prostitution. Actually it’s not really about falling in love with a prostitute. It is about transformation of a prostitute into a lady; transformation from perceiving a woman as a prostitute to seeing the woman as a wife.
Because of "Pretty Woman" stars Richard Gere, Hollywood's most successful male sex symbol, and because it's about his character falling in love with a prostitute, it is astonishing that "Pretty Woman" is such an innocent movie - that it's the sweetest and most openhearted love fable since "The Princess Bride." Here is a movie that could have marched us down mean streets into the sinks of iniquity, and it glows with romance.
Rather than the plot itself, the beautiful Julia Roberts makes this movie worth watching...and not simply because of her 88 inches of leg! Always endearing in her roles, she is at her absolute most endearing portraying Vivian in this picture. She brings a real
vulnerability to the role, showing us that just like everyone else, prostitutes do indeed floss their teeth! Richard Gere pulls off quite convincingly the role of Edward, the ruthless, calculating millionaire businessman, who takes over companies only to sell them off piece by piece, quite unmindful of the interests of any people involved. To give Gere credit, I was quite impressed that he actually plays the piano in one of the movie's scenes.
Naturally, given Vivian's membership in the 'oldest profession', old fashioned and strict as I am, thought there would be some inappropriate scenes, and that is so award since we have boys classmates in the classroom. Fortunately, the most truly intimate moment in this film is not during the more explicit sex but rather, simply a kiss.
It seems to be constructed out of the stuff of realism, all right. It stars Gere as an out-of-town millionaire, visiting Los Angeles, who borrows his friend's car and gets lost on Hollywood Boulevard. He asks a hooker for directions to his hotel. She offers to tell him, for five dollars. For $10, she'll guide him there.It's one of those chance meetings as Roberts is looking to pay hers and roommate Laura San Giacomo's rent.
He agrees. It is important to understand that he is looking for directions, not sex, and that he has broken up - coldly and efficiently - with his current girlfriend only half an hour earlier in a terse telephone conversation. The girl gets into the car and it turns out that she knows a lot about cars. This attracts him, and the result is that he invites her to join him in his hotel suite. But not for sex, of course, he says. But you still have to pay, of course, she says.
Turns out he needs her for a business date as he's negotiating with Ralph Bellamy and Alex Hyde-White for their company. Gere essentially does what Danny DeVito does in Other People's Money, but with a little more class. But with lube or not, Bellamy and Hyde-White aren't taking this one without a fight.
She is played by Julia Roberts ("Mystic Pizza" and an
Oscar-nominated role in "Steel Magnolias") as a woman who is as smart as she is attractive, which makes her very smart. Like many prostitutes, she is able to perform the mental trick of standing outside of what she does, of detaching herself and believing that her real self is not involved. That's what she does. She overhears
one of his telephone conversations and wants to know what he does.
He's a takeover artist. He buys companies, takes them apart and sells the pieces for more than he paid for the whole. "But what about the people who work for those companies?" she wants to know. "People have nothing to do with it," he explains. "It's strictly business." "Oh, she says. Then you do the same thing I do." What is happening in these scenes is that the characters are emerging as believable, original and sympathetic. Gere and Roberts work easily together; we sense that their characters not only like one another, but feel comfortable with one another. The catch is, neither one trusts the feeling of comfort. They've been hurt so often, they depend on a facade of cynical detachment. Everything is business. He offers her money to spend one week with him, she accepts, he buys her clothes, they have sex and of course (this being the movies) they fall in love.
They fall into a particularly romantic kind of love, the sort you hardly see in the movies these days - a love based on staying awake after the lights are out and confiding autobiographical secrets. This
is the first Gere film containing more confession than nudity. During the day, the lovers try to recover their cold detachment, to maintain the distance between them. If the love story in "Pretty Woman" is inspired by "Cinderella," the daytime scenes are "Pygmalion," as the hotel manager (Hector Elizondo) takes a liking to his best customer's "niece" and tutors her on which fork to use at a formal dinner.
There is a subplot involving Gere's attempts to take over a corporation run by an aging millionaire (Ralph Bellamy) - a man whose lifework he is prepared to savage, even though he actually likes him.
There are broad Freudian hints that Gere's entire career is a form of revenge against his father and that Bellamy may be the father figure he is searching for. But he has an impulse to hurt what he loves, and there is one particularly painful scene in which Gere reveals to a friend that Roberts is a prostitute and Roberts gains a certain insight by how hurtful that betrayal is.
My favorite scene in the movie is when Vivian and Edward are in bed, talking and Vivian goes on about how she ended up in Los
Angeles to begin with by following a "bum" that her mother called her a "bum magnet" "If there was a bum within a fifty mile radius I was completely attracted to him." But the line that stuck with me the most was "When people put you down enough you start to believe it" and Edward replies "I think you are a very charming, very beautiful woman" Vivian's reply is full of emotion when she replies "The bad stuff is easier to believe...have you ever noticed that?" Which is true.
Maybe it's just me, but I think that this movie is just a fairytale, and fairytales are there to make you believe in something that is totally unbelievable. This movie gives you hope, shows you that even if your life is miserable, that even if you are a bum magnet; if you don't give up hope a millionaire in a Lotus might be just around the corner.
演员评价
The acting is good. Roberts and Gere obviously understand their characters; Roberts perfectly captures the hooker "mentality", and Gere portrays his character believably. I also found various of
the supporting characters to be very credible, well-acted and interesting. I actually would have liked if Laura San Giacomo's character, Kit De Luca, would have had more screen-time than she did, as I found her to be one of the better and more interesting members of the supporting cast.
Julia Roberts plays Vivian Ward, an attractive and smart hooker with a heart of gold. She gives her character a great sense of humor, charming Edward with her honesty. She is intensely appealing and amusing, making any man feel comfortable.
"Pretty Woman" was the film that made Julia Roberts a star and a major player in Hollywood (for a while she held the record for being the highest-paid actress in Hollywood).
"Pretty Woman" is one of her better films. She plays a prostitute who's "employed" by a rich playboy (Richard Gere) to pose as her girlfriend for a little while. He tries to culture her and instill good taste, manners and general class; meanwhile others raise a suspicious eyebrow when she embarrasses herself in public, clearly not belonging in the upper-class group.
个人评价
Lots of romantic scenes showed in the film, from a picnic in the park to jetting off in a private plane for a Big Night on the Town. And etiquette lessons...Vivian displays charming, amusing, curious innocence when she experiences with Edward her first opera (all the while looking knock out gorgeous in a stunning red gown), her first polo match, and her introduction to escargots. As the movie progresses, she is transformed Pygmalion style, from the street smart hooker provocatively dressed in tall black boots and mini skirt, to a sophisticated looking, elegantly gowned and coiffed young lady. But it's merely appearance...Vivian's heart of gold and her vulnerability both remain unchanged.
The status conscious snobbery of Beverly Hills dress shops and ritzy hotels, judging people by wealth and class, is well depicted here. When Vivian goes shopping for a 'more appropriate' wardrobe at some exclusive Rodeo Drive boutiques, she is not 'well received' by the sales ladies, who like all too many of us, are overly inclined to judge by appearance. You'll want these snobs to get
their comeuppance. Actually, perhaps the most touching relationship in this entire film is the one between Vivian and Barney, the quite proper but kind desk manager at the high class hotel (where she is sharing a penthouse suite with Edward), who is able to see beyond appearance. He develops a genuine fondness and even more importantly, respect for her.
I mentioned that the movie is sweet and innocent. It is; it protects its fragile love story in the midst of cynicism and compromise. The performances are critical for that purpose. Gere plays new notes here; his swagger is gone, and he's more tentative, proper, even shy. Roberts does an interesting thing; she gives her character an irrepressibly bouncy sense of humor and then lets her spend the movie trying to repress it. Actresses who can do that and look great can have whatever they want in Hollywood.
Gere's career is on a roll right now, after this movie and the completely opposite, swaggeringly erotic character he plays in "Internal Affairs." In Esquire magazine a few months ago, a collection of Hollywood jokes included one where the punch line
was that a producer was going to be stuck with Richard Gere in his movie. After these two movies, the joke doesn't work anymore.
The movie was directed by Garry Marshall ("The Flamingo Kid"), whose films betray an instinctive good nature, and it is about as warmhearted as a movie about two cold realists can possibly be.
I understand that earlier versions of the screenplay were more hard-boiled and downbeat, and that Marshall underlined the romance.
There could indeed be, I suppose, an entirely different movie made from the same material - a more realistic film, in which the cold economic realities of the lives of both characters would make it unlikely they could stay together. And, for that matter, a final scene involving a limousine, a fire escape and some flowers is awkward and feels tacked on. But by the end of the movie I was happy to have it close as it does.
As has often been pointed out, that is not a realistic story line. Indeed, this film has been criticized for its lack of realism, but romantic comedies, especially that sub-category of the genre
dealing with love between people of different social backgrounds, are not generally supposed to be exercises in kitchen-sink realism. Contrary to what we might have been led to believe by "Maid in Manhattan", for example, most Republican senators (or Democrat ones for that matter) are not married to Latina chambermaids. Nor (pace Richard Curtis in "Notting Hill") do female Hollywood superstars generally find the love of their life working in small bookshops in West London. It is a historical fact that no British Prime Minister has ever married his tea-lady (not even Palmerston, whose appetite for working-class girls was legendary), so it seems that Mr Curtis got it wrong in "Love, Actually" as well. Like "Maid in Manhattan" and "Love, Actually", "Pretty Woman" is a modern dress version of all those old fairy tales about the poor girl who falls in love with a prince.
Many people think the story is too fake, nothing like that would happen in real life, how can a millionaire fall in love with a poor hooker just out of her beautiful appearance? I must say Vivian has many good qualities that distinguished her from other girls in her condition.
She is healthy, not on drugs, not on alcohol, not even a smoker; no syphilis, no gonorrhea, no AIDS wounds on her legs, nothing,
she is just perfectly absolutely healthy. Body and mind. She is not a criminal, not inclined to steal anything, she even values love and dignity more than money. Oh, she has no pimp, who would be the other man (other than Richard Gere) in her life; nobody to protect her from smart types who walk off without paying; the pimp would explode the whole romance instantly. (Instead, a girl friend.)、She has a golden soul, full of goodness, and loves art, and feels for art. High-society types around them appear silly, artificial, stuffy. She is natural. She even was a good student and might be again. She loves to bathe, and half the time we see her happy in the bath tub (which is a powerful signal and symbol for clean, clean; she even sings so super-ultra-charmingly in the bath; she wants to wash off the foolishness of her previous few months of street. And she can do it.
With all those qualities, and her good looking, why would she ever become a prostitute in the first place? Don't think, don't think. Just dream, it is lovely.
The film has also been criticized by certain moralists for giving an excessively romantic and glamorized picture of prostitution.
Certainly, it is not exactly realistic to suggest that every prostitute is a beautiful, healthy, carefree Julia Roberts lookalike who ends up marrying a handsome millionaire. On the other hand, the moralists' preferred position on prostitution- that every prostitute is a drug-addicted disease-ridden crack whore living in squalid poverty who ends up either dying of AIDS or being murdered by a modern Jack the Ripper- is equally unrealistic. Vivian is an example of the "tart with a heart", a stock character who has been part of the literary tradition going back at least as far as "La Dame aux Camellias" (when Vivian and Edward go to the opera together, it is to see "La Traviata", based upon Dumas's story) and part of the cinematic tradition since at least the sixties, when film censorship began to be relaxed.
All in all, it’s a quite entertaining and worthwhile romantic comedy, that is worth watching, even for people who usually loathe romance in movies. I recommend it to pretty much anyone who enjoys romantic comedies, comedies in general and fans of any of the actors. This is probably also a good movie to get for guys whose girlfriends demand to see a romantic comedy.。