A Beautiful Life English Movie 2009
Reviews :

From director Alejandro Chomski comes this indie drama, adapted from a play by writer Wendy Hammond. The film stars Denise Richards (Wild Things) as an exotic dancer and features supporting contributions from Michael Madsen, Debi Mazar, and Dana Delany. ~ Matthew Tobey, All Movie Guide
An ironically titled descent into L.A.’s muddy depths, A Beautiful Life invokes some serious topics. But it’s hard to take them seriously, because the movie piles up characters and controversies more or less at random.

Introduced while riding a bus toward the city’s Skid Row, Maggie (Angela Sarafyan) is a teenage runaway with good reason to run. When she finds temporary refuge in a homey strip club, a quick shower reveals her battered shoulders and back.

zThe joint’s featured attraction, Chinese hoofer Esther (Bai Ling), is shocked by Maggie’s bruises. She commands the club’s Salvadoran janitor, David (Jesse Garcia), to give the girl a place to sleep in his grungy industrial loft.

Maggie, a willowy suburban princess, and David, a beefy illegal immigrant, are bristlingly incompatible, so inevitably they fall in love. But Maggie soon admits to a sexual kink that complicates the relationship.

This conflicted romance would be enough to sustain a drama, especially given the eventual arrival of Maggie’s despicable dad (Jonathan LaPaglia) and loving but ineffectual mom (Desperate Housewives’ Dana Delany).

But Wendy Hammond and Deborah Calla’s script, adapted from Hammond’s stage play, insists on boosting the squalor with gamy subplots. Many of them involve Maggie and David’s frantic quest for cash.

Driven from his job by an immigration raid, David is threatened with eviction. Maggie’s temporary gigs include selling homemade bracelets on the street and working at a Korean mini-market that pays less than the minimum wage. Oh yeah, and being a drug courier.
Meanwhile, Esther fights for true love, and awaits her big break as a chanteuse. Luckily, she works at the sort of indulgent nudie bar whose management (and audience) doesn’t mind that she’d rather sing than strip.

When not hauling packets of dope to pistol-packing supermodels, meanwhile, Maggie studies for her GED. She also seeks counseling for sexual dysfunction, thanks to a librarian (Debi Mazar) who doubles as an unofficial social worker.

Argentine-bred director Alejandro Chomski could have done better with this preposterous saga, but not probably much. Even with a bigger budget and higher production values, the screenplay would have defeated him.

The actors face a similar dilemma. Sarafyan and Garcia are engaging enough, and the sharp-featured Ling is always a formidable presence, even if delivering lines in English is not among her principal skills.

But these performers, and most of the other ones, struggle with scenes that are simply unplayable. And despite closeups of gyrating strippers, the movie can’t be enjoyed as campy sleaze. A Beautiful Life is too earnest to be a hoot, and too amateurish to be anything else.

Maggie (Angela Sarafyan), a middle-class Caucasian girl running from a brutal father, David (Jesse Garcia), an illegal from El Salvador who has lost his mother along the way, and Esther (Bai Ling), a Chinese stripper and would-be singer in a blond wig, are all young adults who have befriended each other in Los Angeles (”where some come to hide and others come to dream”), in the October 9th select (Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago) theatrical release of the film A Beautiful Life. The film has an October 2nd exclusive release at the Sunset 5 in Los AngelesAlthough the energy of youth can be seemingly limitless, the small group is constantly confronted with bullies, robbers manipulators, possible deportation, unpaid bills and the need to work jobs they never envisioned (e.g. running drugs) just to get by.

“I wanted a beautiful life too,” David tells Maggie, but the past gets in the way, and somehow the present is always fraught with worry. Angela Saraflyan gives a very touching performance as Maggie, helped by the fact that her looks are not typical or perfect, and Esther, played by Bai Ling, a beauty to whom guys are constantly attracted, can only dream of a large stage on which she’s singing to thousands and thousands of people.Yet ultimately, the friends are loyal to each other and try to understand each other, although each comes from such a dissimilar background. What can David do when he has no money to hire someone to find his mother “left somewhere near the border”, and what can Esther do when the guys she wants have no intention of being faithful to her and the guys she doesn’t want obsess over her? Maggie may have the most difficult situation of them all, discovering learned elements within herself that are decidedly unattractive and that are now strongly rooted in her subconscious
I would recommend watching A Beautiful Life with the family, because although it’s unrated there are many sexual and drug themes involved. The film represents life as messy and somewhat impossible (when you’re severed from your family), although the performances of the three main characters are both solid and endearing, and, in the end, hopeful.

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ast and Crew

Release Date: 10/2/2009
Director : Alejandro Chomski
Cast :: Jesse Garcia ,Angela Sarafyan ,Dana Delany ,Bai Ling ,Debi Mazar ,Rena Owen ,Jonathan LaPaglia ,Ronnie ,Blevins ,Enrique Castillo ,Meltem Cumbul
Genre: Social issue melodrama , Drama
Running Time: 81 minutes

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