Yes

nn

Great Movie!! Genuine, heartfelt, beautiful, romantic movie!!! Best acting I've seen in a long time. Iambic pentameter made the screenplay fluid and sexy! Gorgeaous! Simon Abkarian and Joan Allen were AWESOME!!! There was so much chemistry between all the actors. The conflict between east and west was brought to forefront. The directing was great! The soundtrack and the fusion between two cultures made things even more interesting. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS MOVIE! If ever this movie were to become as popular as it deserves to be, the screen play should be shelved alongside the plays of Shakespeare and the other greats. Easy, yet complex; There was a meaning behind this movie that Sally Potter was successfully able to put out for the audience to see/feel.

Joan Allen did an adequate job of acting, (although she was much better and more believable in "Upside of Anger") and the young gal who played Grace, Stephanie Leonidas, was outstanding. Hopefully, this job will put her out there for directors and producers of real movies to discover. Those are about the only positive things I can say about this dreadful film. The rhyming of the lines was extremely distracting and annoying. When I want to enjoy poetry, I read poems. That's not why I go to the theater. It was truly ludicrous with all the lines ending with a rhyme that I kept guessing which word they would come up with, and 95% of the time, I guessed it. What a waste of my time and money. I didn't enjoy this movie at all.

A rhymed couplet is a gloss, a sheen. It is courtly, borne of sophistry, and what there is to be found in it is often in what is left unsaid rather than what you might find on the page. It is also used, when used pithily, to express concisely and without fear of mockery for preciousness the exact inward workings of one's soul. As Angelo in "Measure for Measure," hardly a man given to poetry, says: "Ever before now/ When men were fond I smiled and wondered how." Sometimes Shakespeare uses them as a drum roll to let you know the soliloquy is over. Their use is varied and imprecise, but it is rare to find a work of primarily dramatic intent that utilizes them over any length of time. This is, perhaps, appropriate, because Sally Potter's "Yes," while undeniably interesting, is varied and imprecise, moreso than it thinks it is. Blame not Joan Allen, even when she is on the verge of making us believe she is losing control and surrendering she must still cope with the regimented rhymes. Blame not Simon Abkarian, though a bit goofy his facility borders on the sublime. Rather it is ironing and weaving on behalf of the director/writer that has left catches and snags in a pattern that is intended to be tightly woven. The asides by the delightful Shirley Henderson are, indeed, delightful, but their relationship to the plot is tangential at best. To say that the sketchily drawn Sam Neill's character is sketchily drawn is to belie the intricacies of a skillful sketch. I wasn't even aware except from reviews afterwards that his character was a politico. The most moving part of the movie, the part that reduced me to tears, was the Auntie's silent soliloquy about death. It certainly rivaled Shakespeare. And it had scratch-all to do with the film. It is not surprising, as many have noted, that the confrontation scene is reported to be the first scene written in the film. It was an interesting scene, and I liked how she called him a "terrorist" not as an unspecific slur, but because of his behavior towards her personally. What was surprising and disappointing was that this scene was not the jumping off point into the deeper regions and darker places. That would have made for an interesting movie. By having it as the climax we go from –60 to 0 in 2 hours. The Deus Ex Auntie relieves Potter of having to write anything really difficult. God forbid we should have to go down further beneath the polished and rhyming surface into the ugly, and worthwhile, murk. The shot composition is excellent, but I wish someone would tell Ms. Potter and Wong Kar Wai that the blurred slo-mo is a feature available on the cheapest camera, and thus looks cheap cheap cheap. The Onion's review of this film really annoyed me because it stated as a matter of course: "Visually and narratively, Yes is inarguably pretentious…" Oh, is it now? I would say that it is only marginally successful, but I think it is a sorry state of affairs when trying to do anything interesting earns you a de facto smear. If you come back with "well, it had a pretension in the same way that a hopeful was a pretender to a throne" then your sense of meaning stops in the era of rhymed couplets. They could have just said that at least she tried to do something different and not been such snide sots. So: at least she tried to do something different, but instead of just getting our feet wet next time she should try throwing us without warning off a high high cliff, so high we never know when we will ever hit the water or how deep and dark it might be when we get there. Ms. Potter is the one that really needs to lose control. And: Yes, the laughing on the beach ending wasn't really earned. This is most worth seeing for the two main performances, although I might say that Mr. Abkarian's native confidence was occasionally out of place; in his interpretation, the character was always so sure of himself sometimes even more than his dialogue indicated.

Writer/director Sally Potter's movie "Yes" gives us an inkling - at least in terms of style -of what it might be like if Shakespeare were alive today and writing screenplays (though one hopes that they would turn out considerably better than this one happens to be). The "unique" characteristic of the film is that the characters discuss the meaning of life and the complexities of relationships entirely in poetic verse. Pure rhymes, slant rhymes, internal rhymes - virtually every type of rhyme can be found in this film. The problem is that the novelty of the conceit wears off mighty quickly, so that all we are ultimately left with are a bunch of pretentious, whiney characters driving us crazy with their high-toned blathering. Allow me to propose a simple rule of thumb: you know you'll be needing a sturdy pair of hip boots to wade through any movie, play or novel in which two of the main characters are referred to simply as He and She. I hope I won't be dismissed as a Philistine for objecting to this film. As a matter of fact, I am always open for anything even remotely novel and different in film-making, and I actually quite like the idea of a movie that plays like an extended poem. The problem is that I just couldn't stand any of the people we were being asked to care about in this particular work. Joan Allen and Sam Neill play a middle-aged English couple whose marriage has long ago become a hollow shell. They are clearly intended to be models of the enervated upper class - cynical, bored, filled with ennui and unable to communicate their innermost thoughts and feelings to one another - but we've seen these types of characters and marriages so many times before that Anthony and She feel more like caricatures than actual people (I'm not quite sure why he gets a real name and she - I mean She - doesn't, but no matter). And their speaking in verse only makes them all that more insufferable in their pseudo-profundity and monumental self-absorption. Allen, due to her extraordinary gifts as an actress, is at least able to cut through the pretentiousness and create some feeling for her character, but Neill and Simon Abkarian (who looks distressingly like Borat), as a chef from Beirut who becomes her lover (he's the He to Allen's She), are not quite so fortunate. Moreover, to make matters worse, in a movie in which language plays such a crucial part, some of the accents are so thick that much of the dialogue is simply incomprehensible. That only compounds the frustration of watching the movie. There are some genuinely lyrical moments when the movie seems to be working and we can see what the filmmakers were trying to get at. But, unfortunately, those wind up being too few and far between to keep us from voting a resounding "Nay" to "Yes."

I suppose for some, this movie has some redeeming qualities. For me, however, I found myself hitting the fast-forward button through 75% of the film. First of all, the attempt at having all of the characters dialog rhyme was extremely distracting and so removed from real life that it made the already uninteresting plot even more unbearable. Since I spent most of the time fast-forwarding through what seemed to me as the ridiculous and mundane, you should really watch the movie for yourself and make your own judgements. Maybe you'll get lucky and actually be able to get into it. One word of advice, rent this movie first prior to purchasing. You'll be glad you did. I'll be putting my copy up for sale on eBay.

Please be prepared, because you may like this film. To be one of those, you must dislike President Bush and join other Europeans and Middle Easterners in hating the US, its influence, and its foreign policy. Joan Allen, a liberal wacko in real life, is a woman who comes to understand that her country is a bad and egotistical one. One a good note, some music in the soundtrack is excellent! From several Chopin pieces, to a Brahms waltz, to a snippet of Rachmaninov, the music in this film is mostly very satisfying. The acting in and of itself is also very good. The cinematography and scenes are picturesque as well. The entire film is written in silly poetry, yes, with rhymes! The filmmakers took Ms. Allen to rap/poetry readings (definitely "art") so she would understand this film's dialogue by Sally Potter. It is boring and slow moving, and it's supremely annoying with its forced rhyming (oh sorry, RAP) and unveiled loathing of the US. This is pure rubbish; and it's easy to see why Hollywood continues to moan about decreasing box office revenues each year. If this is the sort of product they produce, the trend will most certainly continue.

Incredible achievement. One of the year's best. The language is poetry. (I hope the DVD will include the script.) Great Casting. The performances strike the right note, which leaves room for the story to paint the picture for us to enjoy ... It's like sitting with a masterpiece, this one. To be taken in. An inquiry into our modern human condition ... it combines politics into personal intrigue. I'm reminded of Baz Luhrman's take on 'Romeo and Juliet', the clash of worlds. I like Potter's unique style, however. I recommend this film for almost anyone, even though it is challenging and some may not appreciate it. Hey, it's all personal, or is it? Note: R. Ebert's review reflects Potter's intent most closely I believe.

The director Sally Potter in her movie "Yes" gives us an unfinished film. The director tried to gives us Shakespearian style by directing the actors to talk with certain melody which is supposed to be in the Shakespearian style, but it's not. The actors' monotone speech and slow past of scenes contributed to a boring piece of work which can be compare to "Northfork." The movie "Yes" might work if there were better components like better transition between the scenes or for example: in the movie during one of the shots we see beautiful natural trees with flowers and this scene is spoiled by plastic flowers in the hospital. The actors did and okay job. Also the vulgar language with f-words does not fit with this movie and it's not call for. So it's up to you if you would like to see this lousy movie!

Not since Shakespeare's day have playwrights written entire screenplays in iambic pentameter, but writer/director Sally Potter might single-handedly start the trend again. However, it took me over a half hour to realize that the whole film was one epic poem – before then all I thought was, "This dialogue is horrible! People don't actually speak like this!" But that's the point. Poetry is not meant to imitate average speech. That's why it's poetry. Joan Allen plays a lonely wife (whose name is never mentioned) trapped in a loveless marriage who has a fiercely passionate affair with a Muslim man from Lebanon. Because she was born in Northern Ireland (but raised, however, in America), she thinks she understands her lover's pain and suffering as an Arab man living in London. These two lovers fight about race, class, religion, politics, stereotypes, and identity, and with the recent bombings on the London Underground, this film is unsettlingly too relevant. Yes is a superb love poem that speaks volumes about what we, as a society, are afraid to mention in our post-9/11 world. But unfortunately, sitting through this film feels more like homework than pleasure.