IT'S COMPLICATED. So, that's what you call it!

If you're dying to see a movie about the filthy rich in Southern California (Santa Barbara, to be exact) encountering self-absorbed, self-induced 'problems' of self-perception, then this is THE movie for you. Actually, it's not that complicated - in fact, it's less complicated than High School Musical. However, it does have its pleasures. And a few good laughs too. This is probably a good movie to watch on an airplane.

And here's another foxy actress in her 60's (move over, Sigourney). Meryl Streep is in close up all the time, and quite a few body shots (no naughty bits) - looking still firmly in the dating game. Sexy.

And paired with a very naughty, utterly amoral Alec Baldwin, their scenes together are by far the best in the movie.

However, do we really care?

Here's Meryl with her Bakery empire, money is in constant unending supply like the gas pipe from Alaska, and she never hurts. Until one day, her harpie coffee-morning friends stick it to her that she may have everything but she doesn't have a man. Thereby starting the decline of a successful independent intelligent woman to a quivering self-doubting mess.

The movie posits that you're not 'really there' until you're successfully paired. There's always something that is impeding your true happiness.

At the start of the movie, she's experiencing empty-nest syndrome, and instead of scaling downwards like most normal people would (especially having put your kid through NYU.....hello!), she's building a Xanadu of new kitchens onto her sprawling hacienda, entirely for herself. That's a simple example of what's wrong with this movie. All of the people in it have this bizarre sense of entitlement, and the movie keeps on giving, without question. A visit to New York must have the entire family staying at the New York Regent. Why? Because it's so nice. Mere 'simple' parties at people's houses must be catered like Oscar nights, and nobody stops to notice HOW FUCKING PRIVILEGED THEY ARE, and the mexicans who work in the background are never seen. These poeple can't enjoy a life like this without the support of immigrant slavery - but here, everybody walks on air and there's no visible support. The smugness of the noblese oblige eventually creates distance (because they are SO protected from the great unwashed out there), and that distance makes us care less and less and less and less. They never get their shoes dirty, and if they did, the movie would immediately give them new clean shoes without question. Why spoil the mirth?

The movie deals with Meryl's dangeous liaisons with Alec Baldwin, her ex-husband currently married to Agnes, who stole him away in the first place. And it's less about her moral quandry in the act of adultery, than her worry about becoming vulnerable. In fact, when she breaks the news of her adultery to her man-hating, self-piteous, open-wound-licking divorced harpie friends, the pious moral outrage that they have ravenously fed on through the years (at being abandoned for younger women), suddenly flips into Hellelujah chorus of revenge, rendering their abhorence of adultery irrelevant. I guess when you're selfish, anything works that FEELS right.

It sounds complicated. But it's not really.