I'll tell you why so serious

As Good As It Gets

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

One of those European films that chooses an American star to look more acceptable for American audiences, German Director Tom Tykwer's "A Hologram for the King" still looks irredeemably continental, with all the pluses and minuses that that entails.Basically, that means visually interesting, thought-provoking, weird, and not always seeming to make perfect sense!Primarily, Hanks plays (pretty straight, if with moments of comedy) a US businessman working at high level in sales, whose life has been uneven and seems to have gone into a bit of a downward spiral as middle age takes hold. Tellingly, and perhaps as a highlight of this film, Hanks's face glues on a broader and broader smile as he meets his more-youthful team each day, notwithstanding the weird and trying circumstances all are facing as they set up - VERY slowly - to make a high-tech sales pitch in Saud Arabia.Also importantly, our man Alan Clay is both a purveyor and a victim of globalisation, and this topic looms large a couple of times in the film (including at its - again telling - end). Globalisation has put a barrier between Alan and his traditionalist father and is of course what explains Alan's globetrotting in the first place. He is present in countries with Western-looking hotels and advertising hoardings on the surface, but with actually an entirely different culture just (a few millimetres) below that surface.Where "weird" is concerned, well that word is liable to arise from time to time in the watcher of this film (most especially on the scene of a party for diplomats who apparently respond to the strain of their somewhat repressive posting by abandoning absolutely all inhibitions!) But of course the weirdness does not stand in the way of what can at times be absolutely beautiful filming, featuring many scenes of simply gorgeous places where the desert meets the sea.Except that it is not THAT desert and not THAT sea, for this piece is filmed in Morocco (and Egypt), but only a little in Saudi; and that's a deflating discovery, as a key pleasure for the filmgoer is to cogitate on what Saudi Arabia is like. The best we can do here is imagine ... on the basis of concocted Arabia-like locations, and that's a great pity.Presumably, the distance from the true locations offered the artistic distance necessary to achieve the somewhat negative and critical portrayal that we get here, of Saudis as haughty, enigmatic, unpredictable, unreliable (at least from a Western point of view), restricters of rights, users of the death penalty and so on ... as well as of course super-rich! In turn, their kingdom is portrayed here - perhaps authentically - as an edgy place in which various people fear various things, but also endlessly try to "get round" impositions. There's thus considerable hypocrisy on show, to add to the other depicted downsides.Certainly, the first few semi-comedic scenes of the film are intended to show us how completely alienated the Hanks character Alan may be feeling in this new world. But helping him bridge the gap is driver and guide Yousef - a pleasantly dodgy character who offers a sympathetic highlight of the film ... but is in fact played by New York-born Alexander Black!Now that is another somewhat weird circumstance.And yet all this is the strange new world the Hanks character ultimately chooses to live and work in, having fallen in love with a lady doctor who treats his afflictions physical and mental. (And since said doctor is played by London-born Sarita Choudhury, who is half-Indian, we are again being presented with something that is not quite what it is making out to be).Now does the whole possibly hang together as a story? Not really, for how could it?And naturally, some of this is down to Dave Eggers, who wrote the original novel (as he also wrote the in-some-ways-very-innovative "The Circle", whose screen version also features Hanks).However, a certain amount of pleasure (and cross-cultural enlightenment) is to be had as we follow Alan through the aforesaid, pretty unlikely transition, hence I'm risking a 7 for an effort that is fairly unique (though ever-so-slightly recalling the (better?) 2011 film-of-the-book "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen").

I mean it's a useless movie, but it has Tom Hanks, one of the nicest people ever existed, so it's nice to watch, weirdly I didn't get bored even though it was a pretty meaningless movie, the shots and locations were nice which made it exciting but the dialogues weren't so exciting or meaningful so is the story, I mean actually, I think the idea was pretty cool I think they would make a lot more with that story, but it felt like they were in a rush. it feels like you are listening to a long story from the person who lived the story and they are just trying to tell you in 5 minutes. so it would be more, why it didn't? though it is a bright storytelling I guess, nice to watch when you have extra time.

To summarize things, I am a huge Tom Hanks fan. I love to see his movies over and over. The Terminal (2004) - I don't know how many times I have seen that movie and even cried. But this particular movie also made me cry, because of the intense level of pain. Totally unexpected from Tom Hanks, that he will go through with such a character and a script. I have tried to watch this movie and for the first several attempts, I failed. The movie has no attraction points. There is almost no scene where you can get amazed and set yourself for the rest of the movie. Everything is so hazy and without any solid purpose.I will still be seeing more of Tom Hank's movies. But I don't expect him to work on such type of characters.

This movie comes close to hitting it out of the park. Alan Clay is a Willy Loman figure. He outsourced production of Schwinn, an American icon, to China and the company went under when the Chinese undercut Schwinn. Clay bitterly describes the result "all the bikes are the same, just different labels for different companies" and the Chinese of course can sell theirs for a fraction of what Schwinn does.Now he finds himself on a "do or die" mission for his current company. His job is to sell a holographic communications package to the Royal Family in Saudi Arabia.He has to negotiate a number of obstacles, both real and imaginary, to achieve his goal. There is a literal "monkey on his back" that represents his state in life. Once he gets rid of that the life he imagined comes back...or does it? Karma both gives and takes.Tighter editing would have made this a much better picture. Perhaps some voice-over dialogue from Clay to emphasize the Willy Loman in him. Flashbacks to the good ol' days when he was the king (of sales) himself.