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Please Give | 2010 | R | - 7.3.6

A husband and his wife (Oliver Platt and Catherine Keener) own a vintage future store and two adjacent apartments in New York City. Along with their daughter (Sarah Steel), they wait for their difficult elderly next-door tenant (Ann Guilbert) to die in order to combine and renovate the apartments, and her adult granddaughters (Rebecca Hall and Amanda Peet) bring additional friction to the relationships. Also with Josh Paris, Elise Ivy, Thomas Ian Nicholas and Lois Smith. Directed by Nicole Holofcener. [1:30]

SEX/NUDITY 7 - In a massage room in a spa, a woman lies on top of a man on a table, face to face, and thrusts for several seconds as if in the act of sex (both are fully clothed); later he stands behind her in the darkened massage room as she faces a wall and thrusts, again as if in the act of sexual intercourse.
 The opening scene shows a dozen pairs of bare female breasts in sequence, all being placed on a mammogram machine for testing.
 Several scenes depict a fully clothed man and his wife in bed, talking: in one scene they hold hands, in another they lie side by side under covers, revealing part of the man's bare chest, and another scene shows the same man lying in a bed with a different woman and the woman tells the man that she no longer wants to have sex with him (using crude terms). A man and a woman kiss briefly on a sidewalk.
 A teen girl wears a low-cut blouse that reveals cleavage and a twenty-something woman appears in various low-cut blouses that reveal cleavage. A teen girl tries on two pairs of low-cut jeans that reveal her bare abdomen. At a family dinner, a man briefly peers down the blouse of a younger woman guest and then looks away.
 A man tells his wife that a celebrity has a tiny penis and that he worries that his penis hairs are longer than his penis. Two women agree that their 91-year-old grandmother has dyed "menopausal red" hair. Two women argue about why both of them never have a date. A man asks a woman if she was breast-fed and she replies she was not. A woman says that as a radiology technician, breasts are only tubes of potential death to her.

VIOLENCE/GORE 3 - A dead woman is shown sitting in her chair in front of the TV and an adult granddaughter discovers her and tearfully goes to the neighbor to tell them that her grandmother is dead; we then see the body wrapped in a sheet on a gurney being taken out of the building.
 A woman visits a nursing home and a recreation center for the developmentally disabled where we see many very old people and one woman is bent deeply at the waist with rheumatoid arthritis as she hobbles across the floor; the visitor begins to cry.
 An elderly woman speaks insultingly to relatives, repairmen and visitors several times a day and a woman curses several times in response to these outbursts and leaves. A mother and her teen daughter have several arguments about money, with the daughter cursing in all but one scene. Two women argue about their jobs and how long their cranky grandmother will live. A woman says "They look at me as if to say 'Is she dead yet?'" A woman asks how two apartments will be joined when the elderly tenant is dead; another woman objects loudly to the question. A man talks about an elderly woman having a long chin and nose hairs.
 A teen girl describes how an older homeless woman used their bathroom for a shower and then defecated on the bedroom floor before she left. A teen girl and a college-aged woman walk their dogs in NYC and carry bags that they say are dog feces. A woman tells a teen girl that her mother committed suicide when she was the teen's age and later the teen asks her mother if she's planning to do the same. A college-aged woman's older sister says their mother took 85 Valium pills to die. In a vintage furniture store, two women sit on a couch, as one tells another that vintage furniture has ghosts; one woman describes a vintage bed she had, in which a male ghost appeared to her each night for a while, but was not entertaining. A woman tells her sister that they are going to take their grandmother next door to the neighbor's for dinner so that, "They can poison grandma and demolish her apartment." We hear that a woman has cancer and needs surgery and she says, "The breast will come clean off, just like that."
 A teen girl examines a pimple on her nose in a store mirror until a clerk asks her if she needs help. A teen girl has a facial and we see her having her face steamed, having pimples and blackheads removed and describing that she will do a chemical peel that will make her look bad for a few days (we do not see the peel, but see the girl with a red, blotchy complexion later as she explains to her mother what happened and cries briefly).

LANGUAGE 6 - About 16 F-words, 1 obscene finger gesture, 9 scatological terms, 11 anatomical terms, 3 mild obscenities, name-calling (vulture, idiot, insane, old lady, old, alcoholic, filthy, duke, grease ball, cow, ambulance chasers, damaged stalker, loser), 44 stereotypical references (senior citizens, single women, married men, liberals, New Yorkers, successful business people, the homeless, teenage girls, lesbians, short men, tall women), 3 religious profanities, 8 religious exclamations.

SUBSTANCE USE - Several unlabeled medicine bottles sit on the dining room table of a recently deceased person, and a woman places several drug capsules into different compartments of a pill holder. A man drinks from a highball glass in a bar, a woman holds a beer bottle and another bottle sits beside a woman, a woman searches kitchen cabinets looking for liquor but can't find any, wine glasses sit on a dinner table, a woman drinks bourbon several times and acts as if she might be inebriated, and a man sips from a wine glass.

DISCUSSION TOPICS - Greed, materialism, old age, suicide, guilt, volunteerism, death, families, infidelity, love, suicide, reconciliation.

MESSAGE - Life is too short to worry and fight with each other.

CAVEATS

Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.

We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.

Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.


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