Stars: Meg Ryan, Diane Keaton, Lisa Kudrow, Walter Matthau, Adam Arkin, Cloris Leachman, Maree Cheatham

Director: Diane Keaton

Summary: Eve is pulled in all directions by her two sisters and her cranky dad becoming a means of connecting all three by telephone. She soon realises that a good idea is to hang up...

Daddy's favorite daughter is over-extended in this Diane Keaton-directed comedy about loving, laughing, and learning to let go. Meg Ryan plays party-planner Eve, a streched-too-thin mother, wife, sister, and dutiful daughter. Eve's harried life has become even more complicated by her reliance on modern technology--her cell phone, fax machine, lap top, and answering machine assist in tying up her already busy life. Walter Matthau is her ailing 79-year-old father, Lou, a curmudgeonly grouch who is admitted into the hospital with memory loss. Eve tries to recruit help with her father from her two neglectful sisters: Georgia (Diane Keaton), a New York publishing tycoon who runs her own magazine, the self-titled "Georgia," and baby sister Maddy (Lisa Kudrow), a self-involved soap opera actress. Hoping to please her father, Eve also tries to reach out to her mother (Cloris Leachman) who abandoned the family years earlier. But finally Eve must learn to "hang up" on the pressures, obligations, and responsibilities of being a do-it-all woman. Real-life sisters Nora and Delia Ephron co-wrote the screenplay to HANGING UP, which was adapted from Delia Ephron's book. HANGING UP was Walter Matthau's last film before his death in 2000.

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You've got to admire a movie that embraces womanhood as so few mainstream movies do, and Hanging Updeserves credit for combining issues of sisterhood and elderly parent care while relying on neuroses to carry its unconventional plot. But you've also got to lament this botched "dramedy" from screenwriting sisters Nora and Delia Ephron (adapting the latter's novel) and director Diane Keaton, who lack a coherent plan for illuminating their trio of female siblings. Despite a sharp focus on Meg Ryan as the middle sister Eve--a capable Los Angeles event planner--the movie never quite seems to know where it's going, and you feel like the best scenes are merely happy accidents. In exploring the foibles of family, Keaton fared better with her earlier film Unstrung Heroes.

In addition to directing, Keaton plays the eldest sister Georgia, a celebrity magazine editor, and Lisa Kudrow is kid sister Maddy, a soap-opera actress who's nearly as self-absorbed as Georgia. They leave it to Eve to care for their declining father (Walter Matthau), a retired screenwriter who slips in and out of lucidity and is, at best, a cantankerous curmudgeon whose estranged wife (Cloris Leachman) has long since severed all family ties. This is potent material--at least it could have been--and Ryan admirably struggles to hold the film together. But it's ultimately a losing battle as the movie, so full of cell phones and disconnected people (hence the title), becomes disconnected itself, offering hollow humour and a few memorable moments with characters whose problems are too minimal to worry about. --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com

Aspect Ratio:	1.85 Wide Screen, 16:9 Anamorphic Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Interactive Menus, Scene Selections, Deleted Scene, Filmographies, The Making Of, Trailer, Outtakes, Isolated Score
Subtitles:	Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Polish, Swedish, Turkish
Year:	2000
Release Date:	November 27, 2000
Runtime:	91 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	C D R 29098
Keywords:	Comedy, General, Wide, Screen, Hanging, Up
Genre:	Comedy