Woody Allen and Bette Midler star as a well-heeled couple who spend their 16th wedding anniversary at the mall shopping for a party that they're throwing that night. In the course of the shopping afternoon, they watch their marriage hit the rocks as serious problems develop when the guy admits to an earlier infidelity, and an out-and-out argument develops. ~ Rovi
Mazursky has returned with a vengeance to his special universe where the upper middle class is the only thing that exists, and this time he has absolutely nothing to say about it.
When a movie seems overflowing with interesting, colorful details, that is often a sign of desperation -- a way of saying, if the picture's no good, get a gaudier frame.
Saw it. Talky. Why Woody Allen? Would have been better with a real actor. Bette Midler is terrific as always.
December 21, 2010
Pete Skeris
A Los Angeles couple (the improbably paired Woody Allen and Bette Midler) head for the mall on their anniversary to do some shopping and, among other things, wind up revealing marital infidelities and having sex with each other in a movie theater. Aside from the idea of the neurotic Allen visiting a mall, there is
surprisingly little entertainment value here. Both actors exert serious effort to impart a humorous spin to some of the most pretentious and tedious dialogue in recent memory. Shadowed by a particularly irksome mime, an overdressed mariachi band and a barbershop quartet singing carols, the two trade barbs at the mall's various milieus. Sometimes the situations are fresh and funny -- as when they are overcome by lust at a matinee of "Salaam Bombay" --but mostly they are stale and therapeutic. Still Allen and Midler, with their various other flaws in common, recall partners who have been together so long they are starting to look like each other. They do indeed seem caught up in the conflicting emotions of breaking up, alternately furious, tenderhearted and aggrieved. The trouble is that as California trendies, they make such familiar targets.
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