Flirting With Disaster

Normally, this type of comedy might be characterized as slapstick in the Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton mold, but its so clever and intelligent that its impossible to imagine this as a silly film.


COMIC TIMING.   January 7, 2004
Shashank Tripathi (Gadabout)
12 out of 13 found this review helpful

Where to begin! Lily Tomlin and Alan Ada at the top of their game in an all-round stellar comic starcast. Lighthearted but biting dialogue that houses a charming warmth for its dysfunctional characters.

And a doozy theme: a new father's search for his birth parents. He can't name his own baby until he knows more about where he came from. The adoption agent who accompanies them is the epitome of the high strung New Yorker, whose goofs and gaffs lead the group into one riotous predicament after another. Particularly funny if you have recently been thinking of names for a baby, or if you can laugh at 60's counterculture.

The movie is funniest in the last 15 minutes or so. The closing credits alone are worth the price of admission (or DVD). Recommended rental. Even better the second time round.


Fantastic!   May 1, 2000
C. Pencil
11 out of 12 found this review helpful

This is certainly one of the funniest flims to come along in years and years. It is filled with memorable dialog and scenes that are so much fun you'll want to see them over and over. The cast is superb. Everyone is great. Mary Tyler Moore and George Segal as Stiller's adoptive parents are perfect. As he begins the search for his real parents he meets some hilarious characters and it all culminates in the meeting of Lily Tomlin and Alan Alda. Without giving too much away, let me just say that this movie is priceless! A must see.

My highest compliments to the writers and director.


Doctor, my brain hurts   May 6, 2000
Malcolm Lawrence (Seattle)
9 out of 29 found this review helpful

This film is so plot-driven and relentlessly acrobatic with it's schematics and motivations that each time the narrative threads are explained and advanced (SIMULTANEOUSLY) you have to juggle all the various strands so much that your mind freezes up with what's going on NOW. As a result the characters are hopelessly telegraphed, and even such talent as Alda and Tomlin (not to mention Mary Tyler Moore and George Segal as Mel's adopted parents) strain to do as much as they can with their roles, but the script is just so much smoke and mirrors to conjure up situations and confrontations that act as dramatizations of talk show themes that the film only really succeeds as a farce careening between an examination and commentary on as many different lifestyles as there are stories in the naked city, and an investigation of marriage.

Every lifestyle trotted out is held in suspicion by one character or another, not to mention the ironic distance the audience is given. Only motherhood (if you can call that a "lifestyle," maybe in a passive/aggressive way it's a "lifestyle" choice) has the obvious sacrosanctity glowing around it like a halo. And how does marriage hold up? Underneath all the plot mechanizations, the basic temptations are A) will the father, who is not sexually interested in his wife because she's still getting her body back into shape after giving birth, fall for the randy, recently divorced adoption agent with the "dancer's legs" (some of us call them toothpicks, despite what Hollywood moguls deem erotic) who is trying her best to get into his pants and B) will the mother fall for the buff, caring 90s bisexual stud who is emotionally "there" for her and has much more time and understanding for her predicament and her child than the husband?

Patricia Arquette does the best acting out of all of the cast members and displays the only real voice of sanity in this mess, despite the fact that the filmmakers deemed it necessary to show her boobs every chance they got. Why they didn't show her legs so we could compare them with the "dancer's" legs is beyond me. In the introductory scene when Arquette is lounging on her bed, you do get a slight glimpse of her shapely legs (as in SHAPE-ly, not shape-LESS like the "dancer's") and they looked a lot HEALTHIER and certainly more EROTIC than the TOOTHPICKS/ NEEDLES/STRING CHEESE legs of the "dancer." At root, this film is like an ideological challenge for males: Loving Wife and Caring Mother vs. Sexual Temptation. After it was done I felt like I'd been through some sort of whirlwind. My brain hurt.