Something's Gotta Give

I am in my early 30s and have never known anyone (male or female) to find someone almost 3 times their age attractive, much less this film's Harry. Harry is not believable as a successful hop hop record producer nor is he believable as stud who can have any 20-something year old woman he wants. I give 20-something year old women more credit than that.

Erica weeps for days over the loss of her love Harry. She weeps as she pathetically tells him she loves him and she wishes it lasted more than a week. Later Erica tells Marin that she had never taken a chance with love before as she continues to cry. I was disgusted in the theater - close to walking out - crying over a over person who you loved for years and then betrayed you is believable - this farce was not. Give us a break - had Erica been 20 and Harry been 25 we would have chalked the short-term failed relationship to infatuation. Why just because these characters are older are we expected to believe the unbelievable? I give older women more credit than that.


Tip: Don't buy the in-flight headset - nap instead   April 20, 2004
verafides (Somewhere above the earth)
14 out of 23 found this review helpful

Apparently, when airlines plan the in-flight "entertainment" on their cross-country flights, they go under three assumptions: 1. They have a captive audience. 2. This audience would rather look at a tiny screen in the dark than see the Rocky Mountains. 3. People that fly in airplanes are stupid and in menopause (note that, unlike this movie, I am drawing a distinction between these two groups).
This movie is nothing more grandiose than a low-grade soft-porn flick for old people. That neither the director nor the target audience realize this only further emphasizes the need for a serious re-evaluation of the voting privelages of the elderly. Personally, I would feel safer if our leaders were selected by 10-year-olds than by the ogling herds of fading Baby Boomers in elastic waisted pants that make up this movie's target audience.
Despite what the movie suggests, a man of Jack Nickelson's personal appearance and manner and age would only get a stupid young woman to eagerly wriggle out of her low-rise jeans if he was waving a couple of hundred dollars at her. (Note that the director eagerly waved a good bit more than a couple hundred at the actresses in this movie). Despite the fact that Jack once was young - he is not anymore - much like Joan Collins and Bill Clinton. He is an elderly, liver-spotted fool, and the movie only reminds us of this. I personally find this comforting, since it suggests that, one day, all of the Jack Nickelsons in the world will be dead - and we will thus be rid of them.
Of course Diane Keaton is just as laughable. Looking like she's had enough facelifts to safely tuck her chin(s) behind her ears (Diane to her private Surgeon: "COME ON! PULL IT TIGHTER! MY NEXT MOVIE IS SUPPOSED DEMONSTRATE THAT WOMEN SHOULDN'T BE JUDGED BY THEIR AGE AND LOOKS!"), she has all the emotional clarity that can imaginably be associated with a particularly ugly menopause. Diane is as likely to steal the heart of Keanu Reeves as she is to steal the heart of Alfonso the sea lion. Wait - scratch that - Sea lions are both overly amorous and near-sighted. Someone please tell Diane to steer clear of public aquaria!
In an effort to pile one insulting plot-twist on top of another, we are not only forced to watch Jack Nickelson and Diane Keaton hoot and hump all over the screen like a pair of manure-smeared orangutans, but they are unfortunately also given lines. We are thus faced not only with the impossible demand of picturing these miserable old fools constantly scoring young movie stars, but we are also asked to believe that they're clever and witty while doing it. I can only assume that they believe their audience is excessively gullible, lulled by the hormonal imbalances and extreme wishful thinking of a generation that thought JFK was an upright citizen. Then again, I was entrusting my life to a large chunk of machinery that was hurtling through the air 7 miles above the earth while I watched this movie. Who am I to talk about gullibility?
This movie demonstrates that, for the ideal retired person of today, the flower of old age - wisdom - has been traded in for a second go at the orangutan pen. If you're one of these old fools - by all means, watch this movie. If there's any dignity and decency left in your balding, liver-spotted skulls, it will awake screaming at the full-frontal assault this movie subjects it to. If this doesn't happen - may I suggest the SkyMall catalogue and a miniature bag of pretzels?


See Jack Nicholson play a Smarmwhale   December 20, 2005
Sally D. Mericle (balitmore, md USA)
13 out of 16 found this review helpful

As evidence of my recent malaise, I subjected myself last night to watching Something's Gotta Give with Jack Nicholson(who I can rarely stand any more) and Diane Keaton (who I thought I could stand but now realize I can't).

Why I sat through the whole stupid thing is beyond me. I had the beginnings of some perfectly good work in the studio. I'd already eaten my popcorn for the day, and I'd spent more than enough time on the couch. But sit through it I did.

Are there any words to describe the horror of seeing Jack Nicholson's baggy 60 something ass sticking out of a hospital gown? I know it was meant to be funny, but there are SOME things that are just too gross for humor. And this was one of them.

Was it a big fricking deal to see Diane Keaton's middle aged but acceptably perky breasts jiggling around as she tried to cover the rest of her 50+ but fit body in the infamous NUDE scene? No. there was no gratification, humorous or otherwise to seeing it.

Should I get all worked up to see dopey Keanu Reeves try to play a handsome young doctor smitten with an *older woman*?--no, because his brain still wasn't there no matter how hard he tried to look *intelligent*.

Should I toss whatever cookies might still remain in my stomach at the sight of a blubbery Jack Nicholson, all smarmy eyed to the max, getting all misty over Diane Keaton?? Christ almighty!

And worst of all-- do I HAVE to hear a good five minutes of Diane Keaton pretending to act like she's crying. Sobbing, wailing, moaning, getting it all OUT---all because she fell in LOVE with that blubbery smarmwhale and then saw him with a little blond chippy in a restaurant?

GOD!!!! are there not enough reasons in the world to shoot oneself without the cinema adding to it?

Have I said how STUPID, SAPPY, MORONIC and INSIPID this movie was???
well there, I just did.


A little ditty about Jack and Diane.   April 25, 2004
A. Ryan (Westminster, CA USA)
12 out of 15 found this review helpful

This is a nice film of the "chick flick" variety. You'll rent it with your girlfriend(s) because you are a fan of Keanu, Jack and/or Diane, because it's a feel-good movie movie and because you have no idea what else to get at the video store. You will pass a mild evening on the couch with a few giggles and popcorn.

Diane Keaton plays accomplished 50 something woman Erica Barry whose grown daughter Marin (Amanda Peet) is dating notorious 60 something bachelor Harry Sandborn (Jack Nicholson). After a rocky introduction at the family's beach house, Erica and Harry are in a continual state of hostility that in the movies can only mean sexual tension. Erica is of course idealistically outraged that such an older man is dating her daughter. The two of them trade snipes and pot shots. Inevitably, the odd couple are thrown together alone for a few days while Harry recovers from a heart attack. Harry is impressed with Erica's spirit and intelligence while Erica grudgingly notices that Harry has moments of irrepressible charm. But now it seems that a love triangle is being set up as his doctor (Keanu Reeves) has ironically started to fall for the much-older Erica. How will this mess get ironed out? Hmmmmm.

If you're thinking the plot sounds a bit predictable, you'd be right. The pacing is also a bit slow, the dvd had flaws in its color consistency and there was a general lack of things that would appeal to men in this movie. Jack and Diane hammed it up a little too much at times. At the end, I said to myself, "that was nice", but promptly forgot about it; not a sign of provocative, cutting edge screenswriting to be sure.

I do have to give this movie its props; not many have ever tried to tackle the May/December romance syndrome that is everywhere in Hollywood (which is a particular pet peeve of mine, I might add). Also, while the performances by the leads were over the top, these stars did make a nice pair with a good chemistry. There were also some very girly giggly moments. So it would seem that there is a place for Something's Gotta Give on the shelf of my favorite local video store...just not on the shelf of my home library.
-Andrea, aka Merribelle


Weak, even for its target audience   February 27, 2004
Filmbuff (Hong Kong)
11 out of 21 found this review helpful

Where "Lost in Translation" showed us a complex giving relationship between an older man and a younger woman, "Something's Gotta Give" is unrepentantly nasty about such relationships, which it sees as inevitably a character flaw in the older man.

At the same time it wants to have its cake and eat it by making no such criticisms of relationships between older woman and younger men.

It's not hard to see that the audience demographic for this movie is baby boom women who don't much like the idea that many men of their generation are now dating younger ones, but heartily applaud Cher and Demi Moore for their May/December romances.

In "Something's Gotta Give" Jack Nicholson's Harry Langer gets criticised for his interest in younger women. Frances McDormand as a woman's studies teacher laments that older men can date younger women but that older single women can't get dates at all. A former husband, played by Paul Michael Glaser, is criticised for wanting to remarry - inevitably - a younger woman.

Yet despite that, not only does Nicholson's character finally fall for older female playwright Erica Barry, played by Diane Keaton, so does Harry's young doctor Julian, played by Keanu Reeves. (And Keanu Reeves as a doctor, and an enthusiastic and astute intellectual judge of plays, is perhaps the film's biggest single bad joke.)

But even the better actors are disappointing. Jack Nicholson just does his Nicholson as bad boy schtick, a far remove from his superb performance in "Schmidt". Oscar nominated or not, Keaton gasps a lot.

It's an awful audience-pandering film, and one that will enjoyed pretty much only by precisely that sector of the female audience to which it is pandering. And it's set in a bizarre fantasy world. Doesn't writer and director Nancy Meyers know that Broadway is a highly competitive place these days, and that plays like the stuff Keaton's character writes wouldn't even get an off-Broadway venue? And yet we're to believe that Erica has got filthy rich from doing this kind of stuff.

And then there's the movie's double standard which merely reverses old sexist attitudes and replaces them with new ones. Older men and younger women bad. Older women and younger men fine.

In the end though the film dissatisfies even those who uphold this new double standard. It's even more conservative than that. Date within five years of your own age people. Even some women critics, to whom you might expect this movie to appeal, have said they don't believe the final scene for a second. Neither do I.

In the nineteen-fifties Douglas Sirk directed the wonderful "All that Heaven Allows", in which a middle-aged Jane Wyman fell for a young Rock Hudson. It was a plea for openness in judging the relationships of others, and it's sometimes depressing to realise that in some ways, and particularly in some PC ways, Hollywood is more conservative now than it was in those days, merely replacing the prejudices of one era with those of another.

Like many others, I lament the fact that Hollywood puts many fine actresses out to seed too early. I do wish we had more romances involving older men AND women. I quite liked - for instance - Australian directors Paul Cox's "Innocence" which was about a love affair between two people in their seventies. But, even - or maybe especially - those of us who'd like to see movies skewed a little less to youth audiences deserve a lot better than the audience pandering of "Something's Gotta Give".