Hey folks, Harry here... Peyton Reed was onto something brilliant in BRING IT ON, there was something moving, stirring and it just brought one to attention in their seat about that flick. However, I get the idea that this movie will lack that brilliance of costume design and audacious flaunting of talents. Sigh. However, this actually has quite a great premise to it, and Renee Zellweger is on a streak of damn good romantic comedies, this time she's in a parody, let's see what McFly says...
Hey Harry! Marty McFly here. I viewed what I believe to be the first test screening of Down With Love last night. I remembered during the casting process that the trades kept explaining this was "an homage to the early 1960's sex comedies starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson." I admit that I was rather indifferent to the idea. When I was young my mother used to love those movies, and the only one I ever watched all the way through was Pillow Talk. Later in my life, after seeing John Frankenheimer's Seconds, I held some contempt for those films when I realized that Hudson was truly slumming and capable of so much more as an actor. Regardless, I found Pillow Talk to be enjoyable, light-hearted yet empty romantic comedy and I assumed the others followed suit.
So on to Down With Love, the parody of the Rock Hudson/Doris Day sex comedies of the early 1960's. I know the word "homage" was used earlier but that is certainly not the case here. Down With Love is to those comedies what Scary Movie was to horror films, sans the gross-out jokes.
The movie opens with one of those montages, complete with a voice-over, about the Big Bang theory, set against clips of a chaotic New York city circa 1963. Renee Zellweger, in the Doris Day role, plays a farm girl from Maine who arrives in the Big Apple after writing a novel called "Down With Love." The book offers women a 3 step plan to swearing off the dreaded "L" word. Her theory is that once women learn to forget about love and just have sex for the fun of it, they can focus all of their attention on becoming independent and having a career. Ewan McGregor takes on the Hudson role as a big-time journalist/playboy for a huge men's magazine. McGregor shrugs the small town girl off as not being worth his time, but when her book becomes an international phenomenon, he becomes intrigued. He tries to make her fall for him so he can write an story exposing the "Down With Love" girl as a fraud.
Director Peyton Reed (Bring It On) has gone to great lengths to recreate the feel of the earlier films. The sets are all decorated with vibrant colors, the skylines in the windows are all gloriously fake-looking, the backgrounds in the car scenes are all obviously processed, and the period costumes are present. From a technical standpoint, the elements are all in place to create a nice little tribute to an era when movies were good clean fun. However, it seems as though Reed could not decide whether he was paying tribute or making fun of those films. The movie wildy veers from homage to spoof, and neither approach ends up working.
While playing it straight may have been the more predictable route to take, that method would have let me leave the theater feeling more satisfied. I found myself, as I watched, wishing the film would skip the playful jabs and mockery, and just tell me a old fashioned sweet love story. Forget all that "wink wink, we're making fun so don't take this seriously" crap. There are some nice clever stabs at some of the cliches of those films, such as Hudson's tendencies to show some skin by changing shirts as often as possible. On the other hand, there are complete misfires like a choreographed dance number when Zellweger and her editor enter a restaurant dressed to kill. The split screen phone conversations that dominated those films is put to raunchy use here, ripping off the scenes from Austin Powers where strategic staging makes the actors appear to be doing something dirty. Reed also needs to show more restraint, as quite a few of the jokes long overstay their welcome.
Zellweger is out of place here, for she is no Doris Day. She can play cute but she is lacking that magnetism necessary to understand why everyone finds her so irresistable. McGregor is a revelation. He has charisma to spare and he certainly proves himself to be a gifted comic performer. In the first act of the film, he is in danger of being upstaged by David Hyde Pierce, filling in for Tony Randall (who has a cameo as Zellweger's publisher), as the journalist's boss but social inferior. Pierce plays neurotic to a tee and he gets some of the funniest lines in the film. Later, McGregor gets his chance to shine when he creates a new persona for himself in order to woo Zellweger. The chemistry between the leads is adequate but it pales in comparison to Hudson and Day, whose sparks were even more amazing considering he was gay!
Although the film walks a thin line for most of it's running time. During the final act, the film takes an unpredictable turn that is horrendously misconceived and confusing. The resolution tries so hard to poke fun at the every-comic-misunderstanding-gets-cleared-up-and-they-live-happily-ever-after endings, and the strain was felt by the entire audience last night.
This movie is scheduled for April of next year. Even with a reshot ending, the movie still fails on the level that was intended. This is a poor substitute for the real thing which is sitting on a video shelf near you.I'll see ya' in the future!
Marty McFly
