Something's Gotta Give

Rating:
Summary: Could have been ok....if it was EDITED PROPERLY!!
Review: Wow....I was so excited when the movie started...after the dancing harveys, but then it died. And died. And died again. To the point where I wished that a carachtar would die so it would end. If only this movie had had a plot....like 12 storylines that don't meet in the middle. If it had been bad, I could have left in the beginning and gotten 2 hours of my life back. The worst thing since "It's Pat-The Movie". YUK!!

Rating:
Summary: Lovely.
Review: When it comes to mature, witty, sophisticated romantic comedy of matters of the heart, no writer/director does it better than Nancy Meyers (WHAT WOMEN WANT, FATHER OF THE BRIDE).

What I find this love comedy really lovely is that it gently embarks on the chances of a relationship and continues to unfold the sequence of its certainty, without falling short or being too dramatic. An approximately two and a half hours total length may be quite unnecessary for a comedy, but the dialogues are worth it in every scope of the scenes. Especially when they're coming from both expressively animative Jack and Diane, it's simply convincing and fun to look at!

The soundtrack is lovely too, wafting a number of sultry Cuban/Latin American music selected by the fine Alan Silvestri, who also directed the sountrack of WHAT WOMEN WANT.

Rating:
Summary: another excuse to portray women as weak and pathetic
Review: After numerous wonderful reviews, I went to watch this movie. It's entertaining if you don't mind being told in a movie when something funny is going to happen and that you should be prepared to laugh.

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.

Rating:
Summary: No stars as far as I am concerned!!
Review: Chick flick? This flick made this chick sick. I am a 49 year old woman and went to this thinking it would be great to see two of my favorite stars together. Wrong. I couldn't wait to get out of the theater and sat there with my arms folded waiting to at least crack a smile, which never happened. And that stupid crying scene - another reviewer was right, they knew each other a week and slept together one night and that was enough to cause hysterics? I was embarrassed for Diane Keaton and bored senseless. To me, Keanu Reeves was the best thing about this movie, I don't understand all the negative reviews about him. He could just stand there and not say a word and be better than Jack and Diane were in this movie. And to the reviewer who said the movie took place on "Cape Teddy Kennedy", sorry, you're wrong, it took place in the Hamptons in NY (stated more than once). Ted and Co are on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Where all of us nice liberals live...

Rating:
Summary: Keaton Fantastic in a Wonderful Movie
Review: Some reviewers apparently hated this movie so much they have reviewed it several times giving it a lower score each time. I say move on to something you like and don't try to ruin a movie that has truly touched the heart of so many baby-boomers. Diane Keaton is simply marvelous as a middle-aged woman who falls in love for the first time. Few have the talent to move effortlessly between comedy and drama, but Ms. Keaton does. She makes you laugh one minute and touches your heart the next. Perhaps her success in this film will show the studios that just because she has passed fifty doesn't mean that her incredible and delightful talent has diminished in the least.

Rating:
Summary: Really Good Movie
Review: I really liked this movie because it was extremly funny and still had romance. I feel that this movie would be great for all mature veiwers who like great comedy with a romantic twist.
-Camile

Rating:
Summary: Weak, even for its target audience
Review: 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".

Rating:
Summary: Fun and Entertaining
Review: Diane Keaton is outstanding in her lead role in this movie. Jack Nicholson is hysterical. I laughed through out the entire movie.
Its wonderful to see a fun, romantic comedy where the actors are mature adults. No kid stuff here, this is a comedy anyone over 35 can relate to and appreciate. My favorite scene is Diane's crying scene - which is still hysterically funny. A great fun movie.

Rating:
Summary: You'll Love it it You're Over 40
Review: This is a wonderful romantic comedy for the over 40 crowd, especially women. The hospital scenes with Harry are hilarious. While the romance between the Keaton and Revees characters is a bit hard to believe, the Keaton and Nicolas on sceen fire will keep you interested and entertained. Many laughs and a movie to own.

Rating:
Summary: Jack and Diane -- a nice pair
Review: Oscar nominee Diane Keaton stars with her old friend Jack Nicholson in the film about learning to play with kids your own age. A test disc looked fine despite speckles here and there. Audio was just OK. Director Nancy Meyers does separate commentary tracks with her two stars. Keaton doesn't start talking until 40 minutes into the movie (until her brief nude scene has safely passed). "That's a fiction!" Keaton says at one point, as her character walks toward the camera, gorgeous and dressed to kill. "It is you -- there are no special effects," Meyers assures the famously shy actress. Fans of Keaton and Nicholson will get a kick out of comparing the actors' comments about their extended lovemaking scene. Keaton talks mostly about how embarrassed she was -- Nicholson is so precise about the acting techniques he used it seems as if he's pulling our legs.