Stadt, Land, Kuss

This thing was beyond crap, and I don't use that word often. I had heard it was bad, so I rented it for dud night, and called my sister to come watch it, because we need to bounce our comments off each other. Well, she left halfway through, vowing to watch Lord of The Rings, to try to cleanse her brain. I'm going to use a toilet brush on mine.

I should have known it wasn't an ordinary bad movie in the first scene. There's Grampa, aka Warren Beatty, sitting in a bed, trying to cover his wrinkled shoulders with the sheet. Talk about stomach-turning. That's the plot in a nutshell, old Warren pretending it's 1966 when swingers like him hopped on the nearest woman as regularly as they hopped on a plane.

Seriously, there is no plot. Every washed-up actor or actress in Hollywood is invited to drop by to make an ass of him (or her) self, including Charleton Heston, who must have already been in the grip of his recently-announced Alzheimer's Disease. I know rents are high in Los Angeles, but how badly do these people need money? And did any of them even get any? This stinker can't have made a nickel.

I can't summarize this mess because there was no rhyme or reason anywhere. I can't describe the wild over-acting, except to call it amateur night. All I can do is recommend that nobody, and I mean nobody, watch this thing. Don't inadvertently let your dog or cat see it. It's so bad you can't even make fun of it. That's how bad it is.

Porter Stoddard (Warren Beatty) is a successful New York architect married to Ellie (Diane Keaton) with whom he has two children. Unbeknownst to Ellie, Porter is having an affair with a cellist named Alex (Natassja Kisnki). When the Stoddard's longtime friends the Morris' consisting of Mona (Goldie Hawn) and Griffin (Garry Shandling) go through a turbulent divorce after Mona discovers Griffin's infidelity, Porter travels with Mona to Louisiana to help her assess a property she owns and the two end up sleeping together resulting in further complications.

Following British director, Peter Chelsom's initial success on smaller films that garnered critical praise like Hear My Song, Funny Bones, and The Mighty, Chelsom was hired to do Town & Country a modestly budget $40 million comedy with an all star cast for New Line Cinema penned by Michael Laughlin who while more known as a producer, did have some writing credits on films like Strange Invaders and Strange Behavior as well as the 1986 drama Mesmerized. Production was a nightmare from the start with Beatty clashing with director Chelsom, the script was still being re-written as filming was going on (not an uncommon practice in the industry). Beginning production in 1998, production went through 1999 due to Shandling and Keaton needing to leave to work on other films with filming not resuming for another year. In the interim Buck Henry had been paid $3 million to do some "brush up" work that lead to him being credited on the final film alongside Laughlin. New scenes were added in reshoots in 2000 including a divorce mediator played by Henry, closure scenes, and a subplot featuring Charlton Heston and Andie MacDowell resulting in the final production budget being somewhere around $90-125 million. The film was finally released into theaters in April of 2001 where New Line knew they had a bomb on their hands and kept the marketing to a minimum with no press screenings. Critics who reviewed the film were predominantly negative, and the film made a mere $10 million against its budget. Most of the cast and crew were fine. Director Peter Chelsom averted the crashing of his Hollyowood career thanks to the success of Serendipity the same year as Town & Country, but Warren Beatty wouldn't appear in another film until 2016's Rules Don't Apply, and with the simultaneous failure of Shandling's What Planet Are You From?, he'd never headline another movie except for doing voicework in Dreamworks' Over the Hedge. Looking back on Town & Country very little of it has stayed in the minds of those who saw it with the most notable aspect of it being its ridiculous budget. At it's core Town & Country seems like a mixture of Woody Allen-esque midlife crisis relationship dramaedy and sex farce and doesn't do either that well.

When the movie begins it starts by establishing Beatty's Porter as unfaithful to his wife with a scene of Natassja Kinski naked playing a cello, not that you actually see anything as it's very Austin Powers in its handling of nudity. From this scene onward the movie doesn't seem like it knows how to handle this subject because there's not really any indication of any problems in Porter and Ellie's marriage and most of the setup in the beginning is just odd with a weird aspect of humor being the random people living at Porter and Ellie's apartment. When we get the reveal of Griffin's infidelity, the catalyst is a phone call given to Mona and we never find out who was on the other end of that phone call and the same thing happens a few scenes later when Ellie is called by someone, we again don't know who, and the movie just flies off the rails in the last 40 minutes with a weird subplot involving Andie MacDowell's Eugenie whom Porter met on a plane in Louisiana and coincidently ended up running into her in Sun Valley while on a bonding trip with Griffin and the movie just gets dumber and dumber with all these nonsensical turns until it just flatly concludes.

Town & Country isn't insightful enough to be a relationship dramedy like an Allen film, but it's also too leaden to be a sexually charged farce either. The movie feels like two halves of two not particularly good movies stapled together. It's not abrasive annoying or unwatchable (maybe the final 40 minutes come close) but it's very sub sitcom levels of story and humor that are well beneath the talents of its cast.

It seems that the people behind this drudge of movie took all their cues from Woody Allen's movies during the 1990s. What I mean is, "Town & Country" is about a bunch of rich New Yorkers cheating on each other. I'm sure that everyone involved in it must be embarrassed beyond redemption for having gotten involved in it (and I don't just mean because of its abysmal performance at the box office). The only good character is Charlton Heston, basically spoofing himself. And how could a great screenwriter like Buck Henry have written this? He should have known MUCH better, given that he wrote "The Graduate".

All in all, terrible. Fortunately, the cast members have all done good work since. At least I think that they all have.

"Town and Country" is a critically panned but mildly amusing flick which tells of the marital misadventures of two of middle aged couples (Hawn/Sanders, Keaton/Beatty) who split up over reasons of fidelity. The flick is top heavy with talent on the audience side of the lens with no evidence of same in screenplay and direction. Fraught with meandering repartee, comedic situation which come off like bad improv, a jerky flow, lack of cohesion, no center of gravity, etc. "T&C" isn't as awful as it is an underachiever. Okay for hard up sofa spuds.

Town And Country is brim full of snobbery. Its about rich affluent couples making fools of themselves. Are the cast actually playing themselves in real life? Who knows, but that stands as probably the most damning element of this film. How many mansions could one have bought for what it cost to make this film? How many mouths could it have fed? Town And Country easily bought its own way into the Hollywood 'name and blame' game before it even reached the screens. I laughed a couple of times, I smiled whilst watching it, but only out of amusement at how much the film was lacking. Its a flat and hollow experience. The stars of course probably did their best but the whole enterprise was just too creaky and 'weird' to substantiate their efforts. It strived for outrageousness but attained stupidity. It strived for humble pathos but stayed in the shallows. Everything it grabbed for was lost for the mundanity - this film, whilst it did mildly entertain me for 100 minutes, alas made me feel and register nothing. It was just actors picking up a pay check and a few lovable antics. Whatever approbation I surrender here was surely only out of curiosity. The same goes for any renowned bad movies I seek out, that require viewing just to see just how bad. They can't all be masterworks you know.