C'est ma chance

Kate Gunzinger (Jill Clayburgh) is a math professor but her know-it-all student may be surpassing her. She moved in with boyfriend Homer (Charles Grodin) but she is still troubled by her spinsterhood. It doesn't help that her father (Steven Hill) is getting remarried. She is meeting her future family for the first time. Her new step-brother Ben Lewin (Michael Douglas) is a washed up baseball player. He saves her from an embarrassing situation and the two of them connect despite her boyfriend and his wife.

Like they say, there are too many people in their relationship. That may be the point of the movie but it makes it difficult to root for them to make it. It would help if Homer is a stiff. He needs to have no personality and no chemistry with Kate. There are two ways to take this relationship movie. It's either modern and edgy or it's convoluted modern gobbledygook. Homer is a perfectly good guy and that's a problem. For the climatic talk between them to work, it needs to be setup much better in the earlier interaction. The script got a Razzie nomination although I don't think it deserves it. There are some issues but they are not fatal. There is also a common complaint about the movie's feminism. Let's just say that some boys have very thin skin. Maybe she didn't show enough T&A.

Before "Wall Street" and "Fatal Attraction" put him on Hollywood's A-list, Michael Douglas kicked around with secondary roles in an assortment of comedies and dramas, and he was usually miscast. Either playing the smartass cameraman in "The China Syndrome" or the judge in "The Star Chamber", Douglas exuded confidence but no star-wattage. In "It's My Turn", a sort-of feminist comedy-drama second-biller for "An Unmarried Woman", Douglas is an ex-pro ballplayer with a scruffy beard who dates teacher Jill Clayburgh, the Unmarried Woman herself, who apparently hadn't used up all her feminist angst. Written and directed by women (Eleanor Bergstein and Claudia Weill, respectively), the movie wobbles around from scene to scene without a hope in hell of satisfying an audience of either sex. Clayburgh tries out different bits of shtick, but this persona (a brilliant-but-klutzy gal on the go) isn't funny or very interesting. Poor Charles Grodin is stuck yet again playing third fiddle, while Douglas is amiable and rascally and livens things up briefly (you can feel the movie come to life when he's on-screen). The theme song, sung by Diana Ross and co-written by Carole Bayer Sager, is pretty yet filled with claptrap rhetoric and fantasy delusions ("I've given up the truth/To those I've tried to please"). "It's My Turn" ends up pleasing nobody. *1/2 from ****

Not a bad film, I'm a huge Michael Douglas fan, so he's the main reason I watched it. The scenes of NYC in 1980 were fun to see. Jill Clayburgh is a good actress (sad that she passed away so young.) However, the film doesn't really pack a punch. Kinda weak. It seems as if somebody really liked the Diana Ross song, so they decided to make a movie to go with it.

The final chapter in Jill Clayburgh's unplanned "independent woman" trilogy (the first two were "An Unmarried Woman" and "Starting Over"). This one is from the same writer as "Dirty Dancing," which probably explains why the main character in each is a Jewish woman who is very much "daddy's little girl."

Here, the protagonist is perhaps the most glamorous mathematics professor ever (she wears stilettos to class, but earthy gal that she is, removes them while solving equations at the blackboard). She's got relationship issues with her widowed dad who's remarrying, and with her divorced live-in boyfriend, plus she's conflicted about whether to take a new job in a new city that pays much more, but won't allow her to continue her research. She breezily describes her various complications as "modern problems," which tells you that the creators here felt they were at the very cutting edge of portraying the quintessential "liberated" woman. Laura Linney's character in "You Can Count On Me" had a similarly complicated life, but that film didn't feel the need for its characters to be so self-aware.

Michael Douglas enters the picture to help her figure out where/how to get the healthy, giving relationship that everyone around her seems to have, and that therefore is "her turn" to get (get it?)

This is a decent movie that actually doesn't feel particularly dated, (save for Clayburgh's Oscar-bait "big scene" towards the end) despite its obvious 70's era feminist overtones. But perhaps because of its agenda, the romance doesn't exactly sweep you off your feet.

As with most movies from the 80s, part of the fun is seeing what stars/faces of the future show up. Here, we get a young Daniel Stern, almost unrecognizable as Clayburgh's star pupil, and future "Law and Order" District Attorneys Steven Hill and Dianne Wiest.

Jill Clayburgh plays yet another one of those wannabe liberated women in this feminist fantasy/comedy. She's a math professor at the University of Chicago and living with a guy (Charles Grodin) but she feels she wants more ... maybe. On a trip to New York for her widowed father's wedding, she meets a brash man (Michael Douglas) and something happens.

The trouble with this film is that the feminist view is scuttled in favor of formula storytelling. Clayburgh hit the mark in AN UNMARRIED WOMAN because the character fulfilled her promise. In this film, she falls for the same of song and dance and basically gives up any sort of fulfillment for the usual relationship with a man.

The ultimate fulfillment is still to be found in a man. The real irony here is that this film was written by a woman and directed by a woman and they still come up with "a man is the answer," whereas AN UNMARRIED WOMAN was written and directed by a man.

Feminist politics aside, Clayburgh, Douglas, and Grodin are easy to watch even though there are a few wayward scenes that go nowhere or seem to have come out of nowhere. Steven Hill plays the marrying father, and although he's in bad health and popping heart pills, nothing comes of that arc. Beverly Garland is quite good as the new bride. There's also Dianne Wiest, Charles Kimbrough,, and Daniel Stern as a brilliant student.

Clayburgh's teaching career and new job in New York tack a back seat as soon as Douglas enters the story. Director Claudia Weill, who showed such a sure hand in GIRLFRIENDS just goes by the numbers here. There's never a moment's doubt what the conclusion will be, despite the film's title.