Her Alibi

Philip Blackwood is a depressed writer who's lost his spark and his passion for writing. His successful detective character is the subject of endless predictable stories and his agent is on his back trying to get him to turn it around. As he goes to court with the usual oldies who attend in order to have something to Gossip about up steps the beautiful Nina, an eastern European arrested for murdering a fellow countryman with a pair of scissors. Tom Selleck decides to act as her alibi (Hey it's the title of the film as well!) and invites her to live with him as he believes she is innocent. As the police detective that drops by to chat with Philip Blackwood informs him, if the alibi is made up then he is not only a perjurer, but more importantly, he is liable to be the next victim in order for the alibi to stand forever. What follows is a series of ridiculous escapades in which Philip's life is under threat at every stage of the day, never knowing if the lovely Nina is a cold blooded killer or just deadly unlucky.

I had the fortune to get this film out of the video library on a whim and wound up falling in love with the film as much as Blackwood does with Nina, the parallels between his super-cool fictional world and the clumsy long suffering Blackwood are fantastic, and all the supporting cast do a great job.

Don't get me wrong, this is not an Annie Hall or a when harry met sally, it's silly ridiculous and as Farantino says "I gotta say, Phil, You're works a little predictable!" but it's still a good watch and a very fun film.

Her Alibi (1989) directed by Bruce Beresford, is a very funny, but totally predictable, murder mystery. Tom Selleck plays Phil Blackwood, a mystery writer whose stories are as predictable as the film's plot. Phil has run out of creative steam and his reputation is diminishing.

Paulina Porizkova plays Nina, who is a beautiful (very) Romanian who may or may not be a murderer.

From the moment Phil sees Nina, we can guess where the movie is going. In other words, Her Alibi isn't really a mystery. What makes the film enjoyable isn't the plot, but the technique Beresford utilizes. We see a scene, and hear Selleck's voice- over as he writes the scene into his novel. Of course, what we see and what we hear are two totally different versions of reality. The contrast really is very funny.

William Daniels does well as Sam, Selleck's long-suffering publisher. Porizkova can't act, but nobody will notice. Selleck plays Selleck.

If you want to see fine film-making, rent Beresford's Breaker Morant. If you want to laugh at a film with no social significance at all, rent Her Alibi.

It's true that this film is rather undeep and not particularly demanding. But still, in my opinion, it's charmy. From this point of view, the film is stylistically correct because the books Philip Blackwood writes are also romantic thrillers with exaggerated characters and no attempt to be serious or even world class. We're in the world of trash. Of course, the movie can be understood as kind of a parody on the book that's being written during the film. But on the other hand, it corresponds to it.

Tom Selleck's humour or maybe only the humour around his role keeps the movie alive. Like in „Folks!`, he is the poor guy, damned to passiveness, who desperately tries to cope with what is happening to him. But here the humour doesn't arise only from his mishaps but also from the way he falsifies them when transferring them into his novel. Paulina Porizkova is not a convincing actress but in this movie this doesn't matter because her inflexible face makes her character unfathomable, unpredictable, unlike Philip Blackwood's stories.

If you want to see a trashy little comedy about trashy little thrillers, this is the right one for you!

A lot of us go through our quite ordinary lives daydreaming about being these larger than life characters, so I thought that this story about this sheltered and detached mystery writer, Phillip Blackwood, was quite good because of the funny and endearing way it relates to being a dreamer.

I'm a big Tom Selleck fan, since his days as island hopping P.I. Thomas Magnum, and I think he was the perfect fit for the role of Phil Blackwood. Selleck is this tall, good-looking dude who looks the part of your typical hero or action star, but he is able to come across as this almost goofy, nice guy, and I think those are the qualities that make Thomas Magnum and Phillip Blackwood such great characters. The contradictions between the characters' physical appearances and their personalities make them very easy to like and root for.

I liked the rest of the cast too. Paulina Porizkova was stunningly beautiful and I liked her in her role. The actors who played Blackwood's agent and brother were very funny in their roles.

I recommend this movie. It is lighthearted, funny, and quite charming.

Always likable Tom Selleck is well cast as a mediocre mystery writer (VERY mediocre, based on the samples of his writing we get in the voice-over narrations, which are one of the funniest parts of the movie). He's looking for a plot for his next book and finding it in the person of a beautiful Romanian college student (Paulina Porizkova) who seems to be hiding some big secret. The movie plays like the plot of a bad detective book, with perceptions of the female character shifting from dangerous to trustworthy to suspicious and back. The chemistry between the characters works very well romantically as both characters begin to fall in love despite being wary and suspicious of the various goings-on, and the Romanian KGB agents on Paulina's trail make for useful comic villains.