aprilindeecee

With comedy -- quit ably demonstrated in Albert Brooks's "Search..." movie -- enjoyment is directly dependent upon the observer's frames of references. Most of the things one finds funniest in life are inside jokes that would be funny to few other people outside the circle. I believe this simple truth to those of us with much world experience sometimes eludes the Nintendo generation viewers who tend to dominate these message board.

For those of us with a sense of history and understand the films' reference points, this was a lovingly crafted, superbly directed, and superbly acted comedy. Zellweger was amazing! Clooney and Pryce were perfect. And Krakinski (a newcomer to me since I had never seen the office) was just fine. Stephen Root was hilarious in his bits, and Randy Newman's cameo as the piano player was hilarious. If one wishes to nitpick, I think the actor playing the commissioner threw away his best lines and lacked the grandiosity the part required, but this is a small objection indeed.

Kudos to Clooney for putting the love and effort into a very well-crafted and enjoyable comedy for those of us with patience and who understand the reference points.

Happy Go Lovely is a waste of everybody's time and talent including the audience. The lightness of the old-hat mistaken identity and faux scandal plot lines is eminently forgivable. Very few people watched these movies for their plots. But, they usually had some interesting minor characters involved in subplots -- not here. They usually had interesting choreography and breathtaking dancing and catchy songs. Not Happy Go Lovely. And Vera-Ellen as the female lead played the whole movie as a second banana looking desperately for a star to play off it -- and instead she was called upon to carry the movie, and couldn't do it. The Scottish locale was wasted. Usually automatically ubiquitous droll Scottish whimsy is absent. The photography was pedestrian. The musical numbers were pedestrian. Cesar Romero gives his usual professional performance, chewing up the scenery since no one else was doing his part, in the type of producer role essayed frequently by Walter Abel and Adolph Menjou. David Niven is just fine, and no one could do David Niven like David Niven. At the end of the day, if you adore Niven as I do, it's reason enough to waste 90 minutes on Happy Go Lovely. If not, skip it.

I can hardly believe the number of comments opining that this was a well-directed and well-written movie. It is completely under-written, then punched up so young people could relate to the profanity. As for the direction, snails-paced and meandering are the best things I can say about it. Some thought this to be exploitative, but I felt that it wanted to be exploitative but was never on-point enough to achieve it. This is a pity. Add to this the fact that Jodie Whittaker is given no direction to go with her feckless and underwritten character, then has no screen chemistry with O'Toole, thus giving us no clue to the old man's obsession with her -- other than her being young, but that is belied by his reaction in other scenes when he interacts with young women. O'Toole does well in his scenes alone with Phillips and some of the other old-timers. And, Vanessa Redgrave adds the film's only touch of class which serves more as an incongruity than an enhancement.