Eu e Meu Melhor Amigo

Just imagine, one day your penis starts talking to you - giving you its points of view, opinions, complaints, suggestions, and teaching you life lessons. Well, I most certainly can not but I thought that the idea was interesting. The movie is a loose adaptation of great Alberto Moravia's novel (notable adaptations of his novels include Vittorio De Sica's "Two Women" (1960), based on "La Ciociara", Jean-Luc Godard's" Contempt: (1963), from "Il Disprezzo", and Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Conformist" (1970), from the book of the same name) and I thought that it was funny. Occasionally...

The movie won a Golden Screen award in 1988 - which is presented to the distributors of domestic and foreign feature films - including documentary and children films - with more than 3,000,000 admissions within 18 months since their release or re-release in Germany. "Me and Him" won the award along with "A Fish Called Wanda", (1988), "Rain Man" (1988), and "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" (1988). Now, this fact made me laugh really hard.

This unabashedly silly movie is about an executive whose penis develops its own personality. I saw "Me and Him" as a comedic look at Sigmund Freud's studies: isn't it basically a stereotype that men think not with their brains but with their penises? It's a pretty funny movie, the type of flick that makes no pretense about being totally absurd.

The star is Griffin Dunne, widely known as the decaying friend in "An American Werewolf in London" and the brother of Dominique Dunne (the older sister in "Poltergeist" who got murdered while it was in the theaters). Ellen Greene played Audrey in "Little Shop of Horrors", while Kelly Bishop played Jennifer Grey's mother in "Dirty Dancing".

Worth seeing, if only once.

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. I recommend it to anyone who wants to see an exaggerated view of the male condition. I laughed my head off, and bought a copy of the tape. Then I started to let everyone I know watch it. If you don't mind crude-humor and an offbeat topic, watch it. Imagine waking up on your birthday, and having your penis start talking to you. Then going down the street, trying to stay focused, and having your penis cause your imagination to go wild, causing every women to appear to be dressed in just their undergarments. This movie is a b-rated classic in my opinion.

As soon as my friends and I stumbled upon this movie in a Leonard Maltin guide, it became a bit of a running joke among us. Finally, after years of wondering just what this movie was, we found it in the local video store and had to see it for ourselves.

Man, what a disappointment. We expected it to be bad, don't get me wrong. But we expected it to be REALLY bad. Instead, this was just bad bad: mediocre. There's nothing the least bit interesting about this movie. If you're going to make a bad movie, at least make it REALLY bad. Classically bad. Anyway, we only got about halfway through before giving up on it completely. The whole thing was just really annoying...the penis has an obnoxious voice and keeps calling "Hey Bert! Look at her, Bert!", usually in reference to a woman who isn't even all that attractive...and then Bert gets into some kind of trouble as a result. Rinse, lather, repeat. Over and over again. What a waste.

Avoid.

The crude premise (a talking penis messes up a family man's life) allows for some spicy moments, but runs out of steam quickly. The film is also surprisingly sexist for being directed by a woman (the German Doris Dörrie, in her English-language debut; this one wasn't a hit and she continued her career in her own country). The biggest irony may be that Ellen Greene, who plays Griffin Dunne's wife that "Me" wants to guide "Him" away from, is really the hottest woman in the film! Dunne himself is rather miscast. Mark Linn-Baker does a good job as the "lower voice", but few of his lines are funny. ** out of 4.