Amigos, Sempre Amigos

A wonderful, wonderful film, and if you're my age, you'll cry.

From 1991, "City Slickers" stars Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern, Bruno Kirby, Jack Palance, Patricia Wettig, and Helen Slater.

Three men (city folk) whose lives range from unhappy to disastrous go on a two week holiday in the wild west driving cattle from New Mexico to Colorado. There, on the open range, away from their responsibilities, they can perhaps sort out what they want and who they are.

Crystal is Mitch, a happily married man with children who hates his job and is depressed most of the time. When he gets a 30th birthday gift from his pals to do the cattle drive, his wife (Wettig) insists that he go rather than visit her family. If he hesitates, it's because his friend Ed's last idea, of running with the bulls in Pamplona, was a horror.

Phil (Stern) is humiliated at Mitch's 30th birthday party when a woman who works for him comes in and announces she's missed her period, thus causing his wife to dump him on the spot - though they've been miserable for years.

Ed has a lingerie model girlfriend who wants a family, but he's having trouble making a commitment.

So all three go.

There, they meet some real cowboys, and the oldest one, Curly (Palance), is one tough cookie. But Mitch is able to spend some time with him, and Curly tells him that only one thing matters. Just one. But you have to figure out what that one thing is. When Mitch has a crisis, he finally finds out what it is for him.

I really loved this film. It was absolutely hilarious, with some of Billy Crystal's fabulous delivery, and yet very touching at the same time. A perfect combination, something that's not always easy to achieve. Very well acted and directed, the film moves along beautifully.

Highly recommended. Full of wit, with some excitement, and poignant moments.

Few other comedic filmmakers understand the west on a comedic, farcical level than Ron Underwood. Just a year before directing City Slickers, Underwood directed one of my favorite contemporary comedy/horror films, Tremors, about a small, rather unpopulated town in Nevada being literally swallowed by mutant, underground worms. The film was not just fun to watch, but fun to imagine that deep underground there are large, unearthly worms that have remained undetected by elaborate seismographs and are now resurfacing to swallow anything that could cause a detectable vibration underground. Needless to say, after watching it when I was eight, I took extra-quiet steps.

And here's City Slickers, a comedy that uses the wild west as a background for numerous visual gags, snappy wordplay, and a trio of great performances. The three guys are Mitch Robbins (Billy Crystal), a radio advertiser who is experiencing his midlife crisis after turning thirty-nine, Phil Berquist (Daniel Stern), who is stuck in a sexless marriage in the midst of managing a grocery store, and Ed Furillo (Bruno Kirby), a womanizer uncomfortable with the notion that there is a time to "settle down." On his birthday, Mitch is given a present from his two buds which is a vacation down on a southern cattle drive. Reluctantly, he accepts, and before they know it, they are defending the cattle drive in true western fashion.

Billy Crystal is an ideal character for Mitch. He has the right balance of comedic wit and dramatic potency to make a character like this work well on the basis of being a sadsack but also a compelling lead. Stern and Kirby work well in the supporting characters, mainly because they themselves have good comedic timing and work well off of Crystal's lead.

City Slickers works better than another western farce by the name of Three Amigos, which was stunningly mediocre in its inclusion of three hilarious comedians - Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, and Martin Short - and successfully finding nothing interesting to do with them. The film drifted from one stale setup to another, falling flat on its face, before stumbling over to the next contrived setup and doing the same. Too many instances in the film were dry and the laugh to actor ration was surprisingly very low.

City Slickers works because writers Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel know how to effectively utilize their talent and give each character sustainable depth and energy to run for the near-two hour runtime the film holds. In that time, the film is often funny, kind of poignant, a little overlong, but heartfelt all the more. It's some kind of minor miracle this was well-received by a general public.

Starring: Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern, and Bruno Kirby. Directed by: Ron Underwood.

The first time I saw this film I thought it was a piece of wasted Hollywood fluff. Then I watched it again for some reason and liked it a little more. The third time I watched this film I became hooked. City Slickers is wonderful fun. Billy Crystal is perfect in the mid-life crisis role and Jack Palance has been waiting for this part his whole career. Ron Underwood did a great job with this one. It seemed cliched at first, then I realized it is a great original piece of comedy film-making.

This movie is for anyone who needs relief from a crisis, middle-aged or otherwise.

Three buddies head down the trails to relieve their midlife crises. They wind up sharing the adventures of a lifetime. I have enjoyed this movie each and every time I have seen it. The comedy is pleasant, and you will not exhale during the river rescue scene. *** out of ****

Excellent. Funny, romantic, coming-of-middle-aged, must see.

I had some difficulty trying to categorize this movie. It is extremely funny most of the time, but has an underlying emotional element throughout the film which can send you to a reminiscent mood at times. The beauty of this film is that it explores an uncommon theme among movie makers - the bond between male friends which is just as strong as the female version, but not discussed as often.

Billy Crystal plays a typical bloke in that uneasy period between being "one of the lads" and being "old" i.e. coming up to his 40th birthday. We are drawn in to the lives of all the three main characters with the ups and downs of having lived it all, settled down, and remembered what our youth was like. To get an escape by going away with your old friends once a year to relive your youth - sorry ladies, but all us guys do it now and then - provides an excellent theme for this movie made better by the fact that most viewers will relate themselves to at least one character in the cast, from the lively funster who always has the bright ideas to the quiet lad who secretly looks forward to finding out what his mates have lined up for him this year. The fairer sex are not in any way left out of this character identification with characters from the middle-aged housewife through the feisty-but-dull teenager and back to to good ol' Old Dear - all smiles, reliable no matter what life throws at you.

Without giving too much of the story away, it's difficult to say any more, other than I voted this movie 8 out of 10 and if you do decide to watch it, feel free to complain to me if you don't enjoy it - I don't expect any complaints for this recommendation :-)