Procurando Encrenca

Why is it that people think grating, annoying, OBNOXIOUS characters are funny ? It's hard to laugh when you just want someone, ANYONE to smack those people up the back of the head as hard as they can. The dialogue goes nowhere, the scenes go nowhere and all in all you feel like you wasted 2 hours of your life watching something that might have worked as a Saturday Night Live skit. Avoid at all costs. I'm the type of person that can always find something redeeming in a film and there is NONE to be found here.

Did not expect to laugh so much i have to say for a film that i had no idea existed and was made 24 years ago.

What got me interested was it being a David O Russell film i had not seen and his stuff i had seen was consistenly very good.

Dysfunction brought to the extreme. The line that best sums up this film would be "you come in here and lick my wife's armpit"

Excellent, cheered me right up it has!

FLIRTING WITH DISASTER (1996) **** Ben Stiller, Patricia Arquette, Tea Leoni, Alan Alda, Mary Tyler Moore, George Segal, Lily Tomlin, Richard Jenkins, Josh Brolin. Hilarious and wickedly sharp satire about a young man (Stiller in a memorable turn) searching for his identity by trying to locate his biological parents while alienating his neglected and lovely wife (the yummy Arquette) and Leoni (simply wonderful) as his adoption broker. Fine ensemble cast (especially Moore in an inconoclastic poke at her image) and Alda (ditto). Subversive good, clean fun and seriously dysfunctional family values (thank God!) from filmmaker David O. Russell beating the Sophomore Jinx (in this his second turn at the helm).

This film tells the story of a new father who decides to skip his adoptive father's sixtieth birthday celebration to find his biological parents.

"Flirting with Disaster" has a very happening plot, with new unexpected events every few minutes. It details a trip that goes wrong at every turn, some are innocent mishaps while some are truly disastrous. It illustrates Murphy's Law very well! The story is darkly humorous, it is not laugh out loud funny, but it keeps viewers entertained and engaged with a smile on the face. It is also quite interesting to see what many famous faces looked like twenty years ago. I can't quite believe the policeman is Josh Brolin, for example.

I'm amazed at how much context matters when watching movies. I saw this when it was new and was impressed at how gently it moved. It wasn't frantic. It didn't rely on penis and excrement jokes. It mentions Jews comically but doesn't get mean. It deals with relationships straightforwardly: the humor from this end coming from our unease at natural misfits.

In short, it is everything that the "Fockers" movies aren't. I went back and watched it simply out of protest, out of feeling slimy from having to encounter them again.

And I was shocked that it seemed too slow until the third act. Part of the problem was that I knew where it was going, and much of the development depends on you having the same insecurity about the future as Stiller's character. But the larger part was simply that subtle, soft humor may be dead, even for someone like me who thrives on the slight brush.

Perhaps now "50 First Dates" is as soft as we can get these days.

I urge you to see this for a dive into gentle humor, even though it may be too faded. Screwball keeps. This stuff doesn't. It is a film that doesn't belong about a man who doesn't.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.