Perdidos em Nova York

The Out of Towners could have easily been called The Empty Nesters, or perhaps The Empty Plotters.

Goldie Hawn and Steve Martin play Alice and Henry, a husband and wife of 27 years who's last child, (he's in his twenties) is tearfully sent off to Europe early in the film. He's not crying, they are, or are likely to. Anyway the parents flinch and then head off from their hick home town in Ohio to New York.

Henry has a job interview to attend and we all know what middle aged, middle order executives looking for a job might run in to, at least in an intelligent script written properly for the nineties.

The Out Of Towners was based on a screenplay penned by Neil Simon in the early 70's. The story has been re written for this version but it seems that the comedy slant was firmly in the sights of the producers. The plot was therefore left high and dry. It needed a much heavier rewrite.

Henry and Alice have both been in advertising, but Alice has given the game away while she's been mothering the children. Henry is tired and a bit dowdy. It would be expected that a truly modern script would have found Alice moving back into her old career and Henry taking on home duties.

Henry says as much in the film! Their daughter has also been accruing horrendous credit card debts on cash stricken Dad's card. This is glossed over in happy land Hollywood. And what's to become of Alice? She's lost for a career.

So this emasculated script is left to flounder and to rely on a good deal of slapstick. Neil Simon's clever dialogue is largely gone, and the plot is without depth.

We're left with a good deal of arm flapping, particularly from Goldie Hawn. As I write this, The First Wives Club (much, much funnier than The Out Of Towners) is on TV in the same room and there's Goldie again, arms a flapping, bum a poutin'.

If there's a chair either Henry or Alice will fall over it, and as is the way these days, if there's a buffoon sidekick, he'll be gay.

But still, except for it's contrived, energetic humour, which some patrons will enjoy immensely, The Out Of Towners does work reasonably well. There are one or two warm smiles, and perhaps a laugh or two, but really a bit more heart and common sense and a dose of plot credibility would have been an advantage.

Henry and Nancy Clark have been married for 24 years and it is starting to show. Henry has lost his job but has kept it secret and plans to get a new job in New York. Having had their last child move out of the house the day before, Nancy isn't sure what to do with her time and decides to join Henry on his trip to New York. However a fog-bound city sees them diverted to Boston and struggling to get to their destination. Actually getting into Manhattan is only the first challenge in an eventful 24 hours that could only happen in New York!

Nothing about this film suggested that it would be anything special; in fact the presence of Marc Lawrence as writer only promised the sort of safely comic humour that he produced with Two Weeks Notice, Miss Congeniality and similar projects. And from the very start it is obvious that Lawrence has produced his usual standard and that director Weisman has no aspirations to do more than churn out a rather derivative but amusing rom-com. So that is just what we get and if that is OK with you then you should be alright, although hardly impressed. The plot bumbles along from one unlikely scenario to the next; most of them are ho-hum but occasionally it tickled me. Most viewers (myself included) will find it all a bit obvious and weak but the undemanding will maybe find it amusing enough to serve as a distraction.

Part of the film working (albeit on this level) is the partnership of Martin and Hawn. Even with the rather obvious material to work with, they do work well together and produce some laughs where they may not have existed on the page. Martin is only ever a hair away from mugging but, although not a shade on his former glory, he fits the lazy tone well. Hawn is a bit less convincing but is still quite amusing; the only problem with her is that she has to carry the more emotionally complex character and she can't get that right and mainly just overplays it for easy laughs, robbing the film of the engaging realism that it needed to have if it really wanted to pull off the emotional ending (which of course it doesn't actually want to do!). Cleese is embarrassing and can do nothing with the poor material he is served with – it is pretty much below him and it shows.

Overall then a totally by-the-numbers, obvious little romantic comedy. It is fairly forced and contrived which was a problem but bits of it rose above the rest and generally it provided just enough to be distracting for those in an undemanding mood. However the majority of us will see something that lacks any real effort and it doesn't encourage me to do much into it when watching. The two leads brighten it up a little bit but it is hard not to see the glaring lack of originally and spark at pretty much every turn.

Being that I was a fan of the original, I found this film to be a complete disappointment. Who thought that they could remake the Out-Of-Towners? It was a stupid move actually. George and Gwen Kellerman are now George and Nancy Clark (Played by Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn). This time they are left with empty-nest syndrome after their son leaves for London. With nothing to do, George needs to go to New York because of a job interview that he desperately needs being that he was let go from his previous job after 23 years. The only thing is that Nancy doesn't know this. But she does nearing the middle of the film. A few jokes are resurrected from the original and still bring a smile to those that watched and enjoyed the original. Other than that, the rest of the movie is a complete disappointment from start to finish.

Don't rush so fast to see this one. It is better to wait until it comes out on video.

I have always been a big fan of Steve Martin, and hilarious 80's comedies like 'Trains Planes and Automobiles', so thats why I decided to rent this film. And I can tell you, I was not disappointed! Its not an hilarious movie, but it is funny from beginning to end. The mishaps that Goldie and Steve go through are sometimes predictable, but are always good for a chuckle. And John Cleese just steals the show. I have not seen the 1970 version, but I found this one pleasant and light hearted. I love watching 'endless mishap' comedies like National Lampoon's Vacation and 'Trains Planes and Automobiles', and this is another one to add to my collection. Steve Martin, you are king! And I can;t understand everyones negative comments on this film - maybe they were expecting just too much.

Neil Simon's script for the original 1970 hit, "The Out-of-Towners," was, essentially, a one-joke skit stretched out to a feature-length film. Starring Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis as two suburbanites from Ohio who experience a nightmare of frustrating complications when they hit the Big Apple, the film managed to generate some laughs as well as a great deal of grating repetitiousness.

The 1999 remake, with Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn in the central roles, manages to be a far worse film. The original at least seemed grounded in some sense of reality as the couple fell victim to a believable, if overstated, series of tourist mishaps; this version spins off into slapstick delirium, going so far as to have its main characters actually swinging on hotel signs six stories above street level and John Cleese as a snippy concierge prancing around in lady's clothing to Donna Sommer's "Bad Girls." Also, in the original, Jack Lemmon seemed determined to really take on all the people who arrayed themselves against him and the film conveyed a real sense of this implacable, almost malevolent force known as NEW YORK coming down with all its might on this innocent couple from the Midwest. In the remake, Steve Martin seems strangely passive and unharried and the victory-over-the-city theme comes along only at the very end. Without that added dimension of epic frustration, the new film robs the original of whatever audience identification it might once have had and simply devolves into an undisciplined display of unfunny slapstick.

Martin, Hawn and Cleese are game players, but this "Out-of-Towners" should indeed have been driven out of town!