Happy Birthday, Gemini

Where to start? Did the actors even read the script first? How could they imagine this could be any good? They make up for the lack of a good script with VOLUME.

THe few jokes revolve around bad stereotypes. Almost every line of this movie is annoying and offensive.

The acting isn't any better. The actors ended up trying way too hard trying to make up for the bad script. It just made it all worse.

You feel compelled to see this through because of the reputation of the cast. It just gets more and more painful before it even gets to the lame and dated point of the film.

Skip this. It is unbearable.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GEMINI turned out to be a happy surprise for me, the best widely lambasted movie I've seen in years. A wild farce about some earthy, low-income Philadephians, it's based on a hit play that premiered in 1977 and was still running almost a year after this modest movie adaptation was made! I remember the bad reviews at the time of it's release but had never seen the movie until recently watching it on youtube where it exists in a not very good print that has been sliced into ten episodes but this is likely to be the only place you will be able to see it, it was briefly released on videotape in the 1980's and probably played on cable premium channels a few times back then but I doubt it's been on TV since as much for its limited appeal as for Madeline Kahn's hilarious potty mouth.

20-year-old college student Francis Geminiani is not happy by a surprise visit from his quasi-girlfriend Judith and her brother Randy on the eve of his birthday mainly because he's begun to realize he's gay and actually attracted to the brother rather than the sister. The wealthy young siblings though are warmly welcomed by Francis' father and his middle-aged girlfriend (Rita Moreno playing an Italian Catholic!)and a neighbor, aging floozy Bunny Weinberger (Kahn) and her twentyish, plump, clumsy asthmatic son Herschel.

Top-billed Kahn is actually a secondary character (second-billed Moreno has an even smaller role) but she's delicious as a faded, crude mantrap who is just realizing her best days are now behind her. Her unsuccessful suicide attempt is a gem of a comic scene. The fairly obscure young leads (Robert Viharo, Sarah Holcomb, David Marshall Grant) are good but not unexpectedly unable to hold their own with a master comedienne like Kahn. On the other hand the even less known actor Timothy Jenkins as Bunny's infantile son whom she alternately babies and bullies actually steals the film in an endearing performance. Sadly he appears to never had another major part. Theirs is one of the best smother-mother and child duos created on film and there's even a lovely moment when they sing "Moon River" together off key as Kahn hammers at the piano.

The direction is not particularly good and the film resembles a TV-movie programmer from the era with it's camera shots but the script still has much of the punch of the play and the seven leads are all quite good. No small part of it's lack of success in 1980 was it's sympathetic attitude to homosexuality (though nothing remotely sexual ever happens) which was way ahead of the general population of the era. This might have been a hit a decade or so later but then we wouldn't have the wonderful performances of Kahn and Jenkins in that film.

Dull, self-obsessed people voice their self-obsession in this movie version of Albert Innaurato's Off-Broadway hit. The cast, including Madeline Kahn, and Rita Moreno try to make up for their inherent slovenliness by loudness.

If you were to make a burlesque of what people imagine to be an Off-Broadway play, you couldn't do better than this, with its annoying ethnic portrayals, and Alan Rosenberg's uncertainty about his sexual identity, as he announces to his girlfriend, Sarah Holcomb, that he's gay. When I write "you couldn't do better", in many ways I mean you couldn't do worse, as Miss Kahn swans around in the world's largest beehive hairdo.

These are just the sort of characters and situations that Neil Simon could and did make interesting and funny. I suspect that the people involved in this movie thought they were doing that, but they didn't.

Judith and Randy Hastings are siblings headed to South Philadelphia for Francis Geminiani's 21st birthday. Judith has a crush on Francis. Only he reveals that he thinks he's gay.

It's an indie comedy based on a play. Lead actress Sarah Holcomb had a short 4-movie career with two of the greatest comedies ever. This is not one of those iconic movies. This is a low budget indie. The story is a bit scattered. There are big names here. They are the reasons for my interest, but they can't save this. Madeline Kahn is going all out. The second half is basically her movie. It's hard to wrap my arms around all these characters. I just don't care about some of these people.

This play had significant personal meaning for me in the early 80s and I only recently found a copy of this film adaptation. Like many stage comedies, the translation to film falls flat in most scenes partly due to the absence of theatrical elements (including the audience) but the biggest problem with this version is the casting. With ethnicity at the core of much of the humor, it was less than convincing to have Rita Moreno as an Italian widow, Madeline Kahn as an Irish floozy, and other characters trying to "play" an ethnicity that was not natural for them. But I really liked the ending on this filmed version, and the scene between Francis and his father at the end was very real and touching making this a nice "coming out" film for the whole family.