C'est ma chance

Not a bad film, I'm a huge Michael Douglas fan, so he's the main reason I watched it. The scenes of NYC in 1980 were fun to see. Jill Clayburgh is a good actress (sad that she passed away so young.) However, the film doesn't really pack a punch. Kinda weak. It seems as if somebody really liked the Diana Ross song, so they decided to make a movie to go with it.

Kate Gunzinger (Jill Clayburgh) is a math professor but her know-it-all student may be surpassing her. She moved in with boyfriend Homer (Charles Grodin) but she is still troubled by her spinsterhood. It doesn't help that her father (Steven Hill) is getting remarried. She is meeting her future family for the first time. Her new step-brother Ben Lewin (Michael Douglas) is a washed up baseball player. He saves her from an embarrassing situation and the two of them connect despite her boyfriend and his wife.

Like they say, there are too many people in their relationship. That may be the point of the movie but it makes it difficult to root for them to make it. It would help if Homer is a stiff. He needs to have no personality and no chemistry with Kate. There are two ways to take this relationship movie. It's either modern and edgy or it's convoluted modern gobbledygook. Homer is a perfectly good guy and that's a problem. For the climatic talk between them to work, it needs to be setup much better in the earlier interaction. The script got a Razzie nomination although I don't think it deserves it. There are some issues but they are not fatal. There is also a common complaint about the movie's feminism. Let's just say that some boys have very thin skin. Maybe she didn't show enough T&A.

I enjoyed this movie even though the script was clumsily written. Kate (Clayburgh) is an attractive mathematician and instructor at a Chicago university and lives with her divorced boyfriend, Homer (Grodin), a developer. They seem to have a pleasant, but not particularly romantic or close relationship. Kate goes to NYC alone to attend both her widowed father's wedding and a job interview for a high-paying position in Manhattan. She meets Ben (Douglas), the son of her new stepmother and a retired baseball player who's unhappily married to a wife who is away (we never see her).

A whirlwind romance between Kate and Ben causes her to question what she really wants in her career and personal life. Douglas is very sexy in this role, and blends an earthy confidence and openness about his feelings with a touch of cynicism.

Clayburgh played this same basic role in the much better-written and directed "An Unmarried Woman" (by Paul Mazursky) a few years earlier, but I still related to Kate's feeling of being at a crossroads in her life, wanting to take "her turn," and contemplating imperfect or risky choices in order to "go for it." Career ambition and love are equally important to her. Both Clayburgh and Douglas are appealing and attractive on screen. They both seem like mature individuals who are nonetheless confused about which choices to make in life. A better script would have made this a much stronger film about a topic that resonates with a lot of people over 35.

Both the writer and director are women, so I think the focus is very much on women of that era exploring new opportunities that would not have been open to their mothers. Yet old-fashioned romance and commitment are shown as worthy ideals.

I changed my mind when I noticed there were very few other reviews. I found the movie to be okay. It was a bit slow, and lacking in real substance. The character development could have been so much better. It did have a reasonable ending, and I am glad of that. I admit, I thought the main actress was trying to be Diane Keaton. So I'm uncertain if she is any good in her own right at acting.

It seems that a lot of people consider the main character to be a feminist, and I'm not sure I agree. She seems like she tries to create her life to satisfy males that aren't really emotionally available to her, and comes off as desperate and naive in the process. I am glad that, unlike many typical romantic comedies, she doesn't end up giving up her life for a man. Unfortunately, it seems more situational from the men's lives, as opposed to her own character growth that keeps her from making the mistakes. Hence why I'm not sure I'd call her character a feminist. But I'm still glad it turned out alright in the end. She does end up showing the signs of growth at the very end as a result of the other events, and so that's something good.

The movie didn't make me angry at any point. It made me a bit bored, but not angry. A lot of movies have made me angry for various reasons lately. Since this movie, although a bit of a mediocre film, didn't elicit any strong negative emotions, I gave it a five instead of a four. The acting could have been better, although that was likely a poor script issue. It could have had way more depth, and been pretty good potentially. But, it was alright, and I don't feel it was a complete waste of time.

Before "Wall Street" and "Fatal Attraction" put him on Hollywood's A-list, Michael Douglas kicked around with secondary roles in an assortment of comedies and dramas, and he was usually miscast. Either playing the smartass cameraman in "The China Syndrome" or the judge in "The Star Chamber", Douglas exuded confidence but no star-wattage. In "It's My Turn", a sort-of feminist comedy-drama second-biller for "An Unmarried Woman", Douglas is an ex-pro ballplayer with a scruffy beard who dates teacher Jill Clayburgh, the Unmarried Woman herself, who apparently hadn't used up all her feminist angst. Written and directed by women (Eleanor Bergstein and Claudia Weill, respectively), the movie wobbles around from scene to scene without a hope in hell of satisfying an audience of either sex. Clayburgh tries out different bits of shtick, but this persona (a brilliant-but-klutzy gal on the go) isn't funny or very interesting. Poor Charles Grodin is stuck yet again playing third fiddle, while Douglas is amiable and rascally and livens things up briefly (you can feel the movie come to life when he's on-screen). The theme song, sung by Diana Ross and co-written by Carole Bayer Sager, is pretty yet filled with claptrap rhetoric and fantasy delusions ("I've given up the truth/To those I've tried to please"). "It's My Turn" ends up pleasing nobody. *1/2 from ****