tfpa100

This is one of those jewels of filmdom that Hollywood will seldom or never produce --a shining venue for actors of "a certain age" (and not Clint Eastwood) in a romantic comedy replete with laughs, tears and profound yet light-handed treatments of human nature and national traits. The pace moves without interruption; it lags at no time, a tribute to a superb script and masterful editing. The scenes are remarkable for their realism. The acting is extraordinarily sensitive and on the mark. Watch the body language and facial expressions in funny/sad/ordinary situations. It's almost like being there, eavesdropping and peeping at this wonderful couple as their relationships bobs, weaves, dips and soars. The subtle ethnic jokes are there too ... the Telephone company retiree sporting one of the most ancient family names in Spain ... the Argentine widow (or not) displaying some of the too-clever-by-half sharpness many of her compatriots put to work to get by ... the play on letter of the apartments ("J" in Spanish as in "F" in English), etc., etc. A winner all around, worth seeing again and again. Do not miss this home run of a film.

I hear better dirty jokes at my neighborhood watering hole... This is a self-absorbed circle-jerk by comedians with too much idle time on their hands and coaxed to intellectualize a very old, very threadbare, much-used joke. The self-conscious and forced laughter segment that closes the feature as it is emitted by some of the participating comedians speaks for what precedes it. The theatre in which I saw this movie was embarrassingly silent during most of the screening. My friend and I went to see this movie based on the glowing reviews that ran in, among others, The NY Times. We asked ourselves: "Are we watching the same movie they wrote about or do we have some very, very repressed film critics break into giggles and guffaws over the use of four-letter words that describe bodily orifices below the navel or genital-urinary-duodenal functions?" The best joke --and it contained not an iota of scatology-- came near the end with a brief frog story by Robin Williams. It's a sad comment when one has to wait 90 minutes for a real laugh. If you want dirty jokes save your dollars and tune in to George Carlin (who mumbles some total nonsense about the depth of this one-joke exercise) on HBO.

This is one big long so-what commercial for a sprawling hotel in the Bahamas and it winds up being as duh as the flat beaches it seeks to glamorize. Amazingly for a heist movie featuring gorgeous beings it fails to generate either suspense or romantic heat. The direction is so unimaginative that it compares favorably with the dreary movie commercials one is forced to view in cineplexes before getting to the feature. The most imaginative it gets is in producing the mandatory car chase at the beginning rather than towards the end.

What a waste of beautiful and often talented people said to be actors. It's painful to watch Woody Harrelson playing badly the FBI fool and Salma Hayek exposing her beauty and little else. This is commercial movie-making near its worst; everyone involved with this production should be sentenced to a course in remedial film-making or a lifetime of sipping the treacly multicolor fruit-laced "tropical drinks" that show up every few hundred frames. The script features lines that possess all the grace of dry cement, including a priceless comment about a huge cruise ship sailing back to Paris; at last sighting the French capital was deep inland, on the banks of the Seine river where one would be lucky to float anything drawing more than 10 feet.

One suspects this movie was shot as a winter pastime in the sun for cast and crew in exchange for a freebie stay at a sprawling hotel that looks like a pink-walled high-rise version of San Quentin prison on Paradise Island --a misnomer if there ever was one judged from the primitive antics herein depicted. You'd be well advised to head elsewhere before or after sunset.