Flirting With Disaster (1996)

Ben Stiller plays the adopted son of loving neurotics. He's not an unhappy man, but the birth of his own first child has prompted him to wonder about his true identity, and he can't even think about naming the baby until he knows more about himself. Finding his birth parents is what the film is all about. He makes several missteps along the way, thanks first to an incompetent case worker from the adoption agency, then to a mix-up about who actually donated the sperm to his mother. (It turns out that it wasn't his mother's husband.) Along the way, Ben runs into an assortment of eccentric characters. Indeed, pretty much every character is eccentric, from his adoptive parents to his pseudo-parents to his biological parents to his newly-discovered brother to a couple of gay Feds who cross everyone's path. Ol' Ben is also having some problems in his marriage, so he and the wife (Patricia Arquette) are both flirting with outsiders - with disaster, if you will -  and various romantic entanglements form and dissolve along the way.

This film was a moderate financial success - about on the level of a Woody Allen film. It grossed $14 million on a $5 million budget and made Miramax a profit, but the Weinsteins had been hoping for something in the $30 million range and failed to greenlight a second film in their two-picture option deal with writer/director David O. Russell. As it turned out, that worked out great for Russell, who moved over to Warner Brothers. Warner opened up their checkbooks and gave Russell about a $50 million budget to make Three Kings, a film which did well at the box office while establishing Russell as a major talent.

The enthusiastic critical reaction to Flirting With Disaster baffles me. When it was released, critics threw garlands and flowers in its path as if it were Jesus riding into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Rotten Tomatoes estimates that 87% of the reviews were positive, and even the few dissenters offered plenty of compliments. Damned if I can figure it out. It's not the kind of film that critics usually go ga-ga over. It isn't edgy, or brainy, or "heavy." It basically plays out like a 90-minute pilot for a sitcom, and the sitcom situations are punctuated by the presence of familiar sitcom actors like Mary Tyler Moore and Alan Alda. It is filled with a lot of raunchy sex talk, so it would be a cable sitcom, but there's no nudity, so it would be basic cable. I got a few laughs out of it, but my reaction was that it was the kind of broad, familiar, edgeless comedy that older people like, as opposed to something from a hip young director. The judgment of history on Flirting With Disaster is about the same as my own feeling - it's an OK comedy in the "good, not great" category. It is rated a so-so 6.9 at IMDb, which is respectable, but not what one would expect from a film with 87% positive reviews. Its IMDb rating is even less (6.2) among non-Americans, who probably can't relate as well to the American archetypes being spoofed by the various characters.

The good news is that some of Patricia Arquette's abundant flesh spilled from her nightie in a deleted scene. The bad news is that the quality of the deleted scenes is at the VHS level.

• This zipped clip is Patricia Arquette in the deleted footage.



• Patricia Arquette in the movie. No nudity, but very close.







• Patricia Arquette in the deleted footage. I think there is some nudity, but the quality of the footage is substandard.

Other Crap:

Movie Reviews:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

"The Sisters"

The Sisters (2005) is based on writer Richard Alfieri's play by the same name, which was in turn based on Anton Chekhov's play, The Three Sisters. Actually, IMDb says it was inspired by Chekhov's work. I can explain it easily. Imagine Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, but with four Elizabeth Taylors and half a dozen Richard Burtons. You get to play the parts of George Segal and Sandy Dennis. Three sisters all either teach at or attend the same university where their departed father was chancellor. The eldest is the new chancellor, a closet lesbian, and an emotional zero. The middle sister, Maria Bello, was abused by daddy, and is in a combative marriage to a shrink. In fact, her entire life is combative until an old assistant of her father shows up to have an affair with. The baby is a student, and mainlines crystal meth. There is also a brother, married to an earthy woman (Elizabeth Banks) with little education or tact and a mind of her own. The men are just as screwed up.

The film consists of nearly two hours of verbal combat in the teacher's lounge, with a scant few excursions elsewhere for a wedding, an overdose, etc. Best of all, this dialogue is the sort of thing students produce when required to use all of their spelling words in a sentence. Only Banks speaks in plain English, and only Banks shows any body parts (partial buns, and breasts in a shot too darkened to tell if she was male of female).

IMDb readers say 5.8, but this is very early voting. Other than a few festivals, nearly nobody has seen this. Ebert awarded two stars. I have difficulty imagining a bigger waste of several arguably talented performers and my time. Had Chekhov wrote dialogue this cumbersome and created characters this unpleasant, we would never have heard of him. Some may enjoy this. Many others, I am guessing, will pretend to like it. For me, it was about as good a use of my time as waiting for a doctor's appointment. The film is technically competent, but a long, wordy, static piece full of unpleasant characters. D.

Elizabeth Banks

"Sand Trap"

Sand Trap (1998) is a thriller. The tag line, "When you kill someone, you better make sure they are dead," is a complete spoiler for the first 30 minutes of the film. Nelson (David John James) has money and a dominating wife. As the film opens, he is carrying champagne to bed in his PJs. His wife Margo (Elizabeth Morehead) has something special planned for him that night. He thinks it is her strip tease and wild sex until he hears an intruder. Only breaking a window and setting off the home alarm saves his life. The next day, his lawyer friend Jack (Brad Koepenick) shows up and convinces him that they should all take a break in the desert and look over some potential investment property.

Once they get to the remote site, Jack pushes Nelson off a 250 foot cliff into a cactus patch. We are not surprised when Jack and Margo end up in bed together after reporting the accident to the sheriff. The next day, the sheriff takes them to the site to recover the body, and it isn't there. Not only has Nelson survived, but the experience has changed him from a pussy-whipped, pajama-wearing asthmatic wimp into a modern day Rambo. The sheriff is intent on rescuing Nelson, and Jack and Margo really need to kill him now. The rest of the film is cat and mouse in the desert, and the final predictable resolution.

Along the way, Elizabeth Morehead shows her breasts in two sex scenes.

IMDb readers say 5.5 based on a whopping 48 votes. The story is predictable, and I was never in doubt about the final outcome. One thing did stick with me, however. Elizabeth Morehead was a completely unrepentant and self-serving villain. After a while, her antics provided unintentional but very welcome comedy. Some of the scenery was lovely, and Bob Thompson made a very sympathetic sheriff. This is a low C-.

Elizabeth Morehead

Scoops-

Been trying to get The Gimp to cap an Andrew Blake movie for a while now, but he insists on having a little porn in his porn. Blake's movies have gorgeous women and terrific photography but not many guys doin' what comes natural. So I grabbed a disk entitled Wet. Sho' 'nuff, the gals are gorgeous and the guys are absent. Fine with me. Here is former Pet, Dahlia Grey (she was Jami Dion while a Pet) in the first few scenes of the movie. I must have grabbed a couple hundred frames of her, so I'll need to break up things a bit.

About the clips, they are 320 X 240 this time around to handle their length. Seemed a reasonable compromise.

Dahlia Grey

Dahlia Grey vid #1 (19 megs) Dahlia Grey vid #2 (9 megs)