I know I did before making the mistake, years later now, of watching "Forget Paris" again. Excruciatingly unfunny and unpassionate, which is especially a problem given that it's a romantic comedy. I'm not sure whether Debra Winger does a bad acting job with her faux grinning at every bad joke Billy Crystal makes, or whether that's just me projecting, or she was playing her character as horny and so intentionally pretending to find his shrill schtick amusing. At least hire a joke writer if you're going to have him rattling them off one after another like that. Hard to believe this guy was a sketch comic and is considered the best Oscars host in recent memory. The Japanese in Godzilla movies, to paraphrase him, be all like.... How is that funny? And that's still better than the later gag of a police escort for his sperm, and don't forget to have the guys doing some supposedly manly sport--pool or whatever--when they're talking about their love lives. *Cough*Cliché*Cough*, to paraphrase another stupid joke in the movie.
Easily the worst basketball-adjacent rom-com until "Trainwreck" (2015) was made, and still this narrative comes as relief from the framing one of their story being told by their obsessively-involved-in-their-affairs friends. I usually like this sort of reflexive storytelling device of including storytellers within the story, but, wow, are they annoying. Cynthia Stevenson is the worst--constantly weeping over this junk, and she doesn't even know them. Y'know, she's supposed to be us; she's the surrogate in-film spectator being told the story. How insulting is that.
So, anyways, I hate this movie. There's no point to the basketball stuff except that it provides an audience for the inevitable grand romantic gesture. He could've had any other job that created conflict instead of an NBA referee, though. The opening bit where he makes the right call on a last-second shot in a game doesn't really matter. We don't need to be blown away by his supposed skill or integrity, especially as it's followed up by him respecting the wishes of his late father, who abandoned him as a child, to be buried in Paris. Again, such integrity, such character, right.
Paris looks ugly here, too--very dull and grey like the credits montage of black-and-white photographs. Post-wars Paris has become a tourist attraction and metonym for sex, a point that has been exploited in cinema since at least the silent films of Ernst Lubitsch (e.g. "So This Is Paris" (1926)). Another such film, "An American in Paris" (1951) is specifically referenced here. "Casablanca" (1942) is another, perhaps the most, famous one and seems to provide the counterpoint to the title here, i.e. "We'll always have Paris." And, by that, they meant they'd always have that cut-to-a-shot-of-a-lighthouse stand-in for a sex scene. Here, though, they "forget Paris," and so get married, begin complaining about never copulating, and he ends up masturbating with her on the other side of a closed door in an attempt to procreate. So This is New York. Woody Allen, who largely invented these modern neurotic New Yorker rom-coms by way of the likes of Nora Ephron dumbing them down ("When Harry Met Sally," e.g., which also starred Crystal lite-Woody), must be rolling over in his grave at that being done to the Big Apple, or to the City of Light.
Easily the worst basketball-adjacent rom-com until "Trainwreck" (2015) was made, and still this narrative comes as relief from the framing one of their story being told by their obsessively-involved-in-their-affairs friends. I usually like this sort of reflexive storytelling device of including storytellers within the story, but, wow, are they annoying. Cynthia Stevenson is the worst--constantly weeping over this junk, and she doesn't even know them. Y'know, she's supposed to be us; she's the surrogate in-film spectator being told the story. How insulting is that.
So, anyways, I hate this movie. There's no point to the basketball stuff except that it provides an audience for the inevitable grand romantic gesture. He could've had any other job that created conflict instead of an NBA referee, though. The opening bit where he makes the right call on a last-second shot in a game doesn't really matter. We don't need to be blown away by his supposed skill or integrity, especially as it's followed up by him respecting the wishes of his late father, who abandoned him as a child, to be buried in Paris. Again, such integrity, such character, right.
Paris looks ugly here, too--very dull and grey like the credits montage of black-and-white photographs. Post-wars Paris has become a tourist attraction and metonym for sex, a point that has been exploited in cinema since at least the silent films of Ernst Lubitsch (e.g. "So This Is Paris" (1926)). Another such film, "An American in Paris" (1951) is specifically referenced here. "Casablanca" (1942) is another, perhaps the most, famous one and seems to provide the counterpoint to the title here, i.e. "We'll always have Paris." And, by that, they meant they'd always have that cut-to-a-shot-of-a-lighthouse stand-in for a sex scene. Here, though, they "forget Paris," and so get married, begin complaining about never copulating, and he ends up masturbating with her on the other side of a closed door in an attempt to procreate. So This is New York. Woody Allen, who largely invented these modern neurotic New Yorker rom-coms by way of the likes of Nora Ephron dumbing them down ("When Harry Met Sally," e.g., which also starred Crystal lite-Woody), must be rolling over in his grave at that being done to the Big Apple, or to the City of Light.