 The only wide release that will challenge The Matrix Reloaded this weekend will be the satirical nostalgia comedy Down With Love, starring Ewan McGregor and Renée Zellweger. Nearly all of the reviews observe that the film is intended to recreate the fluffery of the old Doris Day/Rock Hudson type of comedies of the early '60s, even to the point of filming them on some of the stages of those movies and rendering them in old-fashioned Technicolor. Megan Lehmann in the New York Post calls that plan "a great idea ... that unfortunately fails to fully live up to its promise." Michael Wilmington in the Chicago Tribune also says that "initially it seems a promising idea" but goes on to write that it is undermined by the two stars. "The actors often seem to be winking at us, their performances as artificial and empty as the Pillow Talk-style sets." Philip Wuntch in the Dallas Morning News also likes the recreated '60s atmosphere created for the film, but he then goes on to write that whatever affection it has for the films of that era "is tainted with condescension, and the movie becomes a charade of winks and nudges." Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times gives the film tentative praise. "Down With Love is no better or worse than the movies that inspired it, but that is a compliment, I think," he writes. Gary Thompson, the critic for the Philadelphia Daily News, writes even more tentatively that he's "prepared to give a positive review to Down With Love, even though I fear that doing so will put me on some sort of Rick Santorum watch list." (A reference to the Pennsylvania senator who recently equated homosexual relations with polygamy, incest, and bigamy.) "It really is pretty funny," he writes and concludes that MacGregor and Zellweger "have exactly captured the movie's tongue-in-cheekiness." |
