Down With Love

[c-lando]

I'm down with this movie.
PLEASE don't let it got lost among all the newly released action flicks. This one is a keeper....just like all those great Doris Day/Rock Hudson movies.

Go see it....it's a swinging good time.

[Smoker29]

I dug the movie too. You gotta love those cheesy 60's romance comedies.

Well done!

[c-lando]

Very well-done...
They had lots of fun with the split-screen "technology" of PILLOW TALK.

I also loved the two different versions of "Fly Me to the Moon" while they each got ready for their big night...he listened to Frank while she listened to Astrud.

Lovely...just lovely.

If you see it, make sure you stay through the first bit of credits.

[kcneon]

Ewan in Down With Love = 9.9

Ewan with a Scottish accent in Down With Love would have been off the charts! ;)

[Smoker29]

Originally posted by c-lando
I also loved the two different versions of "Fly Me to the Moon" while they each got ready for their big night...he listened to Frank while she listened to Astrud.

Lovely...just lovely.


The whole Getz/Gilberto/Jobim experience is some of my favorite recorded music ever. I absolutely can't get enough of it. People think I'm full of shit when I tell them that "Girl From Ipanema" is one of my all time favorite songs.

Astrud's voice is so close to being flat on most everything she sings, but it works for her. God...her voice is so sexy!

[DudeMan]

I've been hearing pretty good things about this, and this thread solidifies it -- I'll put it next on my list of movies to see.

The other cool thing I read in Entertainment Weekly was that the director of this is next going to be doing a live-action version of the Fantastic Four, which was my favorite comic book as a kid.

And Smoker, anyone who doesn't like Girl From Ipanema has obviously not listened to it closely.

[loveydovey]

Originally posted by kcneon

Ewan with a Scottish accent in Down With Love would have been off the charts! ;)


Indeed, indeed.

[c-lando]

Originally posted by Smoker29
Astrud's voice is so close to being flat on most everything she sings, but it works for her. God...her voice is so sexy! Yes! I've always said that I would like to have her voice if I could somehow acquire ANYONE'S singing voice. Gladys Knight is a close second.

[shivvy]

I LOVED this movie. I went with a group of friends over the weekend and we all really got a kick out of it. It was really the most fun I've had at the movies in a long time. Of course, I'll give it up for any movie that gives Ewan multiple excuses to rip his shirt off. :-D

I am so down for Peyton Reed. First "Bring It On" and now this. Bring on the Fantastic Four!

[kickinitlive]

i really dug it. it was incredibly clever. david hyde pierce was perfect. i think he is the unsung hero of that movie. two thumbs up...very witty and well done. i especially liked the fact that ewan and renee got together to sing at the end of the movie

[Kwyjibo]

Originally posted by DudeMan
The other cool thing I read in Entertainment Weekly was that the director of this is next going to be doing a live-action version of the Fantastic Four, which was my favorite comic book as a kid.


Yeah, but when's it going to happen, I've been hearing about a live action FF film for longer than I can remember, at least since before the first X-men flick came out.

[c-lando]

Originally posted by shivvy
I am so down for Peyton Reed. First "Bring It On"...He directed BRING IT ON also? Well, that settles it. Move over John Sayles! I have a NEW favorite director.

[deime]

Ewan in a towel, need I say more....

Loved the line, "I have a date with Mr Hershey tonight"


Speaking of Hershey bars, my fave candy, they changed the wrapper any one else notice? No silver wrapper around the bar, just opens right up to chocolate

[Trevour]

Originally posted by deime
Speaking of Hershey bars, my fave candy, they changed the wrapper any one else notice? No silver wrapper around the bar, just opens right up to chocolate

Yeah I noticed that not too long ago... it's like the mini Hershey bar wrapper now! WHY?!? I don't know if it was updated packaging design, more economical, or what, but it sucks!!! Reese's cups always seemed to taste better when they came outta the paper wrapper. Then they went plastic, and I don't eat as many these days (maybe that's a good thing, though). Now the Hershey bar!

I don't know, I just like to peel away the paper sleeve and foil wrapper when I'm eating a chocolate bar. Taking it right outta plastic removes a whole lot of tradition. Argh!



Keepin' on topic... I haven't seen 'Down With Love' yet. But that whole variety show/Ed Sullivan type musical sequence alone makes me wanna see it on the big screen!

[SteelTown Boy]

anything with Renee Zellwinger is quelle cool

[Juliana]

The movie totally had me...
Until the last 15 or so minutes. then I thought it got really stupid really fast.

Totally dug the music, and the opening credits and the split screen and all of that though.

[Kwyjibo]

Yup it was great, but it should have been called Up with Lousy Endings. It was going so well but I thought it turned to poop really fast.

I found it amazingly clever until that, and David Hyde Pierce was genious.

[Juliana]

Down With Love
Zipping past "Ban The Bomb" protesters to ultra-modern offices, swanky nightclubs, and gadget-filled, skyline-kissed apartments, the cast of Down With Love inhabits a world that's less a throwback to the romantic comedies of the late '50s and early '60s than one left vacuum-sealed for future use. In the film's version of 1962, New York City wears Technicolor and moves to a bossa nova beat, fueled by cocktails and driven by sex. Or at least the talk of it: As in the Rock Hudson/Doris Day comedies that inspired it, Down With Love concentrates on the build-up and leaves the release for an undetermined later point, presumably seconds after the screen flashes "The End." The film's re-creation of a bygone, hornier era of romantic comedies–from the production design through Bring It On director Peyton Reed's spot-on mimicry of period style–counts as achievement enough. Yet Down With Love not only makes those conventions work, but also makes them look as if they never went out of style. Like Far From Heaven, the film doesn't send up its inspiration so much as reboot it. It may be hard to believe that the formula still has life left in it (or that Rock Hudson movies could serve as the secret font for two memorable films in a year's time), but such thoughts become merely theoretical from the moment the eye-catching credits hit the title song. "Down With Love," a Harold Arlen standard, also lends its name to the scandalous book written by Down With Love heroine Reneé Zellweger, a first-time author with an easy plan to normalize relations between the sexes: Women should keep sex casual, focus on their careers, and, most importantly, never fall in love. In spite of the best efforts of her chain-smoking editor (wittily played by relative unknown Sarah Paulson), the book meets with initial apathy when its publishers neglect to promote it and a profile by Pulitzer-winning cad-about-town journalist Ewan McGregor fails to materialize. Too busy attending to an endless parade of stewardesses and showgirls, he begins to regret his decision when, through some savvy cross-marketing, Zellweger's book becomes an influential bestseller from Cleveland to Chongqing. Encouraging McGregor's second thoughts is the lovelorn David Hyde Pierce, perfectly slotted into the fey-sidekick role filled by Tony Randall in so many Hudson comedies. (In a casting coup, Randall himself shows up like a patron saint in a funny bit part as Zellweger's publisher.) After McGregor disguises himself as a naïve astronaut, he and Zellweger begin a continuously delayed romance carried out via Broadway balconies and cross-town phone conversations, the most memorable of which finds a use for split-screen effects more salacious than anything Brian De Palma has tried. As it did for Hudson and Day, that split-screen functions as an emblem of the search for equal partnership. The equality plays out on the screen, as well; Zellweger's smart vulnerability is well-matched by McGregor's too-suave-for-the-world performance. The script by Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake (best known, if at all, for working on The Nanny) invests the relationship with wit and even some insight, as a reminder that romantic comedies can actually say something as they go about the roundelays of courtship. Down With Love may register most immediately as a snappy whirl of visual gags, double entendres, overheated romance, and comically oversized living quarters, but beneath the exuberance of this fond counterfeit is a heartbeat as powerful as that of any film anchored in the present. —Keith Phipps