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Love Affair
Warner Bros. // PG-13 // January 6, 2002
List Price: $19.98 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
The Movie:
I'm an aficionado of bad Warren Beatty movies, a member of a small if intense clique of critics who can writhe in ecstasy over embarrassing or odd moments, and can quote reels of dialogue. This obsession has generated a cottage industry. My exegesis of all that's wrong with Town and Country and what it all says about the way movies are made is now up to one thousand pages and counting; my colleague Kim Morgan of the Portland Oregonian reveres Ishtar, and can even sing all the movie's songs at the drop of a hat ("Telling the truth can be dangerous business;/ Honest and popular don't go hand in hand. / If you admit that you play the accordion, / No one will hire you in a rock 'n' roll band. / But we can sing out hearts out. / And if we're lucky, then no neighbors complain. / Because life is the way we audition for God; / Let us pray that we all get the job"). Love Affair isn't as execrable as Town and Country, (though it only made about $5 million in the U.S. off of its $18 million-plus budget) nor is it as potentially defensible as Ishtar. Instead, it's somewhere in between, which in the end may be its problem.
Don't get me wrong. This obsession with Beatty's bad movies is no dismissal of his work as a performer or filmmaker. Beatty is fascinating. As the man who has dated all the women I was thinking of asking out, he is the envy of the world. As a filmmaker, he revolutionized the way movies were made. After Bonnie and Clyde Hollywood wasn't the same until Star Wars, as Peter Biskind points out in his gossipy history of '70s cinema, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. But when his films are bad, they are really bad, in a unique, cold, airless sort of way.
Love Affair concerns two engaged people who meet on a turbulent air flight. During a lengthy lay over, they fall in love, but as one is a skeptical and somewhat staid singer engaged to a successful businessman, and the other a roué and former football hero now anchoring the Los Angeles NBC affiliate, neither believes that the other one could really be serious. The singer is Terry McKay (Annette Bening) and the football guy is (the oddly named) Michael Gambril (Beatty). They put their love to the test. If they both show up to meet on the roof of the Empire State Building at 5:02 pm on May 8th, after having had three months to sort out their lives and dump their prospective spouses, they know it is true love. Naturally, unexpected events intervene.
As one watches Love Affair, often while squirming, usually while hoping that everything would just speed up, the viewer realizes that the essence of a love story is that the main characters be likable. Bening and Beatty try, though Beatty should really stop playing publicly perceived variations on himself. Bening has a marvelous voice, one of the most controlled yet flexible instruments in the business. Beatty can have charm, though he is no Cary Grant. There's just an aching feeling throughout the film that it would have been better off as a comedy.
Oh, wait, Love Affair, is a comedy. It's got Gary Shandling as Gambril's hustling lawyer, and Harold Ramis in a cameo as an amusing accountant. In fact, there are lots of cameos in this film, including director Paul Mazursky and Brenda Vaccaro as a noisy couple on a plane., and Pierce Brosnan and Kate Capshaw as the people the leads are set to marry (and, in a move characteristic of the genre, are treated shabbily by the filmmakers). Meanwhile, Mary Hart, John Tesh, Steve Kmetko, Terry Murphy, Barry Nolan, and Andrea Kutyas play "themselves," and Taylor Dayne and Carey Lowell appear. Ray Charles is seen at a benefit concert. Ed McMahon is a fleeting presence (which is funny, given that Shandling did a whole TV show parodying Ed's former boss, Johnny Carson). Another thing that pops up are pop, rock, and vintage jazz tunes. There seems to be one every three seconds, as if this were a Spike Lee film. The fact that the credits are white letters against a simple black background with a vintage jazz tune behind brings up the possibility that everyone involved was inspired by Woody Allen, rather than Leo McCarey, the person who co-wrote and directed two previous versions of this same story, the second one with Cary Grant. That's the movie that Tom Hanks and friend mock in Sleepless in Seattle as a shameless tearjerker. The fact that the Nora Ephron comedy quoted the McCarey Love Affair and renewed interest in it is perhaps what instigated this vehicle for Beatty and his wife in 1994.
It must be nice for couples to work together, but this Love Affair suffers from the same problem that afflicts a lot of romances, including Sleepless in Seattle, in that film perhaps more than others. That is, the central couple don't spend enough time together. Thus the viewer has no faith that there really is potential for a romance. Poor Glenn Gordon Caron, the credited director. Once the master of television, where the writer is king, Caron invented the then hit series Moonlighting, which changed how TV comedies worked. Here he has a series of sometimes ridiculous but usually dull scenes, credited to writers Beatty and Robert Towne, including a brisk lighthearted trip to an isolated house that requires first a boat, then a truck, then another boat, then a Vespa, and finally a hike by foot, and culminating in a contrivance wherein an aged Katharine Hepburn as Gambril's Aunt Ginny is forced to utter a lengthy metaphor comparing animal and human sexual behavior that culminates in the punchline of her saying, "f…k a duck".
The DVD
VIDEO: Warner Bros. has done a conventional job with Love Affair. The print used doesn't show much of its age, though there is dirt and scratching at the beginning and especially at the end. The widescreen image, 1.85:1 and enhanced for widescreen televisions, is fine in its muted, limited palette, but the image does seem a little soft at times, especially at the beginning. But that may be cinematographer Conrad L. Hall disguising the age of his stars. One of the great masters of light, Hall is a little obvious here, with spot beams that the actors walk into or sit under. This form of lighting makes Bening, especially, look glamorous, but it comes at the cost of distracting the viewer.
SOUND: Sound is in Dolby Digital 5.0, which is adequate to a chatty comedy that is overlaid with a lush if tuneless score by Ennio Morricone. The soundtrack also comes in French in DD 2.0. There are subtitles in English, French, Spanish Portuguese, Chinese, Thai, and Korean.
MENUS: A static, musical lead menu offers 28 chapter scene selection for this 108 minute movie.
PACKAGING: Love Affair comes in the regular Warner cardboard and plastic snap case with cover art derived from elements of the original poster. The label on the disc reiterates an image off the back of the box showing Beatty and Bening sunning themselves.
EXTRAS: Supplements consist of the flimsy trailer, presented in 1.85:1 image size, plus two screens of the film's cast and crew.
Final Thoughts: Love Affair is for fanatical members of the bad Beatty films cult only.
I'm an aficionado of bad Warren Beatty movies, a member of a small if intense clique of critics who can writhe in ecstasy over embarrassing or odd moments, and can quote reels of dialogue. This obsession has generated a cottage industry. My exegesis of all that's wrong with Town and Country and what it all says about the way movies are made is now up to one thousand pages and counting; my colleague Kim Morgan of the Portland Oregonian reveres Ishtar, and can even sing all the movie's songs at the drop of a hat ("Telling the truth can be dangerous business;/ Honest and popular don't go hand in hand. / If you admit that you play the accordion, / No one will hire you in a rock 'n' roll band. / But we can sing out hearts out. / And if we're lucky, then no neighbors complain. / Because life is the way we audition for God; / Let us pray that we all get the job"). Love Affair isn't as execrable as Town and Country, (though it only made about $5 million in the U.S. off of its $18 million-plus budget) nor is it as potentially defensible as Ishtar. Instead, it's somewhere in between, which in the end may be its problem.
Don't get me wrong. This obsession with Beatty's bad movies is no dismissal of his work as a performer or filmmaker. Beatty is fascinating. As the man who has dated all the women I was thinking of asking out, he is the envy of the world. As a filmmaker, he revolutionized the way movies were made. After Bonnie and Clyde Hollywood wasn't the same until Star Wars, as Peter Biskind points out in his gossipy history of '70s cinema, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. But when his films are bad, they are really bad, in a unique, cold, airless sort of way.
Love Affair concerns two engaged people who meet on a turbulent air flight. During a lengthy lay over, they fall in love, but as one is a skeptical and somewhat staid singer engaged to a successful businessman, and the other a roué and former football hero now anchoring the Los Angeles NBC affiliate, neither believes that the other one could really be serious. The singer is Terry McKay (Annette Bening) and the football guy is (the oddly named) Michael Gambril (Beatty). They put their love to the test. If they both show up to meet on the roof of the Empire State Building at 5:02 pm on May 8th, after having had three months to sort out their lives and dump their prospective spouses, they know it is true love. Naturally, unexpected events intervene.
As one watches Love Affair, often while squirming, usually while hoping that everything would just speed up, the viewer realizes that the essence of a love story is that the main characters be likable. Bening and Beatty try, though Beatty should really stop playing publicly perceived variations on himself. Bening has a marvelous voice, one of the most controlled yet flexible instruments in the business. Beatty can have charm, though he is no Cary Grant. There's just an aching feeling throughout the film that it would have been better off as a comedy.
Oh, wait, Love Affair, is a comedy. It's got Gary Shandling as Gambril's hustling lawyer, and Harold Ramis in a cameo as an amusing accountant. In fact, there are lots of cameos in this film, including director Paul Mazursky and Brenda Vaccaro as a noisy couple on a plane., and Pierce Brosnan and Kate Capshaw as the people the leads are set to marry (and, in a move characteristic of the genre, are treated shabbily by the filmmakers). Meanwhile, Mary Hart, John Tesh, Steve Kmetko, Terry Murphy, Barry Nolan, and Andrea Kutyas play "themselves," and Taylor Dayne and Carey Lowell appear. Ray Charles is seen at a benefit concert. Ed McMahon is a fleeting presence (which is funny, given that Shandling did a whole TV show parodying Ed's former boss, Johnny Carson). Another thing that pops up are pop, rock, and vintage jazz tunes. There seems to be one every three seconds, as if this were a Spike Lee film. The fact that the credits are white letters against a simple black background with a vintage jazz tune behind brings up the possibility that everyone involved was inspired by Woody Allen, rather than Leo McCarey, the person who co-wrote and directed two previous versions of this same story, the second one with Cary Grant. That's the movie that Tom Hanks and friend mock in Sleepless in Seattle as a shameless tearjerker. The fact that the Nora Ephron comedy quoted the McCarey Love Affair and renewed interest in it is perhaps what instigated this vehicle for Beatty and his wife in 1994.
It must be nice for couples to work together, but this Love Affair suffers from the same problem that afflicts a lot of romances, including Sleepless in Seattle, in that film perhaps more than others. That is, the central couple don't spend enough time together. Thus the viewer has no faith that there really is potential for a romance. Poor Glenn Gordon Caron, the credited director. Once the master of television, where the writer is king, Caron invented the then hit series Moonlighting, which changed how TV comedies worked. Here he has a series of sometimes ridiculous but usually dull scenes, credited to writers Beatty and Robert Towne, including a brisk lighthearted trip to an isolated house that requires first a boat, then a truck, then another boat, then a Vespa, and finally a hike by foot, and culminating in a contrivance wherein an aged Katharine Hepburn as Gambril's Aunt Ginny is forced to utter a lengthy metaphor comparing animal and human sexual behavior that culminates in the punchline of her saying, "f…k a duck".
The DVD
VIDEO: Warner Bros. has done a conventional job with Love Affair. The print used doesn't show much of its age, though there is dirt and scratching at the beginning and especially at the end. The widescreen image, 1.85:1 and enhanced for widescreen televisions, is fine in its muted, limited palette, but the image does seem a little soft at times, especially at the beginning. But that may be cinematographer Conrad L. Hall disguising the age of his stars. One of the great masters of light, Hall is a little obvious here, with spot beams that the actors walk into or sit under. This form of lighting makes Bening, especially, look glamorous, but it comes at the cost of distracting the viewer.
SOUND: Sound is in Dolby Digital 5.0, which is adequate to a chatty comedy that is overlaid with a lush if tuneless score by Ennio Morricone. The soundtrack also comes in French in DD 2.0. There are subtitles in English, French, Spanish Portuguese, Chinese, Thai, and Korean.
MENUS: A static, musical lead menu offers 28 chapter scene selection for this 108 minute movie.
PACKAGING: Love Affair comes in the regular Warner cardboard and plastic snap case with cover art derived from elements of the original poster. The label on the disc reiterates an image off the back of the box showing Beatty and Bening sunning themselves.
EXTRAS: Supplements consist of the flimsy trailer, presented in 1.85:1 image size, plus two screens of the film's cast and crew.
Final Thoughts: Love Affair is for fanatical members of the bad Beatty films cult only.
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