I wasn't sure what to expect -- after all, Billy Crystal's veered from When Harry Met Sally... to My Giant, and you never know if director Harold Ramis will turn in a Groundhog Day or a Multiplicity. Fortunately, this is a pretty damn funny movie, with good comic performances from Crystal, De Niro, and the supporting cast, especially Crystal's son and De Niro's henchman Jelly (though sadly, Lisa Kudrow as Crystal's fiancee is more like Phoebe than her brilliantly bitter Lucia in The Opposite of Sex). It riffs on The President's Analyst and every Mafia film made in the past 25 years, even re-enacting a scene from The Godfather. Of course, the novelty of hearing made guys psychobabble about "closure" and "being in a happy place" gets a bit threadbare after a while, and the jokes are often obvious -- even the Queen Moron behind me (more on her in a minute) could often tell what was coming up, and she was good enough to share her prognostications with the rest of the theater. But overall, it's really funny and manages to get laughs from even the most predictable jokes (aside from a couple lamentable forays into bathroom humor). I haven't laughed this hard since I saw the preview for Ravenous (Tiffany, "he was LICKING me!").
Now for my audience rant, a feature which has been long absent, thanks to my habit of going to these free sneak previews, which usually have more respectful people who enjoy movies and realize that they are not in their living rooms and that there are people around them who might also like to hear the film. Some idiots slipped in somehow, though, and they all sat in the row behind me. There were the two pairs of Constant Conversationalists to my left, but they were nothing compared to the Triple Threat moron to my right. She shrieked at every joke -- and at many lines that WEREN'T jokes -- she clapped after every line, and she repeated the last two words of every punchline. Toward the end, she started stomping her feet and slamming her knees against the back of my seat every time she clapped, often pitching forward, the better to aim her shrieks directly into my ear canal. She came a lot closer than she realized to leaving that theater with my pen in her throat.
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