But, now that I finally feel like seeing movies again, there are precious few of them in town that I want to see. Plus I thought this would be like a healing thing for me, like reclaiming my movie-watching identity or something empowering like that. Plus the quotient of love scenes looked to be pretty low.
The Impostors is a broad farce, obviously meant in the tradition of Abbott and Costello, although it also inexplicably copies overwrought films noir as well. It's pretty funny at the beginning -- Oliver Platt and Stanley Tucci make a great physical comedy team as a pair of unemployed actors. And it looks promising for a while as they stow away on a cruise ship packed to the gills with wacky characters played by a who's who of independent film actors. The problem is, it's too packed, and it's too wacky. The film runs out of gas halfway through -- it's just too insubstantial to sustain the laughs, which are increasing contrived.
A few things that I've said before and will likely say again:
---Oliver Platt is criminally underrated and ought to get more leading
roles.
---Who keeps putting Tony Shalhoub in movies? At least in this one
he's not the only character with an irritating accent.
---Who keeps putting Isabella Rossellini in movies? She is just not
a good actress.
Otherwise the actors don't get enough screen time to really register. Lili Taylor is fun as a take-charge, feisty woman, who should be familiar to fans of '40s screwball comedies. Steve Buscemi has a few good moments as a suicidally depressed lounge singer named Happy, but he can't really go anywhere with it. Fewer characters and less clichéd comedy would have made this a better film. I'd say you can wait for video to see this.
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