Word: herbe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Goodbye Girl's Quinn Cummings. Nineteen-year-old Libby Tucker (Dinah Manoff) decides to embark on an odyssey from Brooklyn to California, to find her screenwriter father who abandoned her 16 years earlier. She hopes to use his help to start--surprise, surprise--a career in show business. But Herb, her father, is not the successful writer she had expected and the road to riches is difficult. This opening sequence adequately conveys the disillusionment of a young woman who learns that her dreams aren't quite so easy to fulfill...
...film. The writer has become complacent about his characters, no longer treating them as human beings, but merely as devices. The irrelevant one-liners that he seems unable to control--"In Brooklyn, you learn Spanish first, then English, then Jewish"--dominate the film. Libby and her father Herb (Walter Matthau) spend most of their scenes together throwing witty remarks across the room; the audience comes to expect no more than impersonal humor. When a serious line does pop out of the dialogue here and there, rather than evoking any real emotion from the audience, it simply sits there, wallowing...
...PLEASANT SURPRISE in I Ought to be in Pictures is the low-key performance of Ann-Margaret as Herb's girlfriend Stephanie Stephanie is the most sensible character in the film, and as such she delivers the most serious lines and she doesn't have to scream to get her point across. Simon uses her as a straight woman to the wise-cracking Herb and Libby, and Ann-Margaret makes the most of this position by never allowing herself to be upstaged. This is an unusual role for her, and she plays it with strength and credibility, thus surpassing...
...beginning of the picture, Libby says that she's going to Hollywood to become an actress and improve "the crap they've been putting out lately." Unfortunately, I Ought to be in Pictures is hardly an improvement. One can't resist drawing comparisons between Simon and the character of Herb Tucker, who is also a screenwriter who hasn't written a successful work for a number of years. If Simon continues with the same overused storylines, ignoring realistic character development, then he may become just as stale as the character he has created. In the final analysis, there...
RUGGERS SWALLOW THE BITTER HERB...