Word: lyne
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Charlie Brown (Steve Lyne), is a clod who fails at everything he tries, and then screams "Aaaargh." But in spite of his many shortcomings, he's also a human being--just like YOU, kiddies--and that makes him (and YOU) special and life just dandy. Lyne churns out an uninspiring but passable performance in a role that doesn't leave much room for inspiration...
...Weeks works as something of a Romeo and Juliet in reverse. Where Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers found common ground in world torn asunder by petty hatreds and jealousies, Lyne's sexual mercenaries have managed to find isolation and meaninglessness in a world filled with potential for those who have enough imagination to discover the meaning in their lives...
...LYNE POPULATES THE exterior world of his movie with gaily chatting and arguing New York ethnics who swirl around his android WASP heroes like flies around a honeycomb. Lyne, in his indominatable style, means to make fun of the Chinese, Blacks, and Italians who blithely live on the surface world of lowtech New York. But the seemingly irrelevant visions of a polyglot urban landscape only serve to underscore the irrelevance and emptiness of Rourke and Basinger's protagonists...
Basinger, whose performance with Sam Shepard in his and Robert Altman's Fool for Love demonstrated that she should be above this stuff, is, thanks to Lyne's directing techniques, able to show the whole range of angst-ridden emotions from fear to guilt-ridden pleasure. But who could fashion a believable role from a script that requires her to suffer the ignominy of being trapped atop a ferris wheel at one moment and to prance down the boardwalk with Rourke as if nothing had happened at the next...
There is little sense to anything either of these characters does. Unless I've missed some major development in human relations that obviates the need for character consistency and development, Lyne's Weeks is a laughable failure in even approaching an understanding of the human condition, Yuppie or otherwise. We are left with two lifeless corpses, animated models who are unable to show any more emotion than they do on the pages of a glossy magazine...