Word: ross
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Ross Brookfield...
...call California Suite uneven doesn't really begin to describe the movie's split personality. This latest Neil Simon-Herbert Ross collaboration is by turns silly and thoughtful, tedious and charming, broad and delicate. It contains some of Simon's best writing as well as his worst: childish jokes about vomiting coexist with wise statements about the art of marriage. So mixed are the returns on California Suite that, if it were an election, one would insist on a recount...
...movie is an adaptation of Simon's Broadway hit, a collection of four one-act plays set in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Rather than film the segments in succession, as Arthur Hiller did in his ill-fated screen version of Simon's Plaza Suite, Ross cuts back and forth among them. The result looks not unlike an episode of ABC's The Love Boat. The approach at least keeps the audience awake. One never knows when Ross will break away from the more tedious subplots to reveal a Simon zinger...
...Angeles one-liners, far inferior to Woody Allen's in Annie Hall, Fonda and Alda get all bittersweet. The heroine's lacerating wit, it turns out, is but a mask for her insecurity. The superficial writing is not helped by Alda's unprepossessing screen presence, Ross's melodramatic use of closeups, or by a gratuitous beach scene that exists only to show off Fonda in a bikini...
...Salters 3 0-0 6; Flick 1 1-2 3; Jackson 1 0-0 2; Price 10 3-4 23; Smith 10 1-2 21; White 7 0-0 14; Kuhl 1 2-2 4; Willis 9 1-2 19; Reynolds 3 0-0 6; Ross 2 0-1 2; Hall 0 1-2 1; Liefsen 0 0-0 0; TOTALS...