Word: streisands
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Mirror Has Two Faces" is a little bit like riding that Gravitron thing at the local carnival: you know exactly what's going to happen, but you still hope that maybe, just this once, you won't get sick to your stomach. No such luck. Even though director Barbra Streisand tries so hard to spin it just the right way, when the credits roll out and Bryan Adams starts crooning, you're groaning along with everybody else in the theater...
...Mirror Has Two Faces" knows exactly what it is--a cheesy romantic comedy--and it follows this classic, comforting formula to the letter: boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy is an idiot, boy loses girl, boy and girl get back together. Streisand, however, adds her own 90's twist--no sex. This little curveball does exactly nothing to divert the film from the romantic formula, but, aside from discouraging most of the male audience, it does accomplish one other significant feat: It makes the movie a whole hell of a lot funnier...
Fortunately for everyone, the boy, girl and just about everybody else in "The Mirror Has Two Faces" happen to be played by very competent actors. Streisand herself plays Rose Morgan, an English professor at Columbia who knows the name of every single student in her 400 person lecture, and appears to be teaching a class entitled "My Personal Life 101." Rose is obviously a delicate flower indeed, witty and smart but resigned to the fact that she is just not that pretty, especially in comparison to her deliciously catty mother Hannah (Lauren Bacall) and sister Claire (Mimi Rogers). A cross...
Richard LaGravenese is one of the few screenwriters left who can write smart dialogue for grownups to speak, but that skill only occasionally distracts from the desperation of his basic conceit. Bridges is a terrific actor, but, putting it mildly, he's miscast in the Doris Day role. And Streisand is a terrific presence, but also a performer who never forgets who she really is. Since she directed, co-produced and wrote Mirror's love theme, she is not about to let us forget it, either. "Second Hand Roses" have been part of her act, part of her calculations...
...Years of public face-time as feisty U.N. ambassador, and she knows the subject; friend of Hillary; goes antiquing with Barbra Streisand...