Word: yorkin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
TWICE IN A LIFETIME, director/producer Bud Yorkin's over-wrought anthology on divorce and middle America, is a movie that you've seen before. You won't remember where you've seen it, but you've seen it. Probably on late-night TV, after Letterman. Or possibly at the movies, for in an inferior sort of way, Twice in Lifetime will remind you of a diluted Kramer vs. Kramer (the male version of what happens to a family after divorce), An Unmarried Woman (the slightly fast woman with precocious child version), Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (the strong, earth...
...have even seen this movie--albeit in a slightly different form--by the same director in 1967, when divorce was a prime subject for light-hearted cinematic fluff, in Yorkin's Divorce: American Style starring Debbie Reynolds, Dick Van Dyke and Jason Robards. Those were the good old days, when a husband and wife would have a fight, get divorced on the spur of the moment, get remarried in a similarly shot-gun manner, then realize that they had just made the biggest mistake of their lives and rectify it by getting back together with their own true love...
Unoriginal plots have made good films before. Fine acting and unusual direction could transform this dry tale into an honest, intense look at a family in crisis. Yorkin, however, does as much as he possibly can to curtail any such developments, repeatedly placing his characters against technicolor skies as they set off to build new lives across the rainbow in Puget Sound...
...scene: December 9, 1985. Teatime at Devon on the Common with Twice in a Lifetime Director/Producer Bud Yorkin of tv-sitcom fame...
...acceptance speech, Yorkin traced the history of television from the "golden age of live T.V." in the '50s to the "witless programming that now dominates the networks...