New York, New York

Day 202 - 7/21/09 - Movie #202

BEFORE: You see what I did there? Following last night's New York-themed movie with another one...ironic because I'm packing for San Diego at the same time... Wait, the running time is 2 hours, 43 minutes? I don't know if I can stay up late enough to watch this whole movie - I wish I had watched it on the weekend, when I had a little more time. I bought this DVD last week at the $5.99 DVD store, on my boss' recommendation.

THE PLOT: An egotistical saxophone player and a young singer meet on V-J Day and embark upon a strained and rocky romance, even as their careers begin a long uphill climb.

AFTER: De Niro and Liza Minnelli? They seem like a horribly mismatched couple, except for when they're performing together in the swing band. It's an uneasy partnership, made difficult by De Niro's Jimmy Doyle, who's a typical 1940's male chauvinist. When Minnelli's Francine tries to have an opinion on anything, he has a Travis Bickle-like tantrum.

Unfortunately, the segments between the tantrums and the musical numbers are long, slow, and fairly pointless - this could have been edited a LOT tighter. It's also unfortunate that Jimmy and Francine can't ever be successful at the same time - when one's up, the other's down, and the one who's down is always jealous of the other's success. Plus it gets confusing later in the film, with Liza Minnelli playing Francine Evans playing Peggy Smith in a Broadway revue.

RATING: 4 out of 10 microphones. I might have ranked it higher if I found Liza attractive, but she always has that astonished look, like she was just punched in the face.

DENIR-O-METER: 7 - Jimmy Doyle is actually a complex character, representing the way I think a lot of men treated women back in the 1940's, as they reacted to women becoming more independent. It's a combination of love, disrepect and borderline abuse that today might be diagnosed as bi-polar, but back then was all too common.

22 De Niro films down, and just 1 more to go...