BEFORE: Well, "Swimfan" was released in 2002, but now this week I'm going further back, to the land of the 1990's, because I've got romance films left over from previous Februarys and I'm trying to clear the decks around here. Everything must go, I've got inventory problems - through no fault of my own, the way that the linking works I've tried every year to put together the best possible string of love-based media properties, but if you think about it, there are dozens of possible connections for each movie and I can only follow ONE of them each day. So films sometimes get "stranded" because I followed a different path, big-picture style to make a fully connected month. This 1993 film with Michael J. Fox has been taking up space on my DVR for about two years, and it's time to clear it, even if it turns out to be a terrible film.
I can't even remember what the original intended linking was supposed to be - but maybe tomorrow's film will remind me. Once two films of a similar genre that share an actor get placed next to each other on my list, they tend to stay that way, unless one is needed somewhere else to fix a linking emergency. Michael J. Fox didn't star in that many romances, so maybe that was part of my problem, I recorded this one and then had no way to get there. I had one this year, actually I had two because Gabrielle Anwar, the young love interest in this one, played another character's MOTHER last week in "The Last Summer". So, yeah, that's how long this one's been slipping through the cracks. As I go through the credits, I'll expect to find several actors who are no longer alive, and I'll try to not get depressed about that.
Dan Hedaya carries over from "Swimfan".
THE PLOT: Doug, a concierge at a luxury hotel in Manhattan, saves all his tips towards his plan for his own hotel. A potential investor seduces the girl he loves, with false promises of leaving his wife. Doug's dilemma: hotel project or girl?
AFTER: Here's today's "Love Tip" - sometimes, a relationship is all about the real estate. I don't mean to sound flippant about relationships, but when you break it down, when you love somebody you want to share your lives, share your space, and maybe share an apartment or a house. And then when the relationship is over, something has to change, one person usually moves out or maybe lawyers get involved and decide who gets the house, or it may even get sold at that point. Even in the best case scenario, where two people stay together until "death do us part", there's still the matter of the real estate, it's just easier to figure out who gets it.
I had a tacit agreement with my first wife that if one of us should want to leave the relationship, they should also leave the premises. Not that it would make things any easier for the one left behind, but hey, at least they'd have a consolation prize, they wouldn't have to move all of their stuff. We had just watched a couple of friends ALMOST go through a break-up, and the husband wanted to leave the marriage AND keep the apartment, and to us, this was a total break-up faux pas. Not cool. So when my wife had mentally "checked out" from our marriage by coming out of the closet, yeah, I asked her to pack up and leave - but I was just following the terms of the discussion we'd had a couple years before. The person who wants to leave should have to physically LEAVE, because that's work, and it should take work to get what you want.
(This is on my mind because I just scanned through that documentary about Kurt Vonnegut - with the sound off - to see who else appears in it, if I want to watch it in April then I need to know if it's going to connect with my other docs, and thankfully, it does. Fits in like it was meant to be. When Vonnegut left his first wife he LEFT, moved to NYC and she got the house on Cape Cod, so it seems he was kind of on the same page with this as a set-up.)
I bring this up because the lead character here in "For Love or Money" is a hotel concierge with big dreams, he wants to open up a hotel of his own on Roosevelt Island, which is a strip of land between Manhattan and Queens, in the East River. To the best of my knowledge, there are no hotels there in real life, and I would imagine that putting one there would be difficult. Not just turning an abandoned building into a working hotel, but also getting people to stay there on a regular basis, because the best way to get there is by a tramway over the river, similar to the trams used to get to the tops of mountains. Why would anyone stay on Roosevelt Island when they can stay in Manhattan itself, within walking distance of plays, attractions and subways? (Actually, there is one subway stop on Roosevelt Island, the "F" train has a stop there.). Apparently there IS at least one hotel on Roosevelt Island now, and surprisingly it's MORE expensive than the average NYC hotel, not less.
So, it looks like somebody out there had a similar dream to Doug's. But it was an uphill battle for Doug to get there, he had all the plans and some of the legal bits figured, and he'd saved for years to put a down payment on the property, but what he needed was to partner with someone with deep pockets, someone to finance the rest of the deal so he could become at least part owner of this new hotel, instead of just working for someone else's hotel. Then in the process he got caught in a love triangle, as the fashion mogul willing to back his hotel plan is also having an affair with the girl he likes who works at the perfume counter in a department store. Wow, this film came out in the 1990's, but clearly it was written in the spirit of the 1980's - Doug's does things like recommending hair stylists by saying "Ivana (Trump) goes there...". I'm surprised that the screenplay didn't have him getting in bed with a Trump-like real estate mogul.
Instead the "villain" here is a fashion designer, someone who lives out in the Hamptons with his third wife. (And somehow the fashion guy is having an affair with a woman, not a man...). He keeps saying that he's going to leave his wife, but come on, he's never going to, and Doug's wanna-be girlfriend, Andy, is just too naive to figure this out. She's got a burgeoning singing career, and apparently sees her relationship with Christian Hanover as her ticket to stardom, like maybe he'll finance a Broadway show that she can appear in. Stranger things have happened, I suppose, but as anyone who's seen a romantic comedy before knows, her real destiny is probably with the younger lead character, who is torn between covering for his prospective business partner and looking out for the best interests of the attractive perfume counter girl.
This leads him to do all kinds of crazy things like take a helicopter out to the Hamptons to intercept Andy at a party (Hanover claims it would take Doug "days" to drive out there, and he's not that far off...) or take her to dinner and explain why her boyfriend couldn't make it - or worse, go watch her perform in her cabaret show, which is, umm, not very good. But he doesn't complain about having to hear her sing, which means that there's some hope for them in the long run. As the title suggests, it's going to come down to a choice for him, he can have the real estate deal or the girl, but probably he can't have both. Or can he?
Beyond that, this is a crazy look at the life of a hotel concierge, which involves getting the hotel guests whatever they want, even if they don't ask in advance, or even if they don't know that they want it. This could be Broadway show tickets, concert tickets, box seats at Yankee Stadium, singing lessons for a bird, etc. The hotel lobby has some kind of "in" with the concert promoters that's gone back YEARS, so if you were one of the millions of people who couldn't get Taylor Swift tickets, because TicketMaster is corrupt and thousands of tickets get filtered off to other sources, this film might show you how this situation came to be. Greed and connections, that's how - and even if we could create a level playing field for concert tickets, eventually the brokers, scalpers and hotel concierges would create a new way to get around the new system, and we'll be right back where we started, because greed and connections.
You might as well also hate the system that allows a young woman to think that sleeping with a famous married fashion designer is a short-cut to fame and fortune, while it's very un-PC these days to suggest something like that, in the 1990's people probably didn't think much about it, but hey, it was a different time. Or a suggestion that the garbage disposal industry in NYC is run by the mob, or the fact that a rich person could probably bribe an IRS agent to threaten an audit. This was all part of the game back then, probably still is now, but you just don't hear about these things as much.
The filming locations included Tiffany & Co., FAO Schwarz (which closed in 2015), the Pierre Hotel (5th Ave. and 61st St.), Yankee Stadium, and a Gray's Papaya up on Amsterdam Avenue. The property that Doug wants to buy on Roosevelt Island is an old smallpox hospital, so, umm, good luck with that. And the film ends on the Queensboro Bridge for some reason, not a great place to have a conversation. Just saying.
Also starring Michael J. Fox (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Gabrielle Anwar (last seen in "The Last Summer"), Anthony Higgins (last seen in "Taste the Blood of Dracula"), Michael Tucker (last seen in "The Purple Rose of Cairo"), Bob Balaban (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Isaac Mizrahi (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Udo Kier (last seen in "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot"), Patrick Breen (last seen in "Just a Kiss"), Fyvush Finkel (last seen in "A Serious Man"), Saverio Guerra (last seen in "Lucky You"), Daniel Hagen, LaChanze (last seen in "The Help"), Paula Laurence, Donna Mitchell (last seen in "The Goldfinch"), Debra Monk (last seen in "One for the Money"), Sandra Reaves-Phillips (last seen in "Lean on Me"), Nicole Beach, Simon Jones (last seen in "Matilda"), Dianne Brill, Susan Blommaert (last seen in "Down to You"), Richard B. Shull (last seen in "Trapped in Paradise"), Mike Moyer (last seen in "Never Been Kissed"), Susan Ringo, John Cunningham (last seen in "Shaft" (2000)), Ann McDonough, Richmond Hoxie, Alice Playten (last seen in "I.Q."), Erick Avari (last seen in "Mr. Deeds"), Douglas Seale, David Lipman (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), Le Clanché du Rand, Hikari Takano, Gabor Morea, Tim Gallin, Steven Randazzo (last seen in "The Family"), with cameos from Bobby Short, Kimora Lee Simmons and archive footage of Yvonne DeCarlo, Al Lewis, Butch Patrick.
RATING: 5 out of 10 packets of duck sauce
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