Love Among The Smart
Set-Part Three-Jason Bateman’s “The Longest Week” (2014)- A Film Review
DVD Review
By Writer Greg Green
The Longest Weekend,
Jason Bateman, Olivia Wilde, Billy Crudup, 2014
Readers who have been
even marginally attentive over the past weeks know that I have taken over as
the site administrator here after Allan Jackson’s retirement (what his old
friend and betrayer by casting the decisive to kick him down the road like a
can Sam Lowell called with a smirk “putting him out to pasture” which in old “neighborhood
speak” meant as he has been spouting recently “purge”) and to get a feel for
the job, for what people are writing film reviews about and why I took on a
review myself of the 1930s classic The
Libeled Lady about the rich and their predilections which I gave a rousing
thumbs down to for its quirky and silly premise. The same Sam Lowell whose
decisive vote basically got me this job in a subsequent review of another
Mayfair swell saga (his term not mine) Preston Sturgis’ The Palm Beach Story took me to task for not drooling over these
classic smart set screwball comedies and gave his reasons why. I didn’t expect
to keep the dispute going but recently I have had an opportunity to see a film,
The Longest Week, which graphically
illustrates my point about the thinness of those smart set comedies.
Look the plotline is
short and sweet when you think about it. A poor little rich boy, played by
Jason Bateman, who is hunkered down in his upscale parents’ swanky Manhattan apartment
in the course of a week, a week in which those same parents decide to divorce
and leave him hanging, finds himself evicted from said apartment, out of dough,
out of luck, out of friends and in love with a beauty, played by Olivia Stone,
all the while dealing with his silly plight in a funny way that young audiences
today looking at a tough future can relate to but also laugh at. Especially
when that foxy lady turns and twists between him and his friend including
sleeping with both of them. This is the kind of film we should be, we will be,
spending more time reviewing as well as spy thrillers and comic book super-hero
films. Let the classics which about twelve people are interested in now mostly
cinematic academics with time on their hands go by the board. Forward.
