BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

ShangLuda Admirable film.

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The_late_Buddy_Ryan I've enjoyed most of David O. Russell's movies and I know it's supposed to be screwball comedy and all, but this one had a few too many goofy, contrived plot twists for my taste—like when gay ATF agent Richard Jenkins impulsively decides to follow a guy he's never met before (and whose wife his committed gay partner's been flirting with) all the way to New Mexico to help him find his birth parents. I liked the scenes where Stiller and Téa Leoni get so wrapped up in each other that they start knocking over the furniture, but it didn't seem like Téa was really pulling her weight the rest of the time, and though I was impressed by the outside-the-box casting choice of MTM as the nudzhy Jewish mother, I was kind of hoping her character wouldn't show up again after the opening scenes. Finally, I couldn't really buy Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin as desert-rat drug dealers, though I enjoyed the antics of their sociopathic teenage son. I know Russell goes in for these big ensemble comedies with everybody yelling and carrying on, but this time, as with "Silver Linings Playbook" a few years back, it seemed like the plot was already spinning out of control with 20 or 30 frantic, not-sot-funny minutes left to go. Eight stars for the first 45′, four for the second.

tieman64 David O. Russell directs "Flirting With Disaster". The plot? Ben Stiller plays Mel Coplin, a young man who attempts to find the biological parents with whom he has never had contact. This, he hopes, will explain "why he is why he is". Unfortunately Mel keeps meeting the wrong people, all of whom he keeps mistaking for kin. The film ends with Mel eventually meeting his genetic parents – a pair of marijuana growing hippies – but its overall point is that there are always other prospective partners, people and kin vying for our attention and more. What matters or defines us are ultimately the choices we make, rather than the genes in our bodies or the company we keep. This stance is the opposite of Russell's "Huckabees", where choices seem irrelevant in light of social/cultural programming. Russell was a political activist/scientist before turning to film."Flirting With Disaster" sports funny performances from Tea Leoni, Alan Alda and the oft underused Lily Tomlin. Its last and first acts are very funny, but things slow down during its middle portion. The film's structured as a "road movie". If Russell's underrated "I Heart Huckabees" was a existential comedy in the vein of late Woody Allen, "Flirting With Disaster" is a light farce in the vein of Allen's earlier, madcap comedies.8/10 – Worth one viewing.

Roedy Green Most important is the cast. It is filled with familiar actors you just love to watch including Ben Stiller, Mary Tyler Moore, Ben Stiller, Alan Alda and Lilly Tomlin. It has a young, beardless, extremely sexy Josh Brolin looking a bit like Matt Damon. Patricia Arquette (Medium) is in it. Glenn Fitzgerald also plays a young hunk, but one so weird you could not really consider him attractive.The basic plot is Ben Stiller (Mel Coplin) travelling from place to place to find his birth parents. He runs into a number of possibilities each weird in his/her own way.Within this loose framework, it feels more like improvisation. Scenes just sort of peter out after a while. The humour is the characters running out their day-to-day (but weird) behaviour. There are not many site gags or bon mots. It is just the fun of watching weird people reacting to unfamiliar situations. I think I laughed hardest at Téo Leone with her long legs like an ostrich striding to get away from a crazed truck driver. She had to look elegant even when her life was at stake.One of the themes is adultery, just what constitutes adultery, and what you should do about it both as adulterer and adulteree. Poor Ben breaks in on a very handsome man licking his bored wife's armpit. How should he react? Etiquette books don't cover this.It is a very gay friendly movie given that in was made in 1996. Homosexuality is treated as just one more comic opportunity. The two gay characters are quite far from the stereotypes. That treatment was refreshing and funny.It is a bit of a sloppy movie, but it is fun just the same.

dave-sturm I submit there is never a single non-funny minute in this masterpiece of screwball comedy. How in heaven's name were these actors able to keep a straight face making this? Tea Leoni, especially, greets each new disaster with insincere mortification so effectively that it is the movie's best running gag.To recap, Ben Stiller is a husband, new father and adopted son of archetypely loud and quarrelsome Jewish New York parents George Segal and Mary Tyler Moore. Ben wants to find his "roots," i.e., birth parents. He has enlisted the help of adoption case worker Tea Leoni, whose somber professional manner conceals incompetence of colossal proportions.So begins a road movie as Ben, Tea and Ben's wife, played by a physically lush Patricia Arquette, and their baby set out on the quest, which seems simple at first. What they are actually plunging into is an incredibly complicated unfolding of an adopted child's real history.There's no point in going into the plot in more depth. Suffice it to say that no sooner does one set of crazy people, all of whom seem perfectly normal at first, exit the movie than a new set of crazy people pops up.Favorite scene? I'd have to say LSD "guide" Lilly Tomlin trying to talk down an LSD-lit-up Richard Jenkins. The destruction of the post office comes in a close second. Oh, but wait, there's the armpit-licking scene. And ... I give up. David O. Russell, the writer/director, take a bow.