[Albion Wilde]

That’s the only line from the movie that I remember, but I do remember I liked it at the time.

I ended up in the lobby, sobbing, after seeing that. The film set you up to expect a comedy, and then it got as serious as cancer. Nicholson and MacLaine were great together -- both very strong performances; but Shirley ripped my heart out when she went to the defense of her daughter. She won an Oscar, a Bafta, and a Golden Globe for that performance.

[moovova]

OK...I went back and read the Wiki plot description. And yes, I now remember how sad it was. Can’t believe I didn’t remember that aspect. May’ve been cross-remembering it with “The Goodbye Girl”.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the John Lithgow/Debra Winger grocery store scene in “Terms”? The scene where he tells the grocery store cashier “You must be a Democrat”?

[rlmorel]

I remembered it as funny, but boy, when I re-watched it, I sure was wrong. But yes, the film DID set it up as a comedy, and in retrospect, I wouldn’t have classified it that way.

I don’t like that in a movie. Be a drama. Or be a comedy. But don’t be both.

The best example to me was a movie “Love & Other Drugs” with Anne Hathaway and Jake Glynenhall. They played drug representative (the kind who peddled their drugs to physicians) and my wife and I howled at the first half of the movie, we both thought it was brilliantly funny. We both spent our careers in medicine, and we had seen these kinds of people often enough in real life to make it hit our funny bone, from the slicked back hair and pointy shoes to to the rolling bags they carried their drugs in.

I thought it might have been one of the funniest movies I had seen in years.

And then they got serious.

In the second half of the movie, it got totally serious, and it completely ruined the movie.