Mar. 24, 2004 - 1:05 pm
this was another movie that i noticed while looking over the AFI Passions list. it's one i had heard the title of a bunch, but never heard much about. turns out it's a Neil Simon play (famous American playwright who often writes i guess what you'd call romantic comedies). man, he was born in 1927 and he's still writing things that are being produced. did anyone see the ads for The Goodbye Girl (2004) on "The 20" at a Regal movie theater lately? i sure did.
so Barefoot in the Park takes place in New York City as Paul (Robert Redford) and Corie Bratter (Jane Fonda) have just gotten married. they spend six days in a hotel on their honeymoon and they then move into their new 6th floor apartment which they've never actually seen before. it turns out to be a very hard climb for most people to get up there and they're always on the verge of death when they actually reach the apartment. it's a running joke. once the couple is in the new apartment they start to realize that there are many differences between them and the marriage is quickly on the ropes. with a little humor and romance though, everything can turn out well, right?
i myself thought that the joke about the apartment's 6th story location and all of the stairs required to reach it was pretty funny, but a bit unbelieveable. i work in a 6 floor library every day and i don't find it that difficult to get up 5 flights of stairs. apparently neither do the french; when the film was shown there (dubbed already) they had to change it to 10 floors because so many old french buildings didn't have elevators that people were already used to climbing to the 6th floor and didn't get the joke.
i guess with all comedies some jokes are funny and some just aren't. a lot of this movie made me laugh though. there's one scene where the couple is fighting and the phone repairman comes to fix the phone. he realizes that the couple is feeling venemous and starts to fear for his safety. he tries harder and harder to finish up fixing the phone quickly, but keeps getting held up and thinking that especially Paul is going to beat him up or something.
i wish the cinematography had been a bit better in this movie. i think the tendency of directing the film version of a play is to keep the camera back at a distance and just pan the camera a lot to follow the action sort of similarly to how your head would move if you were watching a stage play. the problem is that you're wasting the ability of the film camera to capture more intense emotions that actors can portray with close-ups, etc. you lose a lot with this stand-offish technique. the film didn't do this all of the time, but many times especially when filming what was going on in the apartment.
*Diary News: check out the new "movie news" link to the left. it is an automatically-generated page that gives up-to-the-minute movie reports from the BBC (the best movie news site really). there's some pretty cool stories on there.