Truly Dreadful Film

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

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

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Town and Country is the sort of comedy that thinks the height of humor is hearing the phrase "big, stupid cock" come out of Diane Keaton's mouth. It thinks hearing Garry Shandling yell out "I'm gay" to a ballroom full of people is just knee-slapingly funny. It thinks destroying a 25 year marriage through adultery is a punchline. If that's the sort of stuff that makes you laugh…well, maybe you ought to get some therapy.Porter Stoddard (Warren Beatty) is an rich architect, the kind of rich where he can charter a private plane to fly all the way to Paris to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his marriage to Ellie (Diane Keaton) and bring along their married best friends, Mona and Griffin (Goldie Hawn and Garry Shandling), for the party. Everything seems to be fine, except Porter is cheating on Ellie with a beautiful cellist. Oh, and Griffin is cheating on Mona with another man. And then Mona finds out Griffin is cheating but thinks it's with a woman so she ends up in bed with Porter, afterwhich Ellie finds out Porter has been cheating on her with the cellist, which leads to Porter and Griffin going to this winter resort where two more women want to have sex with Porter and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Basically, Town and Country is like the most mean spirited and emotionally decadent episode ever of "I Love Lucy", where Warren Beatty plays the role of Lucy. Wait, maybe I don't want to make that analogy. Lucy getting in on with Fred is too terrible a mental picture to contemplate.This is a thoroughly unfunny comedy. It's not that there aren't lots of jokes, because there are. It's also not because the individual performers can't do comedy, because they can. It's that this movie doesn't understand that its story is usually nothing to laugh at. Adultery, betrayal, divorce and family break-up are not the backbone of light and frothy humor. You actually can be funny about such stuff, but only if you acknowledge how deep and serious such matters are. If you're going to tell a story where the main character is a guy who cheats on his wonderful wife for no apparent reason other than he's a huge jackass, the humor in such a story had either be very dark and bitter or very, very over the top. That sort of tale can work as a black comedy or some absurd spectacle, but Town and Country is neither that sharp nor that broad.Everything about this movie reeks of a pretentious yet sedate unreality. Porter cheats on his wife, but the film refuses to recognize that makes him a bad person. Mona sleeps with her best friend's husband, but the film refuses to acknowledge her as a bad person. There's a scene where Porter is at home and wakes up in the middle of the night to get a snack. As he walks down the hallway, he hears his son having sex with his girlfriend in his room, his daughter having sex with her non-English speaking boyfriend in her room and his maid having sex with her boyfriend in her room. Then the daughter's boyfriend, the maid's boyfriend and his son all join Porter in the kitchen…and absolutely none of that makes Porter even the slightest bit uncomfortable. What's obviously supposed to be funny about that situation is how freaked-out the middle aged dad gets at all the sex happening in his home. If the middle aged dad doesn't get freaked out, where's the joke? The one laugh-out-loud moment in Town and Country comes when Shandling's Griffin has a genuinely real and human reaction to another character's crazy behavior, but that's about the only bit of human realism in the whole movie.It's kind of shame how bad this film is because Beatty and Keaton have wonderful on screen chemistry. I f Beatty hadn't become the sort of obsessive perfectionist who could only make one movie every 5 years or so, he and Keaton could have had an entire career playing opposite each other like a modern Hepburn and Tracy or Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas. Goldie Hawn is okay and Garry Shandling is really just in the film for some one-liners. Andie MacDowell gives a pretty poor performance, but that's largely because her character is a contrived and phony mess that few actresses could make work. Charlton Heston hams it up as the father of MacDowell's character and his on screen wife could have come straight out of a Judd Apatow film.Town and Country is a comedy that isn't funny. The only way you might enjoy watching it is if you really hate Warren Beatty and want to laugh at him as he flops around on screen in this dying fish of a film.

Warren Beatty and Buck Henry team again (many years after the pleasant "Heaven Can Wait") in a boring film, supposed to be a modern comedy about the sexual and emotional relationships of Beatty but in a unfunny and not amusing way. The all-star cast can't save the swallow script (to be honest only Warren Beatty is as good as you expect, the female roles are simply dull - especially Andie McDowell - and the talented efforts are wasted almost in the middle of the movie. Some funny lines between Beatty and Shandling and nothing more at all. From the - "Once Upon a Time I made a great film " director Peter Chelsom ("Hear My Song")

There was nothing funny about this movie, and it could have been funny. It showed no real comic respect for marriage, for women, or for the children of the skirt chaser. It was vulgar. I disliked nearly all of the main characters, not a good sign. Warren Beatty as super attractive to all these younger women--out of the question--simply not realistic at his age. So the plot rationale was poor. One younger woman, maybe, several, no. Worst scene--him together with Goldie Hawn. Trashy, embarrassing, vulgar. I wanted it to be much better than it was, because of all the major stars in it. Jenna Elfman was probably the funniest thing about this movie. Charlton Heston was a disaster, a sad parody of himself. Gary Shandling had a few good lines. But mostly all the talents were wasted. Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson did this type of plot much better in Something's Gotta Give. That movie was funny and tongue in cheek--it worked.

Warren Beatty is one of those Hollywood icons that has had an inconsistant career. For every Bonnie and Clyde he has made, he has also made Ishtar (which I think is better than this movie). This movie is by far his worst. It feels like a desperate attempt by Beatty to make him feel young by having him sleep around with so many women. The whole cast feels lost in this movie. The characters are all unlikable, especially Beatty's. Why would I sit through a "comedy" where we don't want to be around these people? The usually charming Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton are rather shrill in this movie. I say read articles about this movie's troubled production. I think that story would be up there with the story of "Heaven's Gate," "Ishtar," "Bonfire of the Vanities," and "Waterworld" as the behind the scenes story is more interesting than the movie itself.