SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Dorathen Better Late Then Never

ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Piafredux Two splendid actors - Davis and Dreyfuss - doing nothing splendid or special with a predictable, trendiness-laden, and artificial Portentous-Moments-of-Life-Changing-Profundity script. I kept waiting for something to develop or to appear that wasn't bathetic, but no such luck. The scene in which Paul Mazurksy does an insipid and completely off-the-mark impression of Jerry Lewis is actually irrelevant and rather creepy...and not (warning: Spoiler) because Mazurksy's character dies with the Jerry Lewis fake Nutty Professor teeth in his mouth. Also, whoever styled (here I use that word advisedly) and colored Judy Davis's rat's nest hair ought to lose his or her beautician's credentials: not only was her coif awful, it's also just not the sort of hairdo worn by a very affluent, post-middle-aged Connecticut housewife - even is she is wed to a fast-becoming-a-has-been sit-com writer.

jimpa-5 This is a funny movie with some smart dialog and a couple adults in adult situations for a change. Thoroughly enjoyable. Dryfus is in control and not doing his "cute" routine. Davis is believable and always nice to see an old vet like Fred Ward. Sometimes you just have to sit back and enjoy a movie and be entertained.In an era of movies pandering to functional illiterates with the attention span of a bi-polar humming bird on crank, it's enjoyable to see a movie with people actually speaking to each other in complete sentences. Or if it isn't your style, there is always the latest Ben Stiller movie. I understand there is a hum dinger staring a blind ferret.

George Parker "Coast to Coast" sticks Dreyfuss and Davis front and center as a middle-aged couple on the verge of divorce who take a road trip from East to West coasts to attend their son's marriage while waxing nostalgic, visiting quirky friends, and sorting through old regrets along the way. Supposedly a poignant dramedy about reconciliation, this lame dose of couch potato fodder from Showtime has Toronto standing in for the US and a big hole where the entertainment should be. One can only speculate that budgetary constraints got between the cast and crew and a quality film product result. Coulda-shoulda been better, "Coast to Coast" is an uneven, uninspired nice-try-but-no-cigar near miss. (C)

lavatch It was inspired casting in the pairing of Richard Dreyfuss and Judy Davis as Barnaby and Maxine Pierce, a middle-aged married couple on a trek by car from the East to the West coasts. The ostensible purpose of their auto trip is to attend their son's wedding in Los Angeles. At the same time, the couple is contemplating a divorce and is still in recovery from the death of one of their children many years ago. The film reaches for over-the-top comedy in the couple's cross-country reunion with old friends and lovers while simultaneously expressing a painful undercurrent with the couple's long struggle to recover from their personal tragedy.The film juggles the comedic and dramatic styles with uneven results. The best scenes are the comic escapades, such as the visit to Minneapolis where the parents greet their daughter (Selma Blair), who introduces them to her latest fiance (John Salley) and announces that she is carrying another man's child. When the banter is brisk and lively, Dreyfuss and Davis are in fine form, recalling Hepburn and Tracy in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"But when the mood turns downbeat, the actors flounder with dramatic material that does not ring true to their characters. For example, it made no sense when the couple visited Denver and Davis' character Maxine was reunited with her ex-lover. There was even the suggestion that Maxine might remarry the Denver cop (Fred Ward) whose character is not only married, but is frighteningly abrasive. It was implausible that someone with the intelligence of Maxine would find any appeal in an unpleasant character with a hair-trigger temper. It was puzzling as well that the two adult children of Barnaby and Maxine seemed wiser than their world-weary parents and were all-too-ready to provide grief therapy. In any family system, those two children would need to deal with the loss of their sibling, just like their parents.The careful balancing of a comic style with a tragic undercurrent was achieved brilliantly in Edward Albee's play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", which deals a couple's presumed loss of a child while concurrently delivering the dark humor. "Coast to Coast" stretches, but falls substantially short of Albee's powerful style. In a single sequence in the L.A. portion of the film, Barnaby first insults his son's female boss in a hotel lobby; the boss subsequently forgives Barnaby unconditionally when she learns that he is the father of her employee; and, in the next scene, Barnaby is openly weeping in a restaurant, causing the other patrons to gawk at him. Are these scenes supposed to be funny or serious?The emotional roller coaster ride stretches credibility due to the weak dialogue, which, in this film, resembles slapdash sitcom writing. And it was especially disappointing in the film medium that there was not more footage of the colorful locations of the cross-country trip (other than a recurring map of U.S.A. shown to the viewer), as Barnaby and Maxine forge their way across the country. There was never a dull moment on this coast-to-coast trip. But the ride was bumpy and uneven.