ONE FINE DAY
A film review by Walter Frith
Copyright 1996 Walter Frith
Scheduled to open on December 20th is the comedy/drama 'One Fine Day' starring Michelle Pfeiffer and George Clooney. I had the opportunity to view this movie in advance on the evening of December 5th here in my hometown through various established contacts and I can tell you right now that there's no need to hold your breath. The movie is set in New York City and Pfeiffer and Clooney star as the parents of kindergarten aged children who arrive one morning escorting their offspring to school and they are late and the class has already left for their scheduled field trip. She is an architect on the verge of a major promotion within her company and he is a high profile journalist working on the most important story of his life. They are forced to juggle the needs of their children and their careers and are inadvertently thrown together for ONE FINE DAY of course meaning it will be one of the most chaotic and alarming days in memory as they must bring small children to work with them! Unfortunately you can't build a film with a running time of 108 minutes simply around a premise. The premise must expand into plot and develop gears to get off the ground. This film never does that and I looked at my watch at precisely the 24 minute mark which is a bad sign. Clooney, who has struck gold on television's 'ER' and who is presently shoooting next summer's 'Batman and Robin' in which he will star as the caped crusader is the only character with some interesting aspects. He makes the most of a repetitive script by adding an easy going charm and likeability while Pfeiffer suffers badly in a role that gives working women a bad name and really makes them the target of male chauvanism. The film plays more like a network television movie rather than a big screen Hollywood presentation and I was actually offended at the amount of unintended child neglect that is associated with this film. Michelle Pfeiffer is a remarkably talented actress and gained breakthrough recognition and critical acclaim in 1983's 'Scarface' as Al Pacino's trashy and drug addicted wife. Clooney has had small success on the big screen but gained some surprisingly good notices earlier this year for Robert Rodriguez's 'From Dusk Till Dawn' as a murdering escaped prisoner on the lam in Texas trying to make it to the Mexican border with his sexually psychotic brother and a family he's taken hostage. Clooney was one of the most chilling and unrepenting bad guys in recent memory in that movie which was indefensible garbage. I would like to see Clooney perform well in a good film instead of being the standout character in really bad movie which has been happening a lot lately. 'One Fine Day' even has the nerve to insult us by having its two leading characters who hate each other at the beginning of the movie slowly fall in love and bring us to a disappointing conclusion. I've given away nothing but what a cliche!
OUT OF 5 > *
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