That Old Feeling (1997)

THERE NEED TO BE MORE MOVIES LIKE THIS ONE!

I'm still trying to figure out how Bette Midler and Dennis Farina pulled off this movie. They are TOO NATURAL! Did they act this movie, or did they live it? THEY ARE TOO NATURAL!

Movie starts off as a takeoff of the 1996 movie "Everyone Says I Love You" where lead actor Edward Norton puts an engagement ring in girlfriend Drew Barrymore's dessert in a surprise proposal, she swallows it without realizing it and after a scene in the restaurant where she tries to bring it back up, they end up in the GI Lab at the hospital where the ring shows up on X-ray film digested into her intestine! In "That Old Feeling," second lead Jamie Denton puts an engagment ring in girlfriend Paula Marshall's dessert in the same surprise proposal, but when a waiter pops the cork out of a champagne bottle at the next table, her startlement causes her to choke on the ring, which necessitates a waiter rushing over to give her the Heimlich Maneuver, sending the ring and dessert she'd swallowed out of her mouth and into Denton's nose! She naturally accepts his proposal, but warns him against inviting her parents to their wedding; divorced fourteen years and happily married to two other people, they hate each other with a nuclear capacity! Well, after that funny opener, Denton invites them, anyway, and the movie gets funny ridiculous as Midler and Farina blow up at the reception, forcing Marshall, a stuffed shirt next to them, to put them in the parking lot to cool off, where fourteen years of pentup rage becomes into fourteen years of expressed lust! Nowhere for them to go from there but together oblivious to both their spouses! Problem is, Marshall's new husband Denton is running for political office and does not need a scandal, forcing her to have to find her runaway parents alone before their adultery is found out.

Then there is the obnoxious papparazzi played by Danny Nucci that Denton had hired to photograph the wedding, unaware that Midler, whose character of Lilly is an actress, hated him, as he had taken a fat photo of her that she was still trying to live down; in fact, Marshall had had him carried bodily out of the reception! A reluctant alliance ensues as she then has to beg streetsmart photographer Nucci who she thinks a loser and an intruder on people's special moments and who's still nosing around looking for dirt the morning after her wedding to help her find her runaway parents in an odyssy of discovery wherein she learns he's not the loser she'd thought him, she'd had no fun and worst still, she'd just married a man she didn't know with who she wasn't about to have any.

This is the movie I watch whenever I'm in a bad mood and need a laugh and a reality check. Ain't no getting over that old feeling and things aren't always what they seem. Midler, and Farina as her writer ex-husband Dan, are outrageous in their rediscovery of each other trying to stay one step ahead of Nucci, who to their own disbelief found them the first place he looked and taught daughter Marshall so different from the three of them in outlook that she knew nothing about nothing. Carl Reiner delivers the humor and point of view in this comedy romp and magnum opus in my opinion.
December 16, 2008

Cute Unknown Movie

This is really a sleeper of a movie with great people in it. I was glad to find the DVD and will play if often November 16, 2008

Fun!

I accidentally found this movie when trying to find something that was just fun and not a slasher type show. I just wanted somewhere to relax my mind and still be amused. If you want just fun with a few twists and don't mind mild adult situations then you should see this one. I wouldn't let small children or kids that don't understand sexual situations view this film w/out seeing it first. There is no blatant sex scenes just implied ones. Worst is seeing a man without a shirt and a woman without clothes but all covered up in bed is the most adult of it all. Just complete fun with great actors doing what they do best....enterain people. November 2, 2008

Cracked me up...

I enjoyed the characters, & certain parts made me laugh very hard -- in particular the therapist character.

Topics that are (presumably) taken lightly here are marriage and infidelity, with the understanding that "what goes around comes around"...

Spoiler: it does have a happy ending -- unconventionally so, but you expect that with Bette in it. Yay! And I liked that too...
March 17, 2008

THAT OLD FEELING

Great movie, couldn't find it in the video store so we bought it.
My wife and I love the movie - it is really funny
Plus we love Dennis, my wife used to work with his wife - close ties in Chicago area still.
Anyway the movie is too funny! February 8, 2008

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