What's good about this picture? Some beautiful Santa Barbara backgrounds--where the cliffs meet the sea--and a couple of the supporting performances. A young Virginia Madsen is radiant as the student love interest to Vincent Spano. David Ogden Steiers is natural-- for once--and entirely credible as a neurologist and perennial adversary to the O'Toole character.
Everything else is bad. Peter O'Toole looks like Death--cadaverously thin, pale as a corpse, full of jerky movements. He's fifty years old, for Pete's sake, and we're supposed to buy a romance between him and the nineteen year old free spirit **cum** egg donor played by Mariel Hemingway? And where Hugh Laurie ("House" on the Fox TV series) is eccentric, but undeniably macho in sneakers and tee shirt, O'Toole sports a Lord Fauntleroy wardrobe and is decidedly light in his loafers.
Vincent Spano in the juvenile role tries hard but needs acting lessons. Tall, but no Ryan O'Neill with that prominent nose and eyes set too close together. And whose gay idea was it to put the short shorts on **him** for the lyrical, young-lovers-frolicking-on-the-beach scene?
The script is another problem; not the story which at least is out of the ordinary but the dialog. There is just too much of it. O'Toole's character, in an Etonian accent, talks and talks and talks some more, about everything, ultimately about nothing. As a doctor he has even less credibility than as a love object.
Regular viewers of the immensely popular series "House, M.D." will recognize the debt it owes to this movie.
Everything else is bad. Peter O'Toole looks like Death--cadaverously thin, pale as a corpse, full of jerky movements. He's fifty years old, for Pete's sake, and we're supposed to buy a romance between him and the nineteen year old free spirit **cum** egg donor played by Mariel Hemingway? And where Hugh Laurie ("House" on the Fox TV series) is eccentric, but undeniably macho in sneakers and tee shirt, O'Toole sports a Lord Fauntleroy wardrobe and is decidedly light in his loafers.
Vincent Spano in the juvenile role tries hard but needs acting lessons. Tall, but no Ryan O'Neill with that prominent nose and eyes set too close together. And whose gay idea was it to put the short shorts on **him** for the lyrical, young-lovers-frolicking-on-the-beach scene?
The script is another problem; not the story which at least is out of the ordinary but the dialog. There is just too much of it. O'Toole's character, in an Etonian accent, talks and talks and talks some more, about everything, ultimately about nothing. As a doctor he has even less credibility than as a love object.
Regular viewers of the immensely popular series "House, M.D." will recognize the debt it owes to this movie.