509. Here Today. Directed by, written by and starring Billy Crystal, tells the coming-of-old age story of Charlie Burns, a famous writer, who is now suffering from dementia and all the fun that seems to entail. It feels like this was probably a labor of love or a passion project for Billy Crystal, however, to me it felt like a 1990's cable movie, with Crystal in old man make-up and more than likely Queen Latifah co-starring, maybe even Woody Allen doing the Charlie role. Main story is this, Charlie is meeting someone for dinner, a fan, who won the chance to meet Charlie at a charity. Instead, the fan's ex-girlfriend Emma, played by Tiffany Haddish shows up, cause well she's getting even. She's loud, over the top and funny compared to Charlie's quiet and subdued manner, remember that 90's vibe I was talking about? Well, there it is. At dinner, Emma orders enough seafood to feed a small nation, seafood that she is also allergic too, which results in face swelling hijinks and a trip to the hospital. And this incident locks the two in a close, kind of unbelievable friendship that only really happens in movies. First half of the movie is decent, has some laughs. Second half, kind of fell apart for me. Felt it rushed in all the family drama stuff to fast and all at once, and it just lacked believability, I honestly thought at one point Emma was a figment of Charlie's imagination and he probably did something awful to her in the past, it just had that vibe to it. Well, that's just my opinion. Tiffany Haddish is really funny in it and performs some great songs in it. Although her flirting with 70+ year old's while singing Janis Joplin's 'Piece of my Heart' at Charlie's nieces bar mitzvah was a little odd, but oh well. It wasn't awful, it just wasn't anywhere near great either. It'll be on Lifetime soon...
Review of Here Today
