Here Today review: Billy Crystal and Tiffany Haddish share a nice screen chemistry dailymail.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dailymail.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Posted By Bob Grimm on Tue, May 11, 2021 at 7:15 AM
MOVIE REVIEW: Here Today Now playing at Harkins Tucson Spectrum 18 Billy Crystal writes, directs and stars in a film that feels like it’s a million years old. He plays Charlies Burnz, a writer for a
Saturday Night Live type sketch show who is dealing with dementia. A subplot has his Charlie befriending Emma (Tiffany Haddish), a cabaret singer with a shellfish allergy. You don’t know pain until you have endured this film’s early scenes involving Emma finding out she has a shellfish allergy. The way it’s filmed feels very 1987.
In a Hollywood career spanning more than 40 years, Billy Crystal has directed just four feature films. While he’s appeared in a broad range of comedies, his rare efforts behind the camera tend to be more narrowly focused on autobiographical stories and a few personal themes. (Even his sports film,
61 , grew out of his childhood love of the New York Yankees.) That’s definitely true of Crystal’s latest movie,
Here Today, which feels in many ways like a bookend to his directorial debut, 1992’s
Mr. Saturday Night. Both films are about aging comics (played by Crystal) who try to maintain their relevancy in a changing world while they also grapple with the collateral damage their fame took on their families.
Charlie Berns, played by director and co-writer Billy Crystal, is a writer who is so well known for being funny that when his behavior is a little off, everyone thinks he is doing a bit. On stage with Barry Levinson, Sharon Stone, and Kevin Kline, all playing themselves as stars of a fictitious Berns-scripted movie classic celebrating an anniversary, Berns gets disoriented and forgets the names of the other people on the panel. The audience laughs appreciatively; what a cut-up! Stone good-naturedly reminds him: I m Meryl Streep. Another laugh. That Charlie!
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Charlie s daughter Francine (Broadway star Laura Benanti) is not amused. She thinks he must be drunk or that he does not care enough about her to respond to the invitation to her daughter s bat mitzvah. And his colleagues at a Saturday Night Live -style late night sketch comedy show just think it s a quirky eccentricity that he insists on a typewriter instead of a computer.