Flirting with Disaster (1996)
Directed by David O. Russell
Adopted as a child, new father Mel Colpin decides he cannot name his son until he knows his birth parents, and determines to make a cross-country quest to find them. Accompanied by his wife, Nancy, and an inept yet gorgeous adoption agent, Tina, he departs on an epic road trip that quickly devolves into a farce of mistaken identities, wrong turns, and overzealous and love-struck ATF agents.
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What critics compared Flirting with Disaster to
A big hit on the film-festival circuit, Sunshine recalls the zany cross-country trek of 1996's quirky Flirting with Disaster.
It takes an adventurous director such as Russell (Flirting with Disaster, Three Kings and The Fighter) to keep a movie such as Silver Linings Playbook from blowing up in its own face.
Following a detour into heavy drama with The Fighter, David O. Russell returns to his distinctive brand of neurotic screwball comedy, and like his early features Spanking the Monkey (1994) and Flirting With Disaster (1996), this one somersaults giddily from sanity to insanity to sanity again.
As he did in early works such as Spanking the Monkey and Flirting With Disaster, the director profitably mines deep veins of insecurity and compulsion.
Though not as daffily inventive as director David O. Russell's best comedy, Flirting with Disaster (1996),Silver Linings is consistently entertaining, with its scrappy, well-drawn characters, offbeat humor and indefatigable positive outlook.
In such early films as "Spanking the Monkey" and "Flirting with Disaster," director David O. Russell depicted dysfunctional relationships with a keen eye for their darkly comedic potential.
Russell has worked in this terrain before, particularly in his early films like Flirting With Disaster (1997) and his excellent, vastly underrated Iraq war caper Three Kings (1999), and at times he and his excellent ensemble cast nail the essential thrills and terrors of a life unstable, creating a sense of unfettered humanity that is both compelling and oddly humorous.
Writer-director David O. Russell, who scored independent success with Spanking the Monkey and Flirting With Disaster, here moves confidently into the Hollywood mainstream, enlivening it with his original vision.
Though his characters fit the stereotypes of soldiers spawned by countless war movies, writer-director David O. Russell ("Flirting with Disaster") graces them with fresh, funny dialogue (such as the ongoing debate about whether Lexus makes a convertible) and, with cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel ("The Usual Suspects"), tells their story with a grab-bag of visual tricks that help make up for the moments when the pace starts to lag.
But a documentary about the making of the film also included on the DVD, as well as Russell's own video journal, shows a different filmmaker: a cocky, inexperienced brat who found $40 million for a film with only two low-budget indies behind him ("Spanking the Monkey" and "Flirting With Disaster") and a killer script in his hand.
Now comes "Three Kings," fashionably-directed by acclaimed indie filmmaker David O. Russell (1994's "Spanking the Monkey," 1996's "Flirting With Disaster"), which is not your usual war picture, and about as far as could be from something akin to Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan."
The style also complements Russell's screen-writing, which is still as character-obsessed as "Spanking the Monkey" or "Flirting With Disaster," only now it's the characters' content that matters as opposed to their neurotic dysfunction, suggesting Russell has learned to stop worrying and just ride the SCUD, Slim Pickens-style, into oblivion.
Director David O. Russell’s ( Spanking the Monkey and Flirting with Disaster ) film is much more than just your average action movie, as it compiles dark themes with light-hearted humor in an entertaining yet frightful odyssey of three American soldiers and the complications of the Gulf War.
Russell's work since (Flirting with Disaster, Three Kings) has been off-beat but circumspect, and at first, I ♥ Huckabees seems like a return to rebellious form, what with its wilfully uncommercial throughline: to find out why he's crossed paths with the same African stranger on three separate occasions, environmental activist Albert (Jason Schwartzman) hires a pair of "existential detectives" (Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman) who in turn encumber his mission to stop corporate foe Brad (Jude Law, essentially resurrecting Dickie Greenleaf) from building a Huckabees department store on a sacred patch of marshland.
Russell hasn't equaled the laugh-aloud quotient of Flirting with Disaster, but the way he throws zingers at the audience creates enough offbeat moments of humor to make Huckabees worth seeing even by those who don't understand a thing that Hoffman, Tomlin, and Huppert are saying.
And as funny as it is—and it is easily as funny as Russell’s great comedy Flirting With Disaster, and Tomlin and Hoffman together, in particular, are exactly as hilarious as you’d expect them to be—it fully engages the philosophical ideas it brings up.
In Flirting With Disaster, idiosyncratic writer-director David O. Russell proved himself capable of roasting your family neuroses on a slow-turning spit.
David O. Russell begin filmmaking life with his off-beat incest comedy, “Spanking the Monkey,” then went on to his journey of search and discovery of one’s roots in “Flirting with Disaster.”
But Russell (who made "Spanking the Monkey," "Flirting With Disaster" and "Three Kings," all terrific in different ways) and co-writer Jeff Baena lack Anderson's effortlessly smart wit.
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The indie director behind “Spanking the Monkey” and “Flirting With Disaster” went more commercial with 2010’s “The Fighter” and last year’s “Silver Linings Playbook” but forgot to tell his oddball sensibility.
Going back to 1996's Flirting With Disaster, Russell is at his best with freewheeling farces.
It’s as equally predicated upon calamity and delirium as Spanking the Monkey, Flirting With Disaster, Three Kings, I [Heart] Huckabees, The Fighter, and Silver Linings Playbook.
Although David O. Russell has written and directed one of the best comedies of the last two decades—“Flirting with Disaster”—his latest left me looking at my watch after the first half-hour.
From his raw 1996 film, ‘‘Flirting with Disaster,’’ to last year’s acclaimed ‘‘Silver Linings Playbook,’’ he effectively unravels the disarray.
Russell has finally reached the kind of sustained heightened excitement that he has been working toward ever since he directed the satirical “Flirting with Disaster,” in 1996.
Three Kings (also with Wahlberg) was an anarchic war-zone heist pic, Flirting With Disaster a loopy screwball saga, I Huckabees a weird existential romp.
Russell (Flirting With Disaster, Three Kings), whose previous films haven’t soared in box office results, does an incredible job with The Fighter which sets the bar high for his future.
Director David O. Russell has exhibited contempt for his characters before with “I Heart Huckabees,” “Three Kings,” “Flirting with Disaster” and “Spanking the Monkey.”
He places most of his attention on Ward with his family, which is amusingly deranged in a way that reminded me a little of the family his earlier film "Flirting With Disaster."
…light welterweight boxer Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), unless you count Melissa Leo�s car-alarm turn as Micky�s Mommie-Dearest manager as an expressive addition to Russell�s gallery of kooky materfamilias (Alberta Watson in Spanking the Monkey, Mary Tyler Moore in Flirting with Disaster).
David O. Russell , whose stimulating resume ("Flirting With Disaster," "Three Kings") reveals a much wider stylistic range than Aronofsky's, took over.
His previous film, Spanking the Monkey, was a jet-black comedy about an ailing mom who seduces her hapless college-age son.
"Spanking the Monkey" director David O. Russell's first feature film was such a strange, witty hit that he was able to attract an outstanding cast for his sophomore effort.
Perhaps writer-director David O. Russell ("Spanking the Monkey") was aiming the title of his new comedy "Flirting With Disaster" at more than merely the emotional tightrope walked by his central character.
Gone are the fuck-you gestures of a filmmaker once forced to return federal grant money after the movie about a fortune-cookie writer he said he’d make became 1994’s “Spanking the Monkey” – an obsidian-black comedy about mother-son incest.
The sophomore directorial effort by David O. Russell, the man who gave us 1995s incest-centered comedy Spanking the Monkey (starring Jeremy Davies, before his rave-inducing portrayal of the cowardly solider in "Saving Private Ryan"), Flirting With Disaster boasts a doozy of an ensemble script that churns forth some of the most bizarre scenarios and interesting characters ever concocted.