Addicted to Love (1997)

It is a performances centric movie

Good concept, poorly executed.

A Disappointing Continuation

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Matthew Broderick, Meg Ryan and Kelly Preston star in Addicted to love. Perhaps I am a bit too late on writing the review. Considering this movie came out 12 years ago. But here I am ,writng the review for this pretty funny and fun romantic comedy. Broderick stars as Sam, an astronomer who's wife(Kelly Preston) starts having an affair with a french man named Antawne in New York. So Sam travels down to New York to stalk them. While there, he meets a strange woman named Maggie(Played by Meg Ryan). It turns out that Maggie used to date Antawne, and she is stalking him. So while stalking their ex-lovers, they both fall for each other. Of course they do.I'll admit that the movie ain't art. But I found this movie amusing and funny. There are a lot of funny lines, such as"If you ever do that to me again... i'll rip out your eyes and rape your skull".Or something like that. Like pretty much all romantic comedies, the ending is of course predictable. But with this one I didn't mind. It's a good movie.Addicted to love:***/****

Just a point of clarification... Sam, as an astronomer, is familiar with a tool used many decades before for observing distant objects, called a camera obscura. It works very much like an overhead projector, but it has no light source of its own. A lens and/or prism receives an outside image and projects it upon a flat wall of a darkened room using the light from the outside image. See http://brightbytes.com/cosite/what.html On several occasions in the film when the girlfriend and the boyfriend are moving about in the other apartment, you will notice Maggie or Sam turning the camera obscura to follow the action, and it moves the projected image.The use of this astronomical tool adds much needed depth to the Sam character, and the "projector" is perhaps the only metaphysical allusion in the whole film.

Astromer Matthew Broderick sets out to spy on his ex-girlfriend and her new lover; when the man's jilted fiancée comes into the picture, the two conspire to bust up the budding romance. Amiable, rascally, but ultimately predictable comedy is more about transitory love than love addictions. Sunny Meg Ryan gets to work with a little more shading and edge than usual, and she works well with Broderick; but the second-half of the movie scatters around trying to come up with an ending. The finale is cute, like the rest, but some of the wind has already gone out of the picture's sails. Director Griffin Dunne stages a few beautiful comedic scenes (as with the restaurant critic), but Broderick's 'friendship' with the new man in his girl's life is just silly, and the whole conceit of Broderick and Ryan setting up shop in an abandoned building right across the street from the loving couple is amusingly ridiculous. Still, there are finely wrought, surprisingly telling moments in the movie, such as the two leads sneaking over and going through the things in the love-nest, or Kelly Preston telling her Frenchman that she would sell pencils on the street with him if she had to. It's better than it had to be. *** from ****

Maybe it's not the BEST movie ever made, but it's quite a fun movie to watch. It's perfectly funny with the combination of Matthew Broderick's lovelorn character (wanting his true love back from the man that "stole" her) and the revenge-minded character of Meg Ryan (who has the majority of the great lines -- the movie is worth watching for her character alone). The dark, jaded edge puts this movie above your normal romantic comedy. Well acted by Matthew, Meg, and the always impressive Tcheky Karyo (one of the greatest actors around). Give this one a go, and more likely than not, it'll be one of those movies you want to watch every time it's on! Being that the DVD is available at a lower price (I think I got it for about $5.99), it's worth adding to your collection...a great one for rainy/snowy days.