Highly Overrated But Still Good

Good concept, poorly executed.

A Disappointing Continuation

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Addicted to Love (1997): Dir: Griffin Dunne / Cast: Matthew Broderick, Meg Ryan, Tcheky Karyo, Kelly Preston, Maureen Stapleton: Misprint title spawns only bitterness. Matthew Broderick and Kelly Preston play astronomers who part ways then he discovers that she is dating a French chef named Anton. He spies on them until Meg Ryan shows up as Anton's ex. Ryan's revenge tactics include stashing panties in his apartment to filling squirt guns with perfume. Predictable sitcom setup with painful consequences. Griffin Dunne's directional debut. Broderick is one to identify with as he gains curiosity. He accepts a job at Anton's restaurant in order to learn more about him. Now Broderick faces consequences but Ryan is unsympathetic. It just seems lame that Ryan is painted as a victim when she practically gets away with what Broderick could not. This makes her look pathetic in her forceful nature. Tcheky Karyo does the best as Anton who at one point beams at Broderick, "I am Superman!" At least Anton admits his wrong thus giving him more credibility than the Ryan character. Preston is standard issue and mostly observed. Perhaps had she been subject to some of the shenanigans then her role might have had greater appeal. It zeros in on one's dismay upon relationship tragedy but it also finds humour in revenge resulting in a heinous display of ugliness. Score: 4 / 10

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.

New York –1990s. Sam is a brilliant astronomer, who has two passions -the sky and Linda, his first and only love, a schoolteacher in the little Midwest town they live in. But all hell breaks loose when Linda has the opportunity to spend two months in New York, and falls in love with Antoine, a French guy who owns a restaurant and knows how to talk to ladies. Sam cannot accept to be dumped just like that. He goes to New York, settles in a ruined building facing the two lovebirds' apartment, and records every detail of their life, hoping to find a pattern that would indicate the end of the relationship and therefore his chance to get Linda back. This could have gone on for a while but Maggie appears. Ex-girlfriend of Antoine, she is as unwilling as Sam to let go of her love, but her approach is somewhat more active. You would not want her as an enemy –that's for sure! Poor Antoine will have plenty opportunities to test the strength of his love. So will Sam and Maggie, who are in for a few surprises… With no more ambition than to offer a good moment to spectators, 'Addicted to Love' belongs to the 'Only You', 'French Kiss', and other 'While you were Sleeping', funny, light and heart-warming. Meg Ryan is really good at it.

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 ****