bam (12/29/82)
I saw Six Weeks last night with three other people (two couples total). Overall, two of us liked Six Weeks and two of us found it a mixed bag. I was in the descenting group. Now, in retrospect, my distaste for Six Weeks is growing by leaps and bounds. This movie had a great deal of potential with Mary Tyler Moore, Dudley Moore, and Katharine Healy all giving fine performances. However, the director, Tony Bill, should be sued for mal-practice. I have never seen a worse directed film. Six Weeks is a schizophrenic movie. First, it's a comedy. Then, it's a love story between and man and a girl. Then it's about a difficult decision. Then it's a love story between a man and a woman... I thought I noticed that Six Weeks was based on a novel as the opening credits went by. If so, (and it seems plausible), the movie tried to capture too much of the novel by including bits and pieces of all the major subplots. An extra ten or twenty minutes of footage may have helped but Six Weeks struck me as being shoe-horned into the standard running time of just under two hours. The most offensive section of all was when Moore & Moore fall in love. Apparently, this happened during an orchestrated montage of scenes at an amusement park and the beach. Then next thing you know, Dudley is dining in Mary's penthouse suite and voila, love has blossomed. Well, maybe Californians fall in love this way but I was hoping for something more substantial - like some dialogue. The only possible excuse for this cheap and tidy way of having major characters get involved is if they just aren't hitting it off together. After seeing Six Weeks, I still couldn't say if this was the case for Moore & Moore. I can't help recalling an article just posted by someone who saw Frank Capra in San Francisco; directors, and therefore movies, just don't have the artistic touch they used to have. Six Weeks had so much potential to be a good movie the end result is turning my stomach. Bruce McLean