Movie review: Same Time, Next Year
it’s just a movie, but…
Movie review:
Same Time, Next Year
starring Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn
Universal Studios, 1978
Love is grand, of course.
Well, almost all the time.
“If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with” was the way Stephen Stills wrote the song in 1970.
This is an unmysterious film. George (Alda) and Doris (Burstyn) are attractive, clean-cut, smart, sentimental, successful grown-ups who love their spouses and their kids. While each is traveling alone, they meet accidentally, they unintentionally experience a one-night stand, and they decide to get together once a year for idyllic adultery, for the next 26 years.
Hey, it can happen, right?
The script includes some adult situations (like Doris having a baby in their room at the inn) and a couple almost self-conscious blippable dalliances with the F-bomb—all quite thrilling on-screen non-PC moments in 1978.
Same Time, Next Year is a see-through movie. Mostly, the script is predictable and heartwarming. The set is minimalist—almost all of the action occurs in the room at the inn. The gritty plot highlights are all too imaginable.
I like Same Time, Next Year, but I say that with reservation. I’m not a big fan of adultery, no matter how all-American it seems when George and Doris do it.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2019 All rights reserved.
A poet is a “maker”
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Book review: Shawshank Redemption
A world I do not want to know…
by Stephen King
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