On the way out she bumps into childhood friend Mickey (ubiquitous character actor Ron Eldard), who’s heading to court to finalize his divorce and custody proceedings for his young daughter. This leads Lizzie to call her friend and confidante Janie (Carrie Fisher, in the kind of “matter-of-fact, quick-witted career woman” role at which she was always excelled), but in the process her purse is stolen from her car, and then the car itself is stolen, leading to her being late getting back to her job as a court stenographer, resulting in her termination. Cates plays Elizabeth “Lizzie” Cronin, a meek young woman whose marriage to Charles (played by a slimy Tim Matheson) has fallen apart in the wake of his infidelity, leading to her going, on her lunch break, to the Jaguar dealership where he works to try and talk about their status, but Charles has little time for her and brushes her off in condescending fashion, as he’s more focused on trying to bed a blonde woman who’s browsing the selection of vehicles in the showroom. The film stars Phoebe Cates, on the shortlist of the most beautiful women of all time and a fine actress with a number of excellent dramatic and particularly comic performances, in one of her last film roles before retiring to focus on motherhood and private life. Beyond a small but loyal cult following that treasures the film as I’ve come to, its existence has scarcely been acknowledged since its original theatrical release. Night Shyamalan have routinely received scathing notices for efforts that have pushed boundaries and tackled tricky and meaningful thematic material in powerful fashion), but I’m surprised, given the lip service paid by media figures to concepts like “female empowerment” and “self care,” and the accompanying need for entertainment to portray them, that not only was the film so uniformly pilloried upon release but that it hasn’t recuperated in the intervening three decades. It’s hardly a novel occasion when critics miss the mark on a movie (great filmmakers like Paul Verhoeven, Abel Ferrara, Brian DePalma and M. The late Gene Siskel referred to it as “easily one of the worst movies ever seen,” Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman gave the feature a “D” grade and singled out the late, legendary British comic actor Rik Mayall as “obnoxious” (not just his performance Gleiberman referred to Mayall himself as “an obnoxious British actor”) and capsule review king Leonard Maltin described it as a “putrid mess… recommended only for people who think nose-picking is funny.” ![]() It made a decent profit on a modest, roughly $7 million budget, but was noteworthy mostly for being lambasted roundly by critics of the period. ![]() Drop Dead Fred is a 1991 “Black Comedy Fantasy Film” (according to Wikipedia) that came and went without much fanfare.
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