Voxitype
Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.
Mabel Munoz
Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?
Hayleigh Joseph
This is ultimately a movie about the very bad things that can happen when we don't address our unease, when we just try to brush it off, whether that's to fit in or to preserve our self-image.
Bob
This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.
SimonJack
"Lovesick" has a few witty lines, but just a few. And two top actor roles have just a little substance and fun in them. Alec Guinness as Sigmund Freud and John Huston as Dr. Larry Geller give the movie a shot with their performances. But the plot and its screenplay are so weak that nothing can save this film. Dudley Moore and Elizabeth McGovern are the pretty faces as the leads, but that's about the gist of the content we see when they are on screen together – a couple of dreamy pretty faces.Some reviewers think this is a funny film. But, too many minuses distract from what humor there is and what the plot might have become. This could have been a rollicking satire of the analysts' profession – the psychiatrists, psychologists and their minions. But, instead, it gives a little catalog of the types of people who flock to their analysts. Most of them don't need to be there but just need to get on with life. And, those scenes are interspersed with the daydreaming and carousing by the two leads.The screenplay writers should have taken the advice that Freud (Guinness) gives Dr. Saul Benjamin (Moore) – "Don't go there." Their affair is a wild stretch in the first place. Then it goes overboard when Saul and his wife, Katie (Anne Kerry), both of whom are in adulterous affairs, fess up to one another and are very chummy about it. I suspect that part wouldn't seem very funny at all to most people in the high number of marriages that were ending in divorce in the U.S. by the mid-1980s. Or of most such people yet today.This film just has too much dull and distasteful about it that the little bit of humor can't help enough to make it enjoyable.
vstoskus
Lovesick 1983. Dudley Moore, Eliz. McGovern. Movie makes mincemeat of Freud & his limited & negative theory of human motivation & potential. "Go Saul", I hear myself thinking throughout the film, feeling here is a therapist who dares stand up to the stiff board of censors who don't deserve to have access to mentally unstable people, for they appear more rigid & dogmatic than the deacons at a Southern Baptist convention. And they have the nerve to be talking about & threatening sanctions pertaining to professional ethics. Would you want to be governed by such repressed stiffs who purport to be a board of censors who can pull someone's license to practice a profession, yet see their distant grandfather Freud as still relevant, while most progressive thinkers in psychotherapy have all but laughed Freud off the shelf as ludicrous? The genius of the writer who says it through Cloe's words put Freud's ideas into perspective when she laughs him & Saul off the stage with her witty explanation of Freud's penis envy theory.A gem of a movie that should be part of every psychotherapist training program & anyone dealing with profession ethics. Indeed, the whole idea of licensure boards being composed solely of those within a given profession just reveals the fear of innovation & insecurity of those within those professions. It is abhorrent to the whole concept of the evolution of human thinking & knowledge to censure someone who challenges the wisdom of old, unproven, & in many cases disproven, methods of therapy, education, medicine, "justice", & many other so-called professions. Just look at the travesty of the medical profession that, hand-in-hand with the drug pushing pharmaceutical industry, prescribes aspirin for headaches rather than treating the ailment (tumor?) hiding within, or the repressive incarceration of youth, which some still dare call education, that is flooding the earth with non-thinking violent robots seeking revenge & targets for the decade plus of physical, & even more disturbingly, emotional abuse perpetrated by their unfeeling bullying teachers & peers.See the movie & think about the rights of innovative creative thinkers & why so few are free to think for themselves.
kooser
I've watched this film at least once a year since it first came out on VHS (or was it Betamax?) It is hilarious. I can't think of a better cast for a comedy than we have here, all playing around the central Dudley Moore character. The jokes, both visual and verbal, are rich with irony and wit. ("What is this, egg salad?" is my personal favorite.) The love story is only a driver for a comedy mix of this wide array of bizarre characters: Dudley Moore, Alec Guinness, John Huston, David Stathairn, Wallace Shawn, Ron Silver and many more whose names you may not know but who's faces you'll recognize.I was quoting a line from the film the other day and got to talking about it with a friend. That led me to do a search on IMDb. The 4.3 rating makes no sense to me at all. It has my "personal 10", as it is a movie I can watch again any time. After all these years it is just as funny as it was 30 years ago.
Jay Raskin
I cannot believe that only two people have reviewed this movie. I would think that all Woody Allen fans would want to see a film written and directed by the co-writer of Sleeper, Annie Hall, and Manhattan. Also, I would think that there must be more Dudley Moore fans around. Moore made this when he was king of romantic comedies in the 1980's, with hits like "10" and "Arthur". He took the crown from George Segal, and was followed by Andrew McCarthy in the late 80's and John Cusack in the 1990's.I movie is a bit slow, or seems that way today, but that's because everybody has been hooked on television series like "Friends" and "30 Rock" where there has to be a laugh every 15 seconds. The laughs come, but they arrive at a leisurely pace of about one a minute.The movie makes fun of Freudian psychiatry, which has pretty much become a relic of the 20th century like walkmen and pong video games. Still, scenes like the one where Moore tries to tell Elizabeth McGovern that she has penis envy seem to work better today, when we all can agree that the theory is absurd.Incidentally, McGovern has possibly never looked so seduction and beautiful as she does in this movie.Many of the supporting cast members are good, including Larry Rivers, John Huston, Selma Diamond, Christine Baranski, and Alan King. Unfortunately, they all have small parts of just two or three short scenes.My favorite Dudley Moore rom-com is Mickey and Maude, but this one runs a close second. Go out and buy it or download it online and give it a try.