Main cast: Jack Nicholson (Harry Sanborn), Diane Keaton (Erica Barry), Frances McDormand (Zoe Barry), Keanu Reeves (Julian Mercer), Amanda Peet (Marin), Jon Favreau (Leo), Paul Michael Glaser (Dave Klein), Rachel Ticotin (Dr Martinez), and KaDee Strickland (Kristen)
Director: Nancy Meyers

Something’s Gotta Give is unusual in that it stars a fifty-something heroine being pursued by two men, one older than her, one younger. This heroine actually shows skin and has a sex scene, which is rare in Hollywood where women over forty are automatically moved from the shelves and locked away in a box in an attic somewhere. The trouble is, this movie knows that it is breaking new grounds and damn if it doesn’t keep hitting me in the head about how daring it is all the time. The sad thing is, apart from this, everything about this movie is strictly formulaic romantic comedy stuff.

And one of its biggest mistakes has to be the casting of Jack Nicholson and letting his character get Diane Keaton’s. Jack Nicholson looks like a mummified corpse that has been dipped in a vat of sulfuric acid for at least three years before being dried out under the sun for another eight years in preparation for this movie. Why they need Mr Nicholson and his date rape leer when a grotesque gargoyle from Notre Dame will be a more attractive sight for the eyes, I will never know. Also, how wonderful that despite the whole “daring” angle of this movie, it comfortably offers the reassuring status quo that the older man still gets the younger chick, even if this older man also happens to be a lizard-like short mummified freak that stares at your daughter’s butt and sticks his wizened wee-wee into women young enough to be his granddaughter.

In this movie, our heroine Erica is chased by two men – the said walking undead Harry Sanborn who is recuperating from a heart attack after crashing her house in a rendezvous with Erica’s daughter and the handsome young doctor that looks just like Keanu Reeves. The movie spends time making these people go around in circles in typical miscommunication issues before having Erica choose the geriatric Viagra-popping gargoyle over that handsome young doctor that worships her so ardently.

Is she freaking out of her mind?

This movie doesn’t know what it wants to do. Nancy Meyers says that she wants this movie to be empowering, but “empowering” in this case means Diane Keaton baring them for the cameras. Wow, fifty-something women having sex – how empowering! But if she’s going for the sex as empowerment angle, why then is Ms Meyers ultimately showing that Erica, in the end, leaves the decision of her happy ending directly in Harry’s hands? Why must it be that a woman must love a man first and then has him make up his mind to want her at the end? And how am I supposed to take a movie seriously when someone chooses Jack freaking Nicholson, the most grotesque senior coot in Hollywood second only to Marlon Brando, over Keanu Reeves?

Empowerment, huh? Female fantasy fulfillment? Only in some crackpot’s fantasy, perhaps, where a repulsive freak like Harry is preferable over a hard-bodied virile young man. Something’s Gotta Give alright, and that’s my brain, combusting from the sheer insulting stupidity of this movie.