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Denise Calls Up (1996)
Runtime: 80 mins
Synopsis: Director/writer Hal Selwen has fashioned an ingenious film from the use of one simple device: all the dialogue takes place on the phone. This little trick not only forces a great deal of free-wheeling conversation and witty asides, but it also serves as an overarching metaphor for romance in... Director/writer Hal Selwen has fashioned an ingenious film from the use of one simple device: all the dialogue takes place on the phone. This little trick not only forces a great deal of free-wheeling conversation and witty asides, but it also serves as an overarching metaphor for romance in the modern age. The film focuses on six friends who are all too busy to actually see each other; instead, they apologize over the phone for missing this or that event. The comic mayhem percolates as they conduct their romantic entanglements with the help of the phone, fax, and modem. [More]
Genre: Comedies
Starring: Alanna Ubach, Tim Daly, Dana Wheeler, Aida Turturro, Liev Schreiber
Reviews
A minor but quirkily charming comedy about alientaion, love, and folly that reflects the zeitgeist in terms of AIDS and modern technology.
Salwen has captured and properly identified a very particular modern American species. His emergence as a filmmaker is a true event.
At only 80 minutes, it doesn't overstay its welcome, but slight though it may be, it knows how to create constant smiles.
As witty as this film is, Salwen can't get around the fact that a movie about people who don't meet saddles a director with a lot of scenes focusing on one person talking to no one but a piece of machinery.
Yes, the movie is a bunch of skits, all right. But in the end it sketches the more elaborate portrait of funny people who don't realize how funny they really are.
The conceit of having everyone talk together almost exclusively by cell phone wears out its welcome by the halfway mark.
The film is never really funny-ha-ha, but it never bores the viewer at all thanks to Hal Salwen's direction.
Too slight to be a cautionary fable and not light enough to merit the term 'goofy caper.' But it sits in an enjoyable place of its own.
Might have been more effective if the writer/director had taken the time to create characters imbued with more than token traces of humanity.


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