Lorimar PicturesDirected by Alan Rudolph
My rating: 1.5 stars out of 4
IMDb
(DVD, Warner Archive Collection)
A movie that takes the romantic notion of a "match made in heaven" and literalizes it. Timothy Hutton dies while saving a family drowning in a sinking car. In heaven, he meets a young girl who is a "guide", apparently born in heaven. They fall in love and have steamy sex. Yes there is sex in heaven. It also turns out that people go back to Earth, so this is really a Buddhist heaven not a Christian heaven. Well his heavenly girlfriend is chosen to return, and he makes a bargain with someone named Emmett Humbird who runs things in heaven. Emmett is really Debra Winger in drag. He/she chain smokes, drinks, wears bad suits and has red-dyed hair. He says he is not God, but I thought maybe he was the Devil. So Timothy gets to be reincarnated and we are thrust back to Earth to watch the two grow up in the turbulent 60s. The film takes a dramatic change of tone as Hutton becomes a pseudo-beatnik and musician while his old heavenly girlfriend marries a filmmaker. They have several close-calls but never meet. There are excessive cameos by famous musicians including Neil Young, Tom Petty and Ric Ocasek. They start to have flashbacks of their time in heaven, even Emmett/Debra Winger appears to Hutton. In a sublimely ridiculous ending they are walking down a crowded city sidewalk and mysteriously sense each other, meet face-to-face and instantly fall in love. A movie that is very entertaining for all the wrong reasons.
My rating: 1.5 stars out of 4
IMDb
(DVD, Warner Archive Collection)
A movie that takes the romantic notion of a "match made in heaven" and literalizes it. Timothy Hutton dies while saving a family drowning in a sinking car. In heaven, he meets a young girl who is a "guide", apparently born in heaven. They fall in love and have steamy sex. Yes there is sex in heaven. It also turns out that people go back to Earth, so this is really a Buddhist heaven not a Christian heaven. Well his heavenly girlfriend is chosen to return, and he makes a bargain with someone named Emmett Humbird who runs things in heaven. Emmett is really Debra Winger in drag. He/she chain smokes, drinks, wears bad suits and has red-dyed hair. He says he is not God, but I thought maybe he was the Devil. So Timothy gets to be reincarnated and we are thrust back to Earth to watch the two grow up in the turbulent 60s. The film takes a dramatic change of tone as Hutton becomes a pseudo-beatnik and musician while his old heavenly girlfriend marries a filmmaker. They have several close-calls but never meet. There are excessive cameos by famous musicians including Neil Young, Tom Petty and Ric Ocasek. They start to have flashbacks of their time in heaven, even Emmett/Debra Winger appears to Hutton. In a sublimely ridiculous ending they are walking down a crowded city sidewalk and mysteriously sense each other, meet face-to-face and instantly fall in love. A movie that is very entertaining for all the wrong reasons.
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