I Think I Love My Wife

[modage]

Chris Rock Directs French Comedy Remake
Source: Hollywood Reporter

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Chris Rock, who co-wrote and was set to star in the comedy I Think I Love My Wife, has stepped-up to take on the directorial reigns left open by the departing Charles Stone, while both Kerry Washington (Ray) and Gina Torres have joined the cast.

The Fox Searchlight film, which starts filming in New York this month, is a remake of the 1972 Eric Rohmer comedy Chloe in the Afternoon. In it, Rock plays Richard Cooper, a happily married man with a young daughter, whose former flame (Washington) reenters the picture causing him to question his marriage.

Rock co-wrote the script with Louis C.K. and this will be his second film as director after 2003's Head of State with Bernie Mac.

[A Matter Of Chance]

What the fuck? Chloe in the Afternoon? Chris Rock? Comedy?

Something is seriously wrong here. 

[Kal]

He should know....

THAT AINT RIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

THAT    SHIT    IS     WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here.

Release Date: March 16th, 2007 (wide)

Starring: Chris Rock, Kerry Washington, Gina Torres, Steve Buscemi, Cassandra Freeman, Samantha Ivers 

Directed by: Chris Rock 

Premise: A sophisticated comedy about marriage and the lure of a new love. Nikki (Washington) is the exciting free spirit who makes Richard's (Rock) daydreams come true while Richard's wife Brenda (Torres) is so preoccupied with her own career and raising their two children that she has little time for her husband.

[Pubrick]

steve buscemi, friend of the blacks.

[MacGuffin]

Just for Laughs: Newer Than New Wave
Source: New York Times

FOR five decades the brilliant French filmmaker Eric Rohmer, now 86, has been writing and directing quiet, pensive, rigorously unemphatic comedies about the baffled relations between men and women. Because his pictures are (at least superficially) so similar, and because they tend to be pretty much action free, it's not always easy to remember which is which.

"Claire's Knee" (1970) is simple enough: That's the one in which a middle-aged man becomes obsessed with the title joint of the title girl. And the central event of "My Night at Maud's" (1969) is, of course, that all-night conversation about Pascal between an uptight, earnestly Catholic guy and a sultry woman who is not his fiancée. "Chloe in the Afternoon" (1972), the concluding film in Mr. Rohmer's series of "Six Moral Tales," is a bit wispier in memory. Could that be the one in which the hero takes Viagra and gets so painfully aroused he has to be rushed to the emergency room?

No, that can't be right. The little blue pill didn't exist in 1972; and although Mr. Rohmer's films have dealt with many of the stickier intricacies of sexual attraction, they have never displayed the slightest interest in the wacky complications of a massive and prolonged erection. The Viagra scene can, however, be found in a new, improbable remake of "Chloe in the Afternoon," called "I Think I Love My Wife" (opening Friday). It is directed and co-written by its star, the not notably quiet, pensive or unemphatic Chris Rock.

As incongruous as this sounds, we can all imagine worse: say, the Farrelly brothers' "There's Something About Claire," with Jack Black ogling a particular body part or "In the Company of Maud," in which Jimmy Kimmel, after arguing epistemology with Sarah Silverman into the wee hours, cries, "Thus do I refute Bishop Berkeley!" slaps her around and posts humiliating pictures of her on the Internet.

The notion of Chris Rock as a Rohmer hero, while maybe a tad counterintuitive, doesn't seem impossible, anyway. And in the spirit of fairness it's probably wise for ticket-holders to leave at the door all traces of art-house attitude, any lingering suspicion that a French-speaking domestic comedy is inherently too precious an objet to be entrusted to the rough handling of Americans. "Chloe in the Afternoon" is a darn good movie, but there's no sense getting reverent about a picture whose lead actress goes by the name Zouzou and whose hero has a closet full of turtlenecks.

Mr. Rock and his co-writer, Louis C. K., retain the original's most radical and least audience-friendly property: "I Think I Love My Wife" is, like "Chloe" (and the other "Moral Tales"), a film about not having sex, about the process by which a man reaches a conscious, fully informed decision not to satisfy a particular carnal desire. (Mr. Rohmer's women are uniformly hot, so this choice is never arrived at lightly.)

This is like making an action movie without explosions, a boxing picture with no knockdowns, a cop thriller in which the hero never pulls his gun out of its holster. Mr. Rohmer's trick is to give his viewers the sense that under certain circumstances the denial of physical satisfaction can itself be a keen satisfaction of a different kind; he makes his protagonists' renunciations feel like consummations. (It probably helps to be Catholic.)

This is not Mr. Rock's trick. Even for a comedian as inventive as he is, it's a challenge to find the funny in the moral theology of renunciation. Actually, he doesn't try that hard. From the first scenes, in which his character, a suburban husband and father, tells us in voiceover that his wife won't make love with him anymore, it's clear that Mr. Rock has decided to translate "renunciation" as "frustration," because that's something he's fairly sure can get laughs.

"Chloe in the Afternoon" supplies no information on the sexual health of its suburban couple's marriage, no indication that frequency of conjugal relations is a burning issue for either the hero or his wife. When Mr. Rohmer's suburban père de famille, Alexandre (Bernard Verley), begins to feel tempted by Chloe (Zouzou) — the free-spirited ex of an old friend — you sense that his adulterous impulses have more to do with his ambivalence about respectability that they do with any specific marital grievance, or even with the specific allure of Chloe. There's a hint of that existential semi-malaise in the intense attraction of Mr. Rock's character, Richard, to his Chloe figure, Nikki (Gina Torres). But mostly he's really randy.

Does this explicitness about the hero's motivation violate the spirit of the original? Yes indeed. The more interesting question, though, is whether transgressions like this are arbitrary or — in a case where the source material is from a very different culture and a very different time — inevitable. In remakes, as in marriages, fidelity is rarely as uncomplicated a question as it looks.

It's an especially vexing issue here because "Chloe in the Afternoon" (to which the terrific Criterion DVD box set of the "Six Moral Tales" has recently restored its proper title, "Love in the Afternoon") is a product of the French New Wave, whose highest value was individuality: the profoundly personal expressiveness without which a filmmaker can only be considered — sneeringly — a director, never an auteur. How do you remake a movie whose essential quality, whose entire reason for being, is that it couldn't have been made by anybody else? Remaking a New Wave film is kind of like being in what used to be called, circa 1972, an "open" marriage: If you're faithful, you're unfaithful.

Which is why Hollywood versions of New Wave pictures are about as infrequent these days as proudly "open" marriages: moviemaking, like matrimony, is demanding enough without adding insoluble, squaring-the-circle conundrums to the experience. It's not as if American studios have ever been shy about lifting plots from foreign films — the most recent best picture Oscar, after all, went to "The Departed," a remake of a Hong Kong gangster movie, and the French cinema has over the years contributed more than its share of ready-to-wear storylines to our vast retail-entertainment industry. (For a while in the '80s and early '90s it seemed as if every other Hollywood comedy was a glossy remake of some frenetic, winking Gallic farce.) But the extensive inventory of films by François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais, Jacques Demy, Agnes Varda and Mr. Rohmer has been left largely untouched.

And when you look at the handful of exceptions, that policy of benign neglect seems, on the whole, a good idea. Remember "Willie and Phil," Paul Mazursky's version of Mr. Truffaut's "Jules and Jim"? Blake Edwards's remake of Mr. Truffaut's "Man Who Loved Women"? Or "Original Sin," Michael Cristofer's reworking of that same unlucky auteur's "Mississippi Mermaid"? How about Jim McBride's "Breathless," with Richard Gere standing in for Jean-Paul Belmondo in Mr. Godard's original? I didn't think so. You might recall, if only because it's relatively recent (2002), Adrian Lyne's aptly titled "Unfaithful," which managed to turn Mr. Chabrol's extra-dry thriller "La Femme Infidèle" into a conventionally steamy romantic melodrama; and you probably wish you didn't.

Mr. Lyne, though, is the one director of that select group who was audacious — or arrogant — enough to take the extremely personal work of another (much stronger) filmmaker and to make it his own. "Unfaithful" may be ridiculous, but it's unmistakably an Adrian Lyne film, not a nervous, tentative homage to a Chabrol classic. And maybe that's the best anyone can hope for from these unholy alliances between New Wave auteurs and Hollywood players: a movie that dares, with all the courage of utterly unwarranted conviction, to be itself.

Hence Viagra — which is, come to think of it, a fair metaphor for the way Chris Rock pumps up the 35-year-old, French-speaking, philosophy-musing, turtleneck-wearing material of "Chloe in the Afternoon." He treats Mr. Rohmer's original as a sitcom that needs a little more com and a lot less sit. Mr. Rohmer is so economical that he declines to provide, among other details he deems irrelevant, an establishing shot of the central couple's suburban home or a clear sense of what Alexandre actually does for a living; none of his three main characters appear to have anything like a friend.

"I Think I Love My Wife" fills in those gaps. Because no American comedy can function without the participation of a best friend-confidant, Steve Buscemi has been pressed into service here. And just to be on the safe side Mr. Rock fills in a few other gaps, as well. What was once a rather austere triangle is now enhanced by a marriage counselor, a violent ex-boyfriend for Nikki, some four-letter words, a sprinkling of Rockian one-liners (many of them concerning Michael Jackson) and a significant across-the-board increase in double-takes, spluttering, and wide-eyed comic exasperation.

Voilà: a Chris Rock movie married to an Eric Rohmer movie. For better and for worse.

[Kal]

I just saw this and I was very disappointed...

He tried doing a more 'adult' or serious film, but its boring and unfunny. The only funny parts come from straight from his routine (pretty much the same lines).

I love Chris Rock but he should keep doing the funny stuff he does best and thats it.

[grand theft sparrow]

There was no reason to want Chris Rock to remain faithful to his wife and no reason to want him to cheat.  This is the main reason this movie fell flat.  In fact, there was no reason to do anything except look at your watch.  It wasn't as all-out awful as something like My Super Ex-Girlfriend because you can see that he was really trying to make something more sophisticated than he has in the past.  The only thing is that his idea of more sophisticated is nothing more than less funny.  But then, he throws in an inexplicably bad end scene that is completely incongruous with the tone of the movie that preceded it and undoes his attempts to accomplish what he doesn't anyway.  He hasn't made a funny enough movie yet for us to be longing for his earlier, funnier films but this makes you do it.