Still Breathing: The Reviews!


		NEWTIMESLA.COM, MAY 21, 1998 STILL BREATHING By Paul Cullum NewTimes/Los Angeles review Pity the poor romantic comedy--province of developing filmmakers, and running at cross-purposes to these cynical times. First-timer James F. Robinson faces these problems square-on in this storybook romance, fashioning a supple fable of kismet, wonder, and star-crossed destiny out of the very cynicism that would seek to undermine it. Brendan Fraser wisely invests his box-office clout from George of the Jungle as a San Antonio eccentric whose male forebears all saw the women they would marry in a vision. The beauteous Joanna Going is Roz, a pliant beauty and failed idealist; she's all about the Benjamins, making ends meet by duping rich simps into buying overpriced art for her. She mistakes him for her next mark at the Formosa Cafe, and the film sets up a nifty turnabout whereby the fated lovers find each other in the first 10 minutes, but spend the rest of the movie trying to locate themselves, passing the time by debating the very romantic comedy conventions which inevitably circumscribe them. In L.A., against all odds, his straight-shooting guilelessness throws her for a loop. And back in Texas, everything she finds there carries the tinge of magical realism--revealing her as the true romantic at the heart of every cynic. -- Paul Cullum © 1998 NewTimes, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by kind permission of newtimesla.com.

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