ADDICTED TO LOVE (63)

Directed by: Griffin Dunne

Starring: Matthew Broderick, Meg Ryan, Tcheky Karyo

The Pitch: A pair of jilted lovers - one still lovelorn, the other bent on revenge - spy on their respective exes, who have now shacked up together.

Theo Sez: A comedy about sadism, about voyeurism and by extension about movie-watching (you could call it a romantic comedy in the style of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000) ; above all of course a comedy about obsession, the unhealthy quality that brings love to within a hair's-breadth of hate. The plotting is cluttered, Ryan (in her new tougher image, post-COURAGE UNDER FIRE) is miscast, and Broderick just does his patented (if under-rated) helluva-nice-guy routine ; nonetheless there must be some merit to a romantic comedy where romance is stalking people, spying on them and trying to wreck their lives, while comedy is what happens when those people, their lives duly wrecked, collapse in tears of despair "like a small twitching stain on the floor". It's a strange, nasty-minded tale that never really got its due ("distasteful", sniffed "Entertainment Weekly" - in a review penned, significantly enough, by its television critic) ; beneath the dreadful, sitcom-bland title actually lurks a surprisingly spiky movie, not a million miles in spirit (if not quite in execution) from another dark comedy of schadenfreude, Scorsese's masterful AFTER HOURS. Which of course was also first-time director Dunne's most famous starring role.