I've been watching a lot of romantic comedies lately, and they all have their conceits. This one is by nature dated, as the lower east side of Manhattan's old Jewish community has largely been displaced by gentrification. I lived in NYC in the 1980s, and it was fun seeing film of communities that have largely been lost since then.
That said, while I liked this film, it felt like a take on Hello! Dolly or the like. It was a well-acted, charming romantic comedy with a predictable plot. Girl goes after guy-out-of-her-class, while rejecting perfectly nice guy in her class. Upper class guy comes after her for shallow reasons, and she realizes the value of blue collar guy. The movie or the plot never really made clear why the self-confident and satisfied mid-thirties woman would abandon her lifestyle for the "old-school" guy, especially when the writer "wanted her" albeit for the wrong reasons. In a way, it reeked of the "desperation" that men tried to put on 30-something women in the late 1980s, where any "nice" guy was better than none, and a pretty 34-year-old woman with a career should be happy to end up with the "pickle guy," no matter what her other options might hold. This, even though the writer and director were women.
I probably would have rated it a 6.5 if that was an option, as it's a decent flick, for acting, writing and dialogue, and because of the charm of the pre-gentrification NYC settings. But it's certainly dated, almost as if it were out of the 1950s rather than the late-1980s.
That said, while I liked this film, it felt like a take on Hello! Dolly or the like. It was a well-acted, charming romantic comedy with a predictable plot. Girl goes after guy-out-of-her-class, while rejecting perfectly nice guy in her class. Upper class guy comes after her for shallow reasons, and she realizes the value of blue collar guy. The movie or the plot never really made clear why the self-confident and satisfied mid-thirties woman would abandon her lifestyle for the "old-school" guy, especially when the writer "wanted her" albeit for the wrong reasons. In a way, it reeked of the "desperation" that men tried to put on 30-something women in the late 1980s, where any "nice" guy was better than none, and a pretty 34-year-old woman with a career should be happy to end up with the "pickle guy," no matter what her other options might hold. This, even though the writer and director were women.
I probably would have rated it a 6.5 if that was an option, as it's a decent flick, for acting, writing and dialogue, and because of the charm of the pre-gentrification NYC settings. But it's certainly dated, almost as if it were out of the 1950s rather than the late-1980s.