Typical Olde Tyme Hollywood (not in a good way)

Rating: 4/10 (14 April 2019)

A lot of perfectly good acting from the major players and some good scenes sabotaged by non-realistic paint by numbers film making. Everything is spelled out. The background music underlines everything in exactly the predictable ways you would think it would. Greg Kinnear's dog wins over the cranky OCD Jack Nicholson who hates him in about ten minutes, and then doesn't want to go back to Greg after a few weeks of eating bacon. Not how dogs act, or people. Greg wears a purple shirt unbuttoned to the waist at a party exactly like no NYC gay artist in 1998 ever would. Helen Hunt has been taking her kid only to the emergency room for asthma attacks several times a month for years and has apparently never taken him to an actual allergist or MD, so the doc that Jack sends fixes everything and the kid is suddenly scoring on the soccer field. She says the HMO won't approve standard allergy skin tests, which no HMO in the world would not approve even without the emergency room visits. In fact once you were at the allergist the tests would never require further approval, and if approval was needed for the allergist it would be routine. The emergency room copay was about $50 then and a doctor office visit maybe $10, so NONE of that made any sense. She has a suitcase from 1950 exactly like she would never have. All contrivances that could be accomplished in some ways that check with reality but the writer didn't bother and the director didn't care. There's more. Lots more. Like Jack is 25 years older than Helen. The actress playing her mother is less than a year older than him.
It turned up on the local PBS station. I watched it. Got some stretches in. Ate some food.