Problem: Write a positive movie review.

Answer: Much like the comedy duo of its title, "The Sunshine Boys" has become a forgotten classic 30-odd years later. It's hardly mentioned alongside other great film comedies of the 1970s. This makes no sense given the singular specialness of this film, perhaps the best Neil Simon ever wrote.

Walter Matthau plays Willy Clark, once half of a legendary vaudeville comedy known as Lewis and Clark, now a bitter 73-year-old solo act who can't get a job in a potato chip commercial. His nephew and agent Ben (Richard Benjamin) is sure he can get work if Willy will only agree to reunite with his estranged partner Al Lewis (George Burns) for an ABC-TV celebration of show business nostalgia.

Nostalgia is what "Sunshine Boys" has going for it in spades, right from the start when a series of 1920s film clips showcasing various entertainers from long ago flickers before us to the accompaniment of Cole Porter's "Be A Clown". Then there's the film's present-day setting in Manhattan, where flared trousers and wide polyester ties abound. The periods collide in Willy's glorious mess of a Manhattan apartment, where framed photos and cartoons of long-dead celebrities stare out from the walls at lurid tabloid headlines and empty Zabar grocery bags. If you were alive in the 1970s like me, you might even feel like you were in that apartment.

Willy clearly has been living there too long. He's sleeping in front of the television when the kettle in the other room boils. Willy wakes up and picks up the phone.

"Hello, who is this?" A pause. "Never mind, it's the tea."

Old men living alone can be sad material in almost anyone else's hands, but Simon's deft wit and unerring feeling for character turns this adaptation of his 1972 stage hit into comedy gold. The amazing thing about "The Sunshine Boys" is how much it rubs your noses in Willy's almost existential condition without turning you off at all. "89 years old and just like that, he dies of nothing'" Willy says of one old songwriting friend, before deciding the man probably died from writing a song that rhymed "lady" with "baby".

Burns won an Oscar for his understated performance as the gentle but steely Lewis, but it's Matthau who brings this one home, his make-up and proud but ragged bearing really selling you on the idea he was already 73 when he made this. Willy is obnoxious in the extreme, fully deserving Ben's description "crazy freakin' old man", but you root for him throughout, enjoying his small victories even when they come at the cost of others' patience. His lines kill you, too, especially when he's trying to kill Lewis, for whom the TV reunion turns out to be a bad idea.

"You're out of touch!" Willy tells Lewis at one point. "I'm still in demand. I'm still hot!"

"If this room was on fire you wouldn't be hot," Lewis replies.

Director Herbert Ross shoots everything in a very casual and understated way, with low lighting and mid-range shots even in emotional moments so as to leave room for the comedy and the film's overall zen message of grace through quiet acceptance. You never get the feeling you are watching a movie, one of "The Sunshine Boys" many charms, and Ross's direction, like the acting of the three principals, goes a long way toward achieving that end.

Comedy is hard, especially when the subjects are people watching life pass them by, but "The Sunshine Boys" makes it all seem a pleasure, because, for us watching, it is.

Problem: Write a negative movie review.

Answer: The director, outfitted in chains and leather, warned the audience at the SF Frameline Film Festival Friday night that we were about to see an "experiental" film. Experimental? Leave the video camera on the back seat of the car, let the tape roll and edit in all the pointless dreck within eyesight. A meandering pastiche road show manque that starts nowhere and takes the audience no place. The gratuitous violence that opens the movie drove more than one patron from the Castro theater. I would have left, too, but my cine-buddy needed a ride home and has this thing about seeing even the worse merde through to the end. By the time the lights came up the audience had thinned considerably. Tepid applause. Pro forma questions of the director who seemed pleased with the product. Avoid this film!

Problem: Write a negative movie review.

Answer: This will be brief. Let me first state that I'm agnostic and not exactly crazy about xtians, especially xtian fanatics. However, this documentary had a tone of the like of some teenager angry at his xtian mother for not letting him play video games. I just couldn't take it seriously. Mentioning how CharlesManson thought he was Christ to illustrate the point that xtianity can breed evil? i don't know it was just cheap and childish -- made the opposition look ignorant. Furthermore, the narrator just seemed snobby and pretentious. The delivery was complete overkill. I can't take this documentary seriously. Might appeal to an angry teenager piss3d off at his xtian mother for not letting him play video games.

Problem: Write a negative movie review.

Answer:
Not even Timothy Hutton or David Duchovny could save this dead fish of a film. For starters, the script was definitely written to be made into a B-film, but somehow Duchovny (looking for a star vehicle to elevate himself out of television) and Hutton (looking for the "two" of a "one-two punch" he had hoped would define his career after "Ordinary People") became attached to the picture. Cheesy lines, big bad wipes from scene to scene (Come on--who uses wipes after 12th Grade Telecommunications class?), and plain old bad acting sink this film. Even Duchovny is not immune to the bad acting plague that is this film. Only Timothy Hutton rises above the material at all. I must admit feeling Duchovny's pain as he read the lines that are the voice-over. While I found myself laughing when I'm sure the director wanted me to feel terrified, nothing prepared me for the closing line of Duchonvey's voice-over: "if you ever need a doctor, be sure to call 911." If only the studio had called 911, this dog of a motion picture would never have been made. Avoid at all costs.