Watch Kissing a Fool For Free

The greatest movie ever!

As Good As It Gets

Absolutely brilliant

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Making a movie is a complex affair when many things can go wrong and nobody may care about the things that go right. Filmmakers and studios are driven mad by audiences who embrace crap and turn their nose up at something good. Even given this difficult uncertainty, there's no excuse for the litany of plainly obvious mistakes and misjudgments of Kissing a Fool. The things that are wrong with this motion picture are so glaringly wrong that it is inconceivable how no one noticed them. This sort of fiasco doesn't just get people fired, it should actually end careers.The plot here is almost as old as fiction itself. A guy falls in love with his best friend's fiancée. The guy in this instance is Jay (Jason Lee), a passive mope who is still devastated after being dumped by his ex-girlfriend and is writing a novel about the miserable experience. His best friend is Max (David Schwimmer), a Chicago sportscaster and all around hound dog who, of course, is the exact opposite of Jay in every way. The fiancée is Sam (Mili Avitai), the editor of Jay's book. Jay introduces Sam to Max, they fall instantly into love, move in together and start talking marriage.Let me stop with the plot and explain how this movie goes into the crapper right away and never gets out. First, it opens with Sam getting married to somebody but we can't see who. We're then introduced to Linda (Bonnie Hunt) who claims to have introduced the newlyweds and proceeds to explain how they got together to a couple of fellow wedding guests, essentially narrating the story as it appears in flashbacks. The whole point of this structure is to create a mystery as to whether Sam ends up with Max or Jay. Yet before you realize there's supposed to be a mystery, Linda says she introduced the newlyweds and then we see her introducing Jay and Sam. So, anyone with half a brain has to assume that Jay and Sam are the ones who got married and absolutely nothing, not even Max and Sam getting engaged, ever causes you to reconsider that assumption. There's never a single second when it seems like Sam might end up with anyone other than Jay, but the film still carries out the non-existent mystery until the very end.Secondly, Jason Lee is playing the sympathetic guy in a romantic triangle…and he has a unibrow. It's not an ordinary unibrow, either. It's one where his eyebrows not only meet but take sharp turns and crawl down the bridge of his nose. It's so hideous you can hardly even notice anything else when Lee is on screen. Lee isn't exactly a matinée idol to begin with and here he's made to look physically repellent.Those two blatant errors strangle Kissing a Fool in its crib. It wouldn't have mattered how good everything else was, it was doomed from the start by those two awful and inept creative choices. And they're both such easily avoided problems. Simply have Linda say she knows the married couple instead of introduced them and there could have at least theoretically been a mystery. Pluck Lee's eyebrows every morning before shooting began and at least the audience wouldn't have been distracted by looking at Lee and expecting him to start strumming a banjo and squealing like a pig.It ultimately doesn't matter because the rest of the movie stinks on ice. Apparently realizing they weren't talented enough to do anything with the old "two people are perfect for each other but neither wants to betray a third person" shtick, they add in a twist that sounds like something Aaron Sorkin would have resorted to if Sports Night has lasted another season or two. Max wants to test the fidelity of his fiancée, so he asks Jay to see if he can get Sam to want to sleep with him. The filmmakers also include an appearance by Jay's horrible ex-girlfriend and give Max an ex-girlfriend he's constantly hanging around with for no explicable reason. They even throw in a female cousin (Judy Greer) visiting Sam and staying at her house, as though giving each main character an annoying chick to deal with somehow made it funny.Compounding the suck is that Max is a far more interesting and dynamic than Jay and also happens to be the one who pushes the narrative along. When the third wheel of your romantic triangle is the most proactive character in the film, that's a problem.Bonnie Hunt and David Schwimmer are both quite good here, particularly Schwimmer, who demonstrates the comedic skills that could have led him to an entirely different career if he hadn't been cemented in the public's mind as "Ross from Friends".Kissing a Fool is a misconceived mistake that people should have seen coming a mile away. Unless you have a thing for guys with unibrows, don't bother watching it.

With those stunning camera shots of Chicago and that snappy Harry Connick, Jr. song in the title sequence, "Kissing A Fool" gets off to a great start. And I liked Bonnie Hunt as the story's narrator. But the film suffers from a plot that is too predictable and from characters whose behavior is not believable.This is one of those movies that you can see the end coming a mile away. There are virtually no plot twists to deflect the story's straight-line trajectory. As such, the story is almost too simple and unimaginative to be worth telling. To varying degrees, most romantic comedies are fairly shallow. But "Kissing A Fool" has no subtlety at all, not in plot, not in characters, not in dialogue.Lacking any complexity, the story relies on two main characters, Jay (Jason Lee) and Max (David Schwimmer) whose behavior toward each other is not believable. They're supposed to be best buddies. But they are constantly at each other's throats. Their constant arguing not only is annoying; it calls into question their friendship. How can they be best buddies?The two are not at all alike. Jay is bookish and cerebral; Max is your typical arrogant, cocky self-centered sports freak jerk. All that animosity between these two guys does not lend credibility to their "friendship"; yet, it is the main contrivance that propels the film's plot. Further, it renders a story conclusion that is, by extension, also not believable.The film's acting is a tad exaggerated. I like Jason Lee, but he tends to overact in this film. Mili Avital, as the girl in between, is okay, but she doesn't have much to do. And David Schwimmer's performance is something of a hyper-masculine strut-fest. Some subtlety in acting would have helped a lot.For all that, "Kissing A Fool" is still worth watching, once. It has credible production values, and there are occasional lines of dialogue that are funny. And I think the film's underlying concept is fine. I just wish the script and the acting could have been a little more nuanced and subtle.

Altogether the premise of this movie doesn't seem all that exciting, now that I really think about it there is not much to this movie but both myself and my sister have an odd obsession with it.It's funny, granted Jason Lee is always funny but the cast puts out some great performances. Not many people have seen this and the reactions to it are mixed. There are some parts with really great narrative and the story moves along quite fluidly. The characters are over the top and make for a very fun movie (Max, Natasha etc.).By no means one of the great films or anything, but definitely one of my favs for sure.

Okay I admit it: I'm a sucker for this kind of "how long will it take them to get together" romantic comedy. Sure it has problems: the plot's kind of dopey, the audience is always ahead of the characters, David Schwimmer's still irritating (though oddly, in a completely way to usual) but enough of it worked to satisfy me.Jason Lee is great (despite awful hair) as Jay, who's really the lead despite billing. Mili Avital is sweet and lovely. It's nowhere near as good as My Best Friend's Wedding or The Truth About Cats & Dogs, but if this is the kind of thing you'll probably like if you like this kind of thing. You know what I mean.