Flirting with Disaster (1996)

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

This film tells the story of a new father who decides to skip his adoptive father's sixtieth birthday celebration to find his biological parents."Flirting with Disaster" has a very happening plot, with new unexpected events every few minutes. It details a trip that goes wrong at every turn, some are innocent mishaps while some are truly disastrous. It illustrates Murphy's Law very well! The story is darkly humorous, it is not laugh out loud funny, but it keeps viewers entertained and engaged with a smile on the face. It is also quite interesting to see what many famous faces looked like twenty years ago. I can't quite believe the policeman is Josh Brolin, for example.

David O. Russell directs "Flirting With Disaster". The plot? Ben Stiller plays Mel Coplin, a young man who attempts to find the biological parents with whom he has never had contact. This, he hopes, will explain "why he is why he is". Unfortunately Mel keeps meeting the wrong people, all of whom he keeps mistaking for kin. The film ends with Mel eventually meeting his genetic parents – a pair of marijuana growing hippies – but its overall point is that there are always other prospective partners, people and kin vying for our attention and more. What matters or defines us are ultimately the choices we make, rather than the genes in our bodies or the company we keep. This stance is the opposite of Russell's "Huckabees", where choices seem irrelevant in light of social/cultural programming. Russell was a political activist/scientist before turning to film."Flirting With Disaster" sports funny performances from Tea Leoni, Alan Alda and the oft underused Lily Tomlin. Its last and first acts are very funny, but things slow down during its middle portion. The film's structured as a "road movie". If Russell's underrated "I Heart Huckabees" was a existential comedy in the vein of late Woody Allen, "Flirting With Disaster" is a light farce in the vein of Allen's earlier, madcap comedies.8/10 – Worth one viewing.

An adopted man goes searching for his birth parents. Hilarity ensues. Not really. Actually there are zero laughs for the first half hour or so. The first chuckle is supplied when Brolin enters the picture as a gay Federal agent. From that point, it becomes mildly amusing, thanks to a terrific cast. It's nice to see the likes of Moore, Segal, Tomlin, and Alda, although sexual scenes of these old-timers is the kind of imagery one does not want lingering in the mind. This film provided Stiller with a career template for playing neurotic men who keep encountering disaster, but the script here is not as witty and the plot not as engaging as some of his later efforts.

Absent since 2004's misbegotten "I Heart Huckabees", filmmaker David O. Russell made a ramshackle screwball farce back in 1996 that's well worth revisiting on DVD, at least until his next film comes along. He was able to blend character-driven humor with moments of pure slapstick as he tracks the misadventures of Mel Coplin, a neurotic entomologist on a frantic search for his birth parents to resolve his long-standing issues with identity. Tina Kalb, a leggy, off-kilter adoption agency worker thinks she's found Mel's mother in San Diego, so Mel, Tina, and Mel's sweetly frumpy wife Nancy, nursing their five-month baby, embark on a journey that becomes ever more haphazard with every turn of events. Unsurprisingly, an attraction develops between Mel and Tina, who is anxious to get pregnant herself. They meet a gallery of eccentric characters in what becomes a memorably wacky road trip. The real coup with this under-appreciated film is the casting. Long before he sold himself up the river with execrably witless comedies like "Meet the Fockers" and "The Heartbreak Kid", Ben Stiller was a promising actor of relative subtlety, and he expertly mans the rudder as Mel with his skittish self-containment. An actress who never seems to fulfill her potential, Téa Leoni brings a mix of klutziness and sexy smarts to the incompetent Tina. As Nancy, Patricia Arquette has a soft, fuzzy quality that makes a nice contrast to Leoni's angularity.Russell was smart to cast four veterans as Mel's two sets of parents. As his adoptive parents, George Segal and a cast-against-type Mary Tyler Moore are hilarious playing classic New York Jewish stereotypes. Moore, in particular, has a field day playing the obnoxious dark side of Rhoda Morgenstern rightfully proud of her unsagging breasts. As the couple who turn out to be Mel's real parents, Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin are equally funny as graying New Mexico hippies heavy into their art and LSD. When Mel meets them, that's when the film becomes a whirlwind, "Noises Off"-type of farce with all the personal shenanigans coming to a head. Playing a gay couple who happen to be FBI agents, a surprisingly deft Josh Brolin ("No Country for Old Men") and the always dependable Richard Jenkins (superb in this year's "The Visitor") shine as bickering personality opposites. Glenn Fitzgerald as Mel's psychotic brother and Celia Weston as a Reagan-loving Southern matron round out a razor-sharp cast. It all ends rather abruptly, but Russell shows a genuine talent for juggling a lot of comic possibilities with supple dexterity. The 2004 Collector's Edition DVD is light on extras - just three deleted scenes, a few outtakes that don't compare to the final film, and a brief featurette on the film's development and production.