Crazy People

Dudley Moore plays an adman who has a nervous breakdown, which provokes him to tell the truth in his ads, in this comedy written by Mitch Markowitz (Good Morning, Vietnam) and directed by Tony Bill (Five Corners). This leads to some fairly amusing gags involving surreal ads for actual products (e.g., for Jaguar: Sleek and smart. For men who’d like hand jobs from beautiful women they hardly know). Moore’s boss is so horrified by this development that he sends him to a sanitarium, at which point the movie takes an abrupt nosedive into the sort of tacky media lies it is supposedly attacking. Within five minutes at the asylum, Moore encounters beautiful copatient Daryl Hannah, who immediately falls in love with him. Then Moore’s ads accidentally make it to the marketand prove enormously successful; he starts his own highly successful ad agency among the sanitarium patients, and so on, ad nauseam. Most offensive of all is the movie’s absurd notion of what sanitariums and mental patients are like (this sanitarium seems to have a total of nine patients), although spectators who like the similarly fanciful King of Hearts may find the conceits of this comedy palatable. With Paul Reiser and Mercedes Ruehl. (JR)

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