Town & Country

REVIEW
In the vein of Hudson Hawk and The Postman, director Chelsom's sloppy, unfunny Town & Country joins the ranks of Hollywood's reigning big-budget mega-flop disasters. It cost upwards of $85 million for nothing but a gaggle of seasoned Tinsletown A-listers and a handful of young up-and-comers, and it sat on the shelf collecting dust for nearly three years. It should have stayed there. Beatty plays an aging architect enduring a mid-life crisis; Keaton, Shandling and Hawn play his befuddled wife and friends, respectively. It's impossible to see what attracted such prestigious talent to this clumsy affair because the film's been so choppily edited that the plot never gains any comic momentum: punchlines are delivered without being properly set up; other jokes fall flat or are abandoned unfinished; peripheral characters appear and disappear with little or no explanation. It's a dreadful mess with one sole bright spot: Seldes' all-too-brief but deliciously vulgar turn as MacDowell's cranky, wheelchair-bound mother.