John Kostmayer
Occupation
Filmmaker
I Love You To Death Review
Excellent
It's a film never particularly loved by audiences and unlikely to be rehabilitated by critics in the future, but I Love You to Death is nevertheless the perfect example of an overlooked gem. Coming right in the middle of director Lawrence Kasdan's extremely earnest period (The Accidental Tourist in 1988 and Grand Canyon in 1991), I Love You to Death took its cue from one of those true stories of horrific Americana that come bubbling through the tabloid mediasphere every few months and mined it for all its comic potential.
Kevin Kline plays Joey Boca - a guy who runs a pizza parlor in Seattle - as an oversexed, extremely Italian workaholic who is able to explain his chronic infidelity by saying with a straight face, "I'm a man, I got a lotta hormones in my body." It's a clown's performance, a filmmaker doesn't bring Kline in for this sort of role and demand subtlety but rather one that's so over-the-top it achieves a kind of genius that Kline also showcased in his similarly stereotypical role in A Fish Called Wanda (in that one, he played a clown's view of an American abroad, here he's the clowning pizza man, bad accent, bushy mustache and all).
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