With or Without You Movie Review
Unless it's Eraserhead’s Baby Henry or Monkey Business, in which Ginger Rogers THINKS that Cary Grant's been rejuvenated into a baby, I tend to hit the rewind button whenever movies about babies swim into focus: planning them, having them, diapering them, feeding them, walking them, et cetera. I took my sister Alanna, who had two stunning babies—Emma and Tess—between 1992 and 1997, to the press screening of Nine Months, and we both hated it for the same reasons. It was boring, fake, stupid, and NOT funny, like most Hollywood baby movies are, except for the aforementioned Monkey Business. With this bias, With or Without You was unlikely to make me sit up and pay attention with the same absorption that I watch Luis Buñel slice an eyeball in Un Chien Andalou. It's about a six-week stand between Alex Tinkham and Zoe Welles (Kristoffer Winters and Marisa Ryan). Her boyfriend's back and he's gonna be in trouble. Oh, not literally. Zoe just blindsides Alex with the news after they have sex. Such MANNERS! Alex loves Zoe and Alex is hurt. Tough! Off Zoe trots to that churl, James (Dylan Roy). Then Zoe finds out that she and Alex are expecting a baby, which makes Alex love Zoe even more, but it doesn't transform the nasty Zoe into an ethereal Madonna, ZZZ…poor Alex; I hope this wasn't inspired by a true story. Rachel True is cute as Alex's friend Misha. Poor Alex also has an awful roommate and the nasty Zoe has a nastier mother. I just remembered another (teen) pregnancy movie (circa 1959) that's pretty good for the genre: Philip Dunne's Blue Denim, because Carol Lynley and Brandon de Wilde are so cute in it and Marsha Hunt and Macdonald Carey are so good as the parents. If I were really into With or Without You, I wouldn't even be THINKING about other movies, which ought to tell you something. Played at San Francisco's Indie Fest in 1999.
1998 105m/C Kristoffer Ryan Winters, Marisa Ryan, Rachel True, Linda Cropper, Jim Lichtscheidl, Margi Simmons, Dylan Roy; D: Wendell Jon Andersson; W: Wendell Jon Andersson; C: Gregory M. Cummins; M: Michael Windemacher.