Personal Foul

Original post date: 25 May 1987
Rating: ✭✭✰✰

Like so many films at the film festival, this is a nice, low-budget U.S. movie looking for a distributor. It stars David Morse (St. Elsewhere) as a guy living out of his pick-up truck and Alan Arkin’s son Adam as a grade school teacher who befriends him when they meet on a basketball court in a park. Jeremy (Arkin) can’t Show His Feelings, which is driving his quasi-girlfriend up the wall, so she makes a play for Ben (Morse) to make him jealous. The comedy is low-key, and the people are all nice and decent. And the kids in Jeremy’s class act like real kids (gulp). The director was there to discuss it afterwards, and he said that so far no distributor has wanted to pick up the film because it didn’t have a “hook,” meaning it’s not like some other movie that’s made a lot of money. Too bad.

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