Year of the Comet (1992)

Beautiful, moving film.

A different way of telling a story

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

William Golman says this is his most hurtful failure ("Which Lie Did I Tell" - published around 2000). Not just a movie that didn't do well at the box-office for some reason, a real stinking dud. He seems at a loss to understand what was wrong. His only hint is that people don't care about red wine. Wrong wrong wrong. Red wine in this movie is only part of the scenery, and the big heavy unbreakable bottle of Château Lafite 1811 (Year of the Comet) is just a McGuffin, albeit a poor one.So William Goldman can't understand why people left, or more accurately fled, the free advance screening in Sherman Oaks that fateful night in 1992. Well the movie is really bad. Exposition is heavy handed, the girl is nice but the character passive and bland, the boy is just weak. Goldman had Cary Grant in mind to picture the male lead, well, let's just say that this cute boy Daly is hardly a decent supporting actor.The movie is totally silly and Peter Yates fails to bring it to the level of an action comedy. Louis Jourdan's last job is what's most in line with a silly funny movie, the rest is mostly a script that doesn't take its story seriously enough for the big fat cheap jokes to work.And by the way Year of the Comet is a really bad title for something that has as much to do with astronomy as with wine.

In his book "Which Lie Did I Tell?", screenwriter William (The Princess Bride) Goldman talked in detail about how this film became doomed after a sneak preview screening ended with nearly the entire audience fleeing the theater by the half-hour mark (or so I remember reading).While this film isn't as bad as it sounded, I still gave up on it halfway through.To paraphrase The Unknown Movies website, it's rather hard to tell whether Goldman wanted to ape Romancing the Stone (a much better film, of course), especially considering he has long criticized Hollywood for avoiding original stories. On the other hand, the finished film seemed unbelievably rushed; it's as if I was watching a movie on television that had already joined in progress following a baseball game, or something.So yeah, don't bother, unless you're really curious. I'll leave you with one amusing thing, however: when I turned off the tape, it was during the scene where Penelope Ann Miller and Tim Daly were in the helicopter as it was spiraling down to its doom; I just turned it off and quipped, "And the helicopter crashed and they both died. The end."

On a rainy Sunday afternoon this would be fun with a friend. It's a silly, fluffy and self-indulgent love story, something that 50 years ago Cary Grant might have done. So what if background details are left out and the plot is nonsensical? It's a romance. (Okay, and the dialogue is sometimes a bit too cutesy and the hero does remind you constantly and annoyingly of The Sundance Kid.) There's room in the world for romp and caper and chase films too. (I only wish the scenery had been used a bit more. Both the Isle of Skye and Monaco can be charming places.) I liked the film when it first came out and watching it last night I enjoyed it again. Thanks, Bill.

The movie revolves around Penelope Ann Miller's character discovering, first a hidden wine cellar at a castle she's sent to catalog for her father's auction house.Then she found a case holding a very large bottle...possibly Balthazar or even Nebudchannazer, of a 1811 Ch. Lafite...from a Year of the Comet, a vintage much more successful than the later 1887 Year of the Comet. Haley's, that is.The movie becomes a romantic adventure-comedy, with Tim Daly pulling the Hero parts off. Louis Jourdan has the role of Mad Scientist, which he'd become excellent at :)The huge surprise comes at the end, when the bottle is auctioned off and a surprise bidder buys it. And THEN shocks EVERYONE in the auction room by OPENING it. And selling glasses for, I think, ten-thousand dollars a glass, made out to a favorite charity.Daly and Miller of course become an item.This movie is beloved of wine geeks, like me. My nick in other worlds is the Winestone Cowboy (VBG)