When Oldie Met Sally

The idea of a heartwarming comedy about aging in which Billy Crystal plays the oldster and Tiffany Haddish serves as his sweet-natured helpmeet is so retro it’s practically reactionary. Overthinking matters a bit, I assumed the movie would have to be a comedy masterpiece just to have gotten made.

My mistake.

Here Today is exactly what it appears to be: a 1989 movie inexplicably dropped upon us citizens of 2021. The jokes are 1989, the theme is 1989, the musical score and the slow pace and the romantic flashback sequences filmed like a Summer’s Eve commercial are all strictly Eighties. At the outset I thought maybe I was watching a parody of 1989 Hollywood style set back in the pre-Internet age: Here comes a joke about Stephen Hawking doing stand-up comedy which would have worked in 1989 but doesn’t seem to take into account that he has now been dead for three years.

But people use iPhones in the movie, so, no.

Here Today is directed by Crystal, who co-wrote the script with Alan Zweibel, one of the first generation of Saturday Night Live writers, and together these men are 143 years old. You’d never suspect it, though; you’d think that separately they’re 143 years old. There are so many layers of cringe to this movie that it’s like a cringe pastry, a cringe wedding cake — no, a cringe skyscraper. Crystal and Zweibel don’t even recognize how far comedy has shifted since their respective SNL stints, and evidently no one had the heart to tell them.