The Odd Couple
Director: Gene Saks
Year Released: 1968
Rating: 0.5
It must have taken Neil Simon a long time to come up with the idea for this one - two men, one anal-retentive, the other anal-repulsive, holed up in an apartment, forced to deal with each other after their wives leave them. The conflict is built in - the anal-retentive one, without an ounce of self-reflection, does everything in his power to infuriate the anal-repulsive one, who, to show how anal-repulsive he is, throws chips on the floor and spaghetti on the wall and spills food on his shirt and says he loves it. It would have taken any sane individual a millisecond to figure out what these two take an entire film to: that the setup is ridiculous and the relationship would only be destroyed, but Simon has never been one to turn down an idea, no matter how simplistic.
