#MOMENT BY MOMENT MOVIE#

Tomlin plays a rich, aloof, depressed Malibu divorcee, with one vapid blonde friend, a shallow, materialistic ex, and a college-aged son we never see. To be even more fair, her longtime collaborator and romantic partner, Jane Wagner (who wrote and directed “Moment by Moment”), didn’t set out to depict Tomlin’s character as a Mrs. (The sex scenes are chaste and clipped, the kissing looks forced, the duo spend more time sobbing and consoling than getting it on, and generally lack chemistry).īut to be fair, Tomlin had never aimed to be a screen vixen. So the movie, to put it nicely, isn’t erotic. The main reason “Moment by Moment” doesn’t work can be surmised merely by its description: “romantic melodrama starring John Travolta and Lily Tomlin.” At 23, Travolta was a sex symbol, hot off “Grease” and “Saturday Night Fever.” At 38, Tomlin, hailed for her eccentric, multi-character one-woman shows, was not a sex symbol.

#MOMENT BY MOMENT MOVIE#

(One such site, The Agony Booth, features a nine-page single-spaced mockery, spoiling the whole movie for you). I have to wonder why it was met with such vitriol upon its release, and why, thirty-plus years after its own participants have publicly acknowledged their mistakes, it’s still trashed so vehemently on cult movie sites. It’s too soporific to induce unintentional laughter, and it’s too gentle in execution for its ideas, however ill-conceived, to yield the sort of outrage that other fiascos bring out in viewers. I have now watched it, and it certainly is a failure, but–in my opinion–it’s not all that egregious or stupefying or even memorable.

The 1978 megabomb “Moment by Moment” is still widely known for torpedoing the careers of John Travolta and Lily Tomlin, until they reverberated, respectively, with “Urban Cowboy” and “9 to 5” two years later. Full-time movie reviewers break their professionalism, reveal their inner high school bully (“Ha ha, this actor who is supposed to be macho is a wimp ha ha, this actress who is supposed to be pretty has a big nose!”) Web pages deconstruct them, blow-by-blow, with much snarky commentary included. Whole books have been written about these duds. So misguided was the script, acting and/or storyline, you wonder what the hell they were thinking, how it got the “go” from anyone in any sort of power. You can’t fathom the chutzpah of the filmmakers. Most colossal flops are the types of bad movies you can’t wait to take down.

Moment by moment