Oak Owl Possible Spoilers?Not sure what this movie was about, and neither were the writers. It could have been an absurdist romp, ala The Producers - and it almost was. It could have been a commentary on the desperation of those trying to make it in Hollywood, and the estrangements and grief - but it only skirted along the edges of that. It could have been a romantic comedy. But it wasn't. Wm Macy is a truly excellent actor, to be sure - and Meg Ryan shows her acting chops here in a way that is surprising; the rest of the cast is good, too. No faults in that department.It is just ... boring. Nothing unexpected or particularly amusing happens. There is no suspense - we're all pretty sure we know how it's all going to turn out. And we're right. The "complication" of the relationship between the two principals is minor and will clearly be resolved. The plot is predictable from beginning to end, including the conclusion.Although the running time is reported to be 100 minutes it seemed MUCH longer. Disappointing.

MBunge William H. Macy has given a lot of great performances in a lot of great films. Absolutely none of that is apparent in this unfunny, self-absorbed, toothless and tiresome movie. The Deal makes Macy look like some talentless boob who won the lottery and decided to leave his job as an accountant and become a filmmaker. Teamed up with a starkly unattractive Meg Ryan, Macy has created a gigantic turd that should have been left in his toilet bowl and not flung at the public like an angry chimp.The Deal is yet another entry into one of the most putrid genres of modern cinema, "the movie about making movies". It seems as though virtually every single person in Hollywood wants to make one of these films and virtually all of them suck ass. Even the best of these "movies about movies" are rarely more than inside jokes that most people don't get. Most of them are boring and self-indulgent. The worst are physically painful to sit through.Charlie Berns (William H. Macy) is a movie producer so down on his luck he's about to kill himself. Unfortunately for the people watching The Deal, Charlie's suicide is interrupted by his nephew Lionel (Jason Ritter), who has a script about Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone that he wants Charlie to look at. In the first of many things in this story that make little to no sense, the script inspires Charlie to try and put together a deal to produce a 100 million dollar action flick starring megastar Bobby Mason (LL Cool J). Though he encounters some resistance from studio executive Deirdre Hearn (Meg Ryan), Charlie is able to pile up enough BS to get the project approved and rushed into production.As filming begins, it becomes obvious that the movie is going to be a spectacular piece of garbage. Charlie, however, can only focus on trying to get into Deirdre's pants. When Bobby Mason is kidnapped by terrorists and the studio shuts down production, Deirdre and Charlie decide to take the leftover money and make a movie out of Lionel's original script, which had been bastardized beyond recognition to suit the meatheaded Mason's limitations. Can Deirdre and Charlie get this charming and classy film made before the studio figures out what they're up to?I can honestly say that I didn't care a whit about anything or anyone in this story. I didn't care if they made the first crappy film or the second quality film. I didn't care if Charlie and Deirdre got together. I didn't care about them when they got together. And after they inevitably broke up, I didn't care if they got back together. I didn't care if Charlie had a hundred lit bottle rockets shoved up his butt. I didn't care if Deirdre was gang raped by a herd of rhinos. The characters in this film are neither real nor amusing. The plot is schizophrenic. The direction is pedestrian in the sense it tried to cross the street and got run over by a truck. The dialog is stunningly unfunny and most of the acting, especially by the two leads, is the sort of stuff that wouldn't even pass muster at a community theater in a small town of 200 people.Macy seems to have tried to get through his entire performance using only two expressions. I wouldn't be surprised if I found out Meg Ryan was drunk in half her scenes. And in addition to her poor acting, Ryan just looks awful in this film. I don't know if it was bad make up, whatever she's done to her lips or if she's just been too thin for too long, but Ryan appears to have been ridden hard and put away wet. Ryan was a marvelously cute woman and had the sort of attractiveness that should have aged well. In The Deal, she only looks aged.Let me give you a specific example of how terrible this movie is. After Charlie and Deirdre have their predictable onset fling, it's just as predictable they break up when filming is over. But things go past predictable and into lobotomized when Charlie and Deirdre have not one, not two but three goodbye scenes, one right after the other right after the other. Imagine if at the end of Star Wars that after the ceremony where Han and Luke received their medals, they held a second ceremony and gave them another pair of medals. That's what the ending of The Deal is like.I didn't get a single moment or ounce of entertainment out of watching this film. If you want to see William H. Macy's bare behind, it does make two very brief appearances. Beyond that, you'd get more out of a screenful of static than you will out of viewing The Deal.

lynk37-862-650071 I saw half this film by accident on cable TV, and then went out and bought a copy the next day for 3$ (Sorry Bill). And was very happy to watch it twice. Although i had never heard of it. Look, it's a good movie. 99% of all films being made these are rubbish or you could say 99.9%! The Deal was a few cameos short of brilliant and a bit light on the darker sides. Macy was great as usual, when is not. I feel Macy's character had to be more depressed and a little more crazy and the film needed more of The Player and less Bowfinger. Satire is not laugh out loud comedy it is often just relief that you are finally watching something good. This film would have been a very hard sell, with a smaller budget than Bill and Ben and I'm sure Ryan was working for free or being blackmailed into making the film. This being said they had very good chemistry, although anyone could with Macy, he is probably the best actor working in America-period!!!!! This film type is now a genre with Entourage and Tropic Thunder etc... It is a great shame this film suffers from what is exactly this film is about-the B.S in Hollywood- the out-door luney bin!!! Bill Macy needs to have his own T.V show where he is a producer!!!

Robert J. Maxwell Every once in a while another movie about movies comes out -- metamovies. Truffaut's "Day For Night" was pretty good. "Bowfinger" had its moments. "The Deal" ought to be the comedy that it strives so hard to be but doesn't quite make it.Producers William Macy and Meg Ryan hire an Israeli director to make an action movie that was originally written as a biography of Benjamin Disraeli. The picture is to be shot in South Africa. There are myriad subsidiary characters I won't bother to name or describe.The action hero, a kind of black, Jewish Rambo, is kidnapped by an extremist political group and the studio tells Macy and Ryan to "shut it down and salvage what you can." They take this to mean they can move to Prague, where the studio has some frozen money, and revert to the original script about Disraeli.Granted it doesn't sound too funny and it's not. That's a shame in a way because they've got some talent in front of the camera, and not just high-end stars like Macy and Ryan.But the script, by Macy and Schachter, is weak, in that it's deficient in laughs, or smiles even, and there aren't any characters to particularly care about.The direction and editing need some seasoning. There are too many cutaway shots to spectators gaping open-mouthed at the goings on. Some gags depend on the viewer's knowledge of the rudiments of Judaism. A book is entitled "The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Talmud." I don't know that, even today, the casual viewer in America's Heartland is going to get a joke like that, or like the director's insistence that everyone on the set wear a yarmulkah. They'll go over well on the Coasts.I got the gags but didn't find them too amusing. The film simply ambles along with characters making shocking statements or doing outrageous things mostly in deadpan. It's confusing too. When the film within the film finally wrapped, it came as a surprise to me because I didn't know the production was that far along.It's not an insulting movie in any way, it's just not what it was intended to be. Too bad. "State and Main" is funnier.