http://avclub.com/content/node/40500
Some wonderful observations on Steve Martin’s writing, by Noel Murray of the Onion AV Club:
But his characters don’t really interact with each other. They just show up at the appointed time and fill their assigned space. This is all intentional, surely. Martin’s a dry guy, with a comic sensibility that increasingly fits the absurdism of his early work into the square boxes of everyday life. So the result is a movie that’s often distinctive and singularly funny, but is on the whole fairly unsatisfying. Still, say this for Martin: in a lot of the movies he’s written, like Roxanne and L.A. Story, he shows a fascination with people who desperately need to be in love, and that passion for passion has a strange poignancy.