One Night at McCool's

One Night at McCool's
Film poster
Directed by	Harald Zwart
Produced by	Michael Douglas Allison Lyon Segan Veslemoey Ruud Zwart Whitney Green
Written by	Stan Seidel
Starring	Liv Tyler Matt Dillon Paul Reiser John Goodman Michael Douglas Andrew Dice Clay
Music by	Marc Shaiman
Cinematography	Karl Walter Lindenlaub
Editing by	Bruce Cannon
Distributed by	Focus Features (Universal Pictures)
Release date(s)	April 27, 2001
Running time	93 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$18,000,000
Box office	$14,473,370

One Night at McCool's is a 2001 American dark comedy/neo-noir film, directed by Harald Zwart and starring Liv Tyler, Matt Dillon, Michael Douglas, John Goodman, Paul Reiser, Reba McEntire and Andrew Dice Clay.

Plot

The majority of the film consists of Dillon, Goodman and Reiser's characters reciting their separate lovesick accounts of their experiences with Tyler's seductress character, each narrating over what they consider to be the real version of the recent events. Scenes are often re-enacted twice, with different accounts contradicting each other for comedic effect. For example, when Goodman's detective character is narrating, he acts as if he were a completely fair, by-the-book police officer, and Dillon is painted as a slimy, macho, abusive thug. When Dillon is telling the story, he is the innocent victim and Goodman is shown as a suspicious, prying, hard-nosed cop; Reiser's character is convinced that every woman is in love with him, and during his version of the tale, everyone acts accordingly.

Production

Writer Stan Seidel, who died prior to the film's release, drew much of the film's material from his days as a bartender at Humphrey's, a college bar located across the street from Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Reception

The film garnered mixed to poor reviews (Rotten Tomatoes rated it at 33%), with Roger Ebert saying that the film "is so busy with its crosscut structure and its interlocking stories that it never really gives us anyone to identify with" but that "it has a lot of fun being a near miss."

External links

• One Night at McCool's at the Internet Movie Database
• One Night at McCool's at AllRovi
• One Night at McCool's at Rotten Tomatoes
• One Night at McCool's at Box Office Mojo