One Night at McCool's

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One Night at McCool's

Directed by	Harald Zwart
Produced by	Michael Douglas
Written by	Stan Seidel
Starring	Liv Tyler Matt Dillon John Goodman Paul Reiser and Michael Douglas
Distributed by	USA Films
Release date(s)	27 April 2001 (USA)
Running time	93 min.
Language	English
IMDb profile

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

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 reinacted 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 recanting, everyone acts as so.

The film garnered mixed to poor reviews (Rotten Tomatoes rated it at 32%), 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." [1] 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.[2]