Taglines: You never know who’s going to change your life.
Here Today Movie Storyline. Veteran comedy writer Charlie Burnz (Billy Crystal) forms an unlikely yet hilarious and touching friendship with New York singer Emma Payge (Tiffany Haddish) in the new comedy-drama Here Today. Emma — the unlikely recipient of a prize to have lunch with the comedy legend, despite not knowing who he is — gets off to a rocky start with Charlie (think seafood allergy, a hospital visit, and an epi pen). Before long, each finds in the other a sort of soul mate, forging a deep bond that kicks the generation gap aside and redefines the meaning of friendship, love, and trust.
Here Today is a 2021 American comedy-drama film directed and produced by Billy Crystal, from a screenplay that he wrote with Alan Zweibel. It stars Billy Crystal, Tiffany Haddish, Penn Badgley, Laura Benanti, Louisa Krause, Anna Deavere Smith, Matthew Broussard, Alex Brightman, Andrew Durand, Max Gordon Moore and Audrey Hsieh.
Here Today was released on May 7, 2021 by Sony Pictures and grossed $900,000 from 1,200 theaters in its opening weekend, finishing seventh at the box office. Females made up 57% of the audience, with 57% also being over the age of 25. The film dropped 41% to $530,000 in its second weekend.
About the Story
Crystal’s Charlie Burnz lives in a beautiful Brooklyn brownstone and walks each day to the cable-television studio where he’s the senior writer on “This Just In,” a popular sketch-comedy show that’s like “Saturday Night Live” done for Comedy Central. It’s always gratifying to see the comedy world captured by someone who doesn’t feel the need to satirize it too broadly, and Crystal, who co-wrote the script with the former “SNL” writer Alan Zweibel (based on Zweibel’s short story “The Prize”), nails how a show like this one works: the neurotic electricity in the writer’s room, the jockeying between laughs that aim high and aim low, the performative office politics of who’s up and who’s down.
At first, when we see Charlie surrounded by hip New York sketch writers 30 years his junior, or seated in his office typing up jokes on his bath-tile-green manual Smith-Corona, we suspect that the movie is going to be about a relic who gets tossed out of a comedy establishment that’s outgrown him. But Charlie, who has Broadway plays, hit movies, and five books to his credit, hasn’t lost the instinct for how to spin a joke, and for what he calls the “music” of comedy. He’s the show’s mentor, its organizing editor, its tribal elder. What he’s losing is his memory.
Each day, on his walk to work, he fixates on the same stop sign and tells himself to turn left. At home on the wall, he’s got photographs of his adult children, the menschy Rex (Penn Badgley) and the resentful Francine (Laura Benanti), with Post-It notes of their names attached. Most of the time, though, his mind is fine: perky, nimble, compulsively funny.
Crystal makes Charlie a worldly spieler — someone who has spent his life winning people over with one-liners, driven by a show-off abrasiveness that has been softened by success. As Crystal plays him, with a scraggly beard and a gentle aging-boomer edge, Charlie is an intensely likable guy, but the names from his past are starting to slip away from him. As we learn early on, during a meeting between Charlie and his doctor (Anna Deavere Smith), it’s not information overload. He’s in the early stages of dementia. He’s hiding it for the moment, but it’s only going to get worse.
Here Today (2021)
Directed by: Billy Crystal
Starring: Billy Crystal, Tiffany Haddish, Penn Badgley, Laura Benanti, Louisa Krause, Anna Deavere Smith, Matthew Broussard, Alex Brightman, Andrew Durand, Max Gordon Moore, Audrey Hsieh
Screenplay by: Billy Crystal, Alan Zweibel
Production Design by: Andrew Jackness
Cinematography by: Vanja Cernjul
Film Editing by: Kent Beyda
Costume Design by: Cynthia Flynt
Set Decoration by: Charlene Wang De Chen
Music by: Charlie Rosen
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for strong language, and sexual references.
Distributed by: Sony Pictures
Release Date: May 7, 2021 (United States)
Visits: 33
