Whether or not you’re much of a fan of Nora Ephron’s romantic comedies, My Blue Heaven is one of those must download movies for anyone who likes great comedies. Lately she’s fallen into a habit, with movies like Bewitched, of trying to repeat When Harry Met Sally by simply… Remaking it, more or less. It’s always the same old stuff, the same outdated dating jokes that were funnier twenty years ago. But My Blue Heaven shows that, when she wants to be, Nora Ephron can be an incredibly funny writer.

Steve Martin and Rick Moranis co-star as, respectively, a made man from the New York mafia currently in the witness protection program, and an FBI agent protecting him from the goombas that would have him whacked. Martin is sent to a picturesque small American town, so it’s your standard fish out of water story, but because it’s done very well this time, it works, it’s funny and it feels relatively fresh. It all comes down to how the story is told, and this one is told well enough.

Of course what really matters is… The movie is funny. Steve Martin hits all the right notes, even the jokes that probably didn’t read all that great in the script, Moranis and Martin have that perfect comedic instinct that helps salvage mediocre material and really knock good material out of the park. The typical odd couple relationship is lent a lot of extra mileage by two funny performers who know how to make the most of material with potential.

Martin quickly takes over the little town he’s been sent to and starts his own thing. He meets a few other protected witnesses, they decide that they’re not getting enough from the government, and they start hijacking trucks and forming their own little mini-mafia in their friendly little town. Watching these old goombas take the town over is really delightful, watching Steve Martin talk his way out of trouble is even better.

Even though the movie does get into organized crime, murder and so on, the end result is really a film that is cute, innocent, funny. The violence is never really scary or suspenseful so much as… Well, a shootout provides a fun bonding experience for Martin and Moranis, and another gunfight towards the end of the film provides one of its biggest laughs “I lied, now where was I?”

One of the movie’s other big sources of laughter comes from Steve Martin’s philandering. He starts the movie with a wife, gets a girlfriend, and then gets another girlfriend. It’s a lot of fun watching him effortlessly juggle three women. He’s a crook, but such a likable crook that you really don’t hold it against him when he lies, steals and cheats on three women at once.

There’s a great, dreamy look to the film with clear blue skies and green pastures, that iconic, picturesque American small town landscape. This really serves as a nice contrast to the urban, gritty environment which Martin typically finds himself more at home in.

The movie might not be one of the greatest films ever made, but it’s somewhere in Steve Martin’s top ten, and certainly one of Nora Ephron’s best. At the very least, it beats watching just another dating comedy from the writer.

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