One Night at McCool's

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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	USA Films
Release date(s)	27 April 2001
Running time	93 minutes
Country	U.S.
Language	English
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

One Night at McCool's is a 2001 dark comedy/Neo-noir, directed by Harald Zwart and starring Matt Dillon, Michael Douglas, Paul Reiser, John Goodman, Liv Tyler, Reba McEntire 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 version of the tale, everyone acts accordingly.

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.

The conceit of the movie recalls the classic movie Rashomon, by Akira Kurosawa, which employs the technique of conflicting flashbacks to explore questions about human frailties and the nature of truth.