Fan review by Sam, January 2005

It's been awhile since we've had some good conversation here so I thought I'd let you know what I thought of it. You may remember my miniature fiasco of it being in a used movie bin and me not having the six bucks to go get it and worrying that someone was going to buy it before I did, so I kept putting it at the back.

The movie is essentially a Ribisi family vanity project, which is not a bad thing. It was written by and stars Marisa Ribisi and also stars Giovanni, and I spotted a couple more Ribisis in the end credits. I'm always skeptical of movies that have the "crazy twentysomething urbanites trying to find love in the 90s!" theme because they come across as trying to hard to be cool. This one didn't, but it did have a distinct lack of redeeming characters to root for.

Marisa plays this girl who is afraid of not have a boyfriend and who gets caught up in the people she dates and inevitably ends up being ditched. Chad (Jeremy) is the guy who finally pushes her over the edge. Jeremy, of course, is great. He looks amazing - one of his most aesthetically pleasing performances, definitely - even though he doesn't have much to do other than act smarmy. None of the characters have too much to do except have irreverent conversations. It seems to me that if I were Marisa and I had the resources to make a movie and could get my hands on a cast that includes so many gifted actors (Jeremy, Giovanni, Michael Rapaport, a drastically underused Adam Goldberg) that I would go for something a little meatier than a story about a girl who can't find love, but whatever. I also like Juliette Lewis, so I include her in the gifted actors category, although not everyone does. In fact, it seems to me that the least gifted actor in this movie is Marisa. I've liked her in secondary roles, like as Cynthia in Dazed and Confused, and I'm sure she's a talented woman, but she really doesn't have the presence or the charisma to carry a movie. Her voice, facial expressions and mannerisms are almost exactly the same as they are in every other thing I've seen her in. In fact, I found my eyes drifting away from her in the many scenes where she was the focal point, looking for something interesting to watch in the background. This story isn't bad, and the dialogue isn't bad, and like I said, some of the supporting actors have turned in amazing performances in other things. But this movie hinges on the main character and relies in her being fascinating to hold it together, and she just doesn't have that thing that makes her sympathetic, multifacted or someone whose point of view you're interested in for two hours. In the scenes with Giovanni, who plays one of his predictably quirky characters, he acts circles around her. And so does Jeremy. I almost got the impression that the other people in this movie know her in real life and think she's cool and want her to do well and were doing this as a favour.

I am probably part of the demographic this movie wanted to reach, and I fall into that young single woman lost in a loveless world category, but because of Marisa's non-presence, this movie left me feeling not much of anything. I didn't love it, I didn't hate it, and I only remember so much about it because of its simplicity. As a movie, I give it a C+, but it gets an A- from a Jeremy perspective for his camp, adding to his range and the sheer hotness of the man.

Miscellaneous thoughts on it: - Why was Claire's mother deaf? I thought it was an interesting element when I first saw it, but beyond a 30-second scene, it was never expanded upon. I thought it would have been interesting to explore if that affected her attitude toward her own relationships. The way it was presented, it almost seemed like a random thing to throw in there, something to make you look for a minute before it faded into the background again.

- This movie gets brownie points for its use of the Bloodhound Gang's Fire Water Burn.

- One of my favourite scenes: Giovanni's character, Jeff, using a piece of fruit to explain the female genitalia.

- Probably one of the best things about this movie is the conversations on morality that could come from watching it with another person. Did Chad really deserve what he got in the end, or had Claire gone off the deep end? Was it really fair for him to get the brunt of what seemed to be years of frustration? Should it have ended at the B.B. gun standoff? He was a dickhead, absolutely, but where does the "buyer beware" aspect come into it? What were the Scrabble players thinking as they watched this? What was it that turned Chad off? Were they justified in the way they treated April at the bar, and should Claire have laughed when her brother said those things to her friend? And so on and so forth.

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