Music Video of the Day: (You Drive Me) Crazy by Britney Spears (1999, dir by Nigel Dick)

Posted on January 13, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Remember Drive Me Crazy?

Released in 1999, Drive Me Crazy was a little film from the Freddie Prinze, Jr. era of teen romcoms with generic titles. Of course, Freddie Prinze, Jr. is not actually in Drive Me Crazy. Instead, the Prinze role was taken by Adrian Grenier, who does a decent impersonation. In this film, Grenier plays the neighbor of Melissa Joan Hart. The plot was pretty standard for the films of this era. Melissa Joan Hart needs to make someone jealous so she pretends to date Adrian Grenier and then they end up falling in love for real. Along the way, an important lesson is learned about being yourself and not worrying about what cliques think of you. It’s pretty much a forgotten film, overshadowed by the likes of She’s All That and Get Over It. (When Adrian Grenier took on the role of “greatest actor of his generation” Vincent Chase on Entourage, it was often said that Chase’s first film role was in a romantic comedy with Mandy Moore. I assume that was a reference to this film. Not that I ever watched Entourage….)

(Want to be your super hero …. fallin’ from running horse….)

Originally, Drive Me Crazy was going to be called Next To You, which is perhaps the only possible title that could have been more generic than the one that they went with. The title changed after the success of Britney Spear’s debut album, …Baby One More Time. One of the songs from the album, (You Drive Me) Crazy, had been included on the film’s soundtrack and the film’s producers decided to try to capitalize on Britney’s popularity by renaming the film after it. And so, Next To You became Drive Me Crazy.

This also led to the production of a music video tie-in. In the video for (You Drive Me) Crazy, Britney plays a dorky waitress who turns out to be a great dancer. Of course, both Melissa Joan Hart and Adrian Grenier make appearances in the video. Apparently, Grenier really didn’t want to be in the video and had to be talked into it by the video’s director, Nigel Dick. Did Grenier think that he was too good to appear in a video with Britney Spears!? That’s a bold statement from someone who subsequently spent 8 years acting opposite of Jeremy Piven.

Anyway, this is a fun video and, with everything that she’s been through, it’s always kind of nice to see Britney actually enjoying herself. Filmed years before the marriage to Kevin Federline and all the stuff that followed afterwards, there’s a lot of optimism and hope to be found in this video.

Enjoy!

Insomnia File #31: Arsenal (dir by Steve C. Miller)

Posted on December 1, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_Qq2DWiTCw

If you were having trouble getting to sleep last night around midnight, you could have turned over to Showtime and watched Arsenal, a film that had a brief theatrical run in January and which has now made its way to cable.

Arsenal tells the story of two brothers. When we first meet them, they’re kids and they’re living with their uncle. But then their uncle kills himself and the two brothers find themselves going down very different paths. JP (who is played, as an adult, by Adrian Grenier) turns a part-time job mowing lawns into a full-time job as the owner of a construction company. Meanwhile, Mikey (played, as an adult, by Jonathon Schaech) stumbles across gangster Eddie King (Nicolas Cage) while Eddie is busy killing a man. JP heads for a life of respectability. Mikey heads for a life of crime. Much like the Bulger brothers, they remain close despite their differing lifestyles.

But who cares about the brothers? Adrian Grenier and Jonathon Schaech both do the best that they can with these two underwritten parts but ultimately, neither JP nor Mikey is that interesting. If anything, they’re like the guys who you keep around as backups in case the guy you really like never works up the courage to talk to you. Instead, let’s discuss about Eddie King.

As I said before, Eddie King is played by Nicolas Cage. As you can probably guess, Cage does not exactly show anything resembling restraint when he plays King. That may not be surprising but what is surprising that, after twenty years or going totally overboard in almost every role that he’s played, Cage can still surprise audiences by just how far he’s willing to go. Every time that you think Cage’s performances can’t get any more bizarre, something like Arsenal comes out and proves you wrong.

There is so much to love about Cage’s batshit crazy performance as Eddie King. For one thing, it makes absolutely no sense. If you look at real-life mobsters, one thing that becomes clear very quickly is that the best ones may have been sadistic but they were usually smart enough to know when to lay low. Eddie, on the other hand, never lays low. He’s so crazy that he might as well be wearing a shirt that reads, “I kill people and then laugh about it.” So, not only do you have Cage giving one of his most over-the-top performances but, for some reason, he’s also wearing this extremely fake nose and the movie doesn’t really make much of an effort to disguise the fact that it’s a fake nose. I mean, you can literally see the glue that’s holding the fake nose over the old nose. And then there’s Cage’s haircut, which would appear to suggest that Eddie King shares a barber with every pervy humorist who has ever had a job working for Minnesota public radio. When we first see Eddie, he’s gruesomely killing a man and Cage gets so into it and there’s so much blood flying that I was half-expecting Eddie to then turn into Pennywise the clown. Eddie gets another scene where he writes a letter to his dead brother. Cage acted the Hell out of that scene. It’s as if he was saying, “You thought my Left Behind performance was strange? CHECK THIS OUT, DAMN YOU!”

Of course, Cage isn’t the only good actor acting weird in Arsenal. John Cusack plays a cop. He always wears sunglasses and a cap and he also keeps his shoulder slouched. Was it a character thing or was Cusack sincerely hoping no one would recognize him in the movie? I’m not really sure but it’s still fun to try to figure out.

Anyway, Arsenal is your typical low-budget gangster film, where there’s a lot of yelling and people getting shot and tortured and all the rest of the usual crap. There are thousands of these films and they tend to blend together into one tedious mass of pointless mass of sadism. One of the brothers gets kidnapped. The other one has to shoot a lot of people. Bleh. Boring. Outside of the people who need something to watch while at the Russian mafia sleepover, who cares? WAKE ME WHEN THE BULLETS HAVE STOPPED FLYING AND IT’S ALL OVER! But at least Cage and Cusack are around to keep things kind of interesting.

Previous Insomnia Files:

Embracing the Melodrama Part II #101: Harvard Man (dir by James Toback)

Posted on June 4, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

https://twitter.com/hrmonie/status/358515665419763713

Oh please, Harvard Man sucks.

I watched this 2002 film for one reason and one reason only. It stars Sarah Michelle Gellar and I used love Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In fact, now that I think about it, my love for Buffy the Vampire Slayer has led to me watching a lot of really bad movies. Seriously, somebody give Nichols Brendon a role in a good movie and do it now! I’m tired of reading about him getting arrested at conventions.

But anyway, in Harvard Man, Sarah plays Cindy Bandolini, a student at Harvard. Her father is a gangster and he’s played Gianni Russo, who is best known for playing Carlo Rizzi in The Godfather. Cindy is also dating the star of Harvard’s basketball team, Alan Jenson (Adrian Grenier). Cindy knows that Alan’s parents have just lost their farm to a tornado. She tells Alan that if he’ll throw an upcoming basketball game, her father will pay him $100,000. However, Mr. Bandolini isn’t really in on the deal. Instead, Cindy has set it up herself with the help of two of her father’s associates, Teddy (Eric Stoltz) and Teddy’s girlfriend, Kelly (Rebecca Gayheart).

But what Cindy doesn’t know is that both Teddy and Kelly work for the FBI. She also doesn’t know that Teddy and Kelly are engaging in threesomes with a philosophy professor, Chesney Cort (Joey Lauren Adams) and that Chesney is also having an affair with Alan.

Got all that?

Good. Of course, it doesn’t really make that much of a difference because Alan is such a passive character that you get the feeling that he really doesn’t care what happens one way or another. About halfway through the film, he takes a massive dose of LSD and he spends the rest of the film tripping while all of the various characters chase him across Boston.

And then Al Franken shows up, playing himself. As Alan wanders across campus, Al Franken walks up to him and says, “Hi, I’m Al Franken.” It turns out that the future senator is showing his daughter around Harvard and wants to ask Alan what the campus is like nowadays. As future President Franken speaks in his nasal tones, we get all sorts of fun distortion effects so, if you’ve ever wanted to see Al Franken with a big googly face, Harvard Man is the film for you. Al Franken’s scenes are, however, partially redeemed by the way that the actress playing his daughter rolls her eyes at her desperately uncool dad.

And, of course, while this is going on, we get random scenes of Joey Lauren Adams giving an endless lecture about ethics. Why, exactly? I imagine it has something to do with fooling critics like me and making us mistake Harvard Man for a movie with a brain.

Harvard Man is a pretentious mess of a film but it’s a fascinating example of what happens when every single role in a movie is miscast. Eric Stoltz and Rebecca Gayheart are the least believable FBI agents ever. You don’t believe for a second that short and scrawny Adrian Grenier could be a basketball star. Joey Lauren Adams comes across like she’d be lucky to teach at Greendale Community College, much less Harvard. Al Franken makes for a remarkably unconvincing Al Franken. And, as much as I loved her in Buffy, Cruel Intentions, and Ringer, I do have to say Sarah Michelle Geller is one of the least convincing Italians that I have ever seen on-screen.

Harvard Man is an incredibly bad film but at least you get to see Al Franken with a googly face,