Guilty Pleasure No. 29: On The Line (dir by Eric Bross)

Posted on April 2, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last night, as I watched Dead 7, I could not help but think about the 2001 film, On The Line. Don’t get me wrong, On The Line does not feature any zombies and there’s next to no violence. However, much like Dead 7, it does feature quite a few boy banders. In fact, with the exception of JC Chasez, every member of *NSYNC makes an appearance in On The Line. Lance Bass stars in the movie. Joey Fatone plays his best friend. Finally, at the end of the film, in a scene that is so homophobic that it practically screams 2001, Justin Timberlake and Chris Kirkpatrick show up as a flamboyant makeup artist and an even more flamboyant hairstylist.

Lance plays Kevin, a shy and somewhat nerdy advertising exec who lives in Chicago. Kevin falls in love easily but he’s always been too shy to have a serious relationship. One day, Kevin is returning home from work on the train when he starts talking to Abbey (Emanuelle Chriqui). It turns out that they both love the Chicago Cubs and Al Green! (Oh my God! Who would have guessed that two people living in Chicago would both love the local sports team!?) It also turns out that both Kevin and Abbey can name all the Presidents in order! Obviously, they are meant to be! The universe arranged for them to both be on the train at the same time so that they can get married, have children, and discuss the presidency of Rutherford Hayes while watching the Cubs and listening to Al Green.

Unfortunately, despite being a single guy who has just totally hit it off with a single girl who is obviously attracted to him, Kevin forgets to get her phone number. The movie explains this by saying that Kevin is shy but if he’s so shy that he can’t even give out his phone number then how did he ever find the courage to tell Abbey that he loves Al Green in the first place?

(Actually, Abbey isn’t really single but her fiancée is such a jerk that she might as well be. Anyone who has ever seen a movie knows that Abbey is not meant to marry a guy who spends all of his time on the phone, yelling, “Sell! Sell!”)

Of course, if Kevin had gotten her phone number, there wouldn’t have been a movie. So, instead, he recruits his loser friends (including Joey Fatone) to help him track down Abbey. He puts up flyers all over Chicago. A story about him appears in the newspaper. Soon, the entire city is obsessed with whether or not Kevin will find this girl that he talked to for ten minutes. However, Abbey apparently never watches TV or reads the newspaper because somehow, she doesn’t know all of this is going on…

There’s an interesting subtext to On The Line. Lance Bass himself produced the film. Five years after On The Line flopped at the box office, Lance officially came out as gay (and, it must be said, that whenever Kevin talks to Abbey, he comes across less like a future lover and more like every girl’s ideal gay best friend). Lance has said that he was still deeply closeted when he made On The Line and there are times when the film seems to be almost desperate to convince us of Kevin’s (and, by association, Lance’s) heterosexuality. In this context, that end credits scene with Chris and Justin, limp-wristed and speaking in exaggerated falsetto, is even ickier. “Gay?” the film says to be saying, “If there was a gay person in On The Line, would Justin Timberlake be playing a makeup artist? Would Chris Kirkpatrick be willing to appear as a hairdresser named Angelo?”

On The Line is not a particularly good film and yet, oddly, it’s one that I always find myself watching whenever I come across it on cable. Lance may be miscast and he’s obviously uncomfortable in the majority of his scenes but he’s also likable. You never believe for a second that Kevin and Abbey will last as a couple but Lance seems like a nice guy and Emmanuelle Chriqui is so pretty that you’re happy that they at least got to go on a date or two before breaking up and never seeing each other again. They’re both pretty and it’s fun to watch pretty people talk to each other, even if they do lack a certain romantic chemistry. As well, though his character is pretty obnoxious, Joey Fatone is still always fun to watch.

On The Line is no Dead 7 but it’s still watchable in its own stupid way. I would suggest, however, skipping the end credits

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Shattered Politics #64: Dick (dir by Andrew Fleming)

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I wouldn’t necessarily say that I love Dick but I still think it’s a pretty good film. (Ha ha, see what I did there?) Of course, to really appreciate this 1999 comedy, it helps to know a little something about political history. For instance, it helps to know that the Dick of the title is President Richard Nixon (played here by a hilariously paranoid Dan Hedaya). In 1973, as the result of his attempt to cover up White House involvement of a burglary at the Watergate Hotel, Nixon became the first President to resign from office.

A lot of the credit for Nixon’s downfall was given to two reporters for the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (played, in this film, by Will Ferrell and Bruce McCulloch). While Woodward and Bernstein investigated the Watergate break-in, they were reportedly fed information by a highly placed informant who was referred to as being Deep Throat. For years, the identity of Deep Throat was a closely held secret. Countless books were written that speculated as to who Deep Throat may have been. (In the film All The President’s Men, he was played by Hal Holbrook.) Finally, in 2005, it was revealed that Deep Throat was a FBI agent named Mark W. Felt, who was upset because he was passed over for a promotion.

And, quite frankly, that’s kind of a disappointing solution. When you think about someone who brought down the government, you hope that he or she will turn out to be something more than just a disgruntled employee whose previous work consisted on running counter intelligence operations against domestic political activists.

In fact, it’s hard not to wish that, perhaps, Deep Throat could have been two 15 year-old girls who just happened to stumble across one of the biggest political scandals in American history.

Well, fortunately, this is the theory proposed in Dick. Betsy (Kirsten Dunst) and Arlene (Michelle Williams) are two friends who, one night in 1972, sneak out of Arlene’s apartment so that they can mail a fan letter to singer Bobby Sherman. While doing so, they happen to stumble across the Watergate burglars and get a good look at White House aide G. Gordon Liddy (Harry Shearer).

The next day, while on a field trip to the White House, the two girls are spotted by Liddy. Liddy arranges for them to be pulled to the side and questioned by chief-of-staff H.R. Haldeman (Dave Foley), who determines that the girls barely know who Nixon is and that they don’t understand what they witnessed. However, before Haldeman can send the girls on their way, Nixon himself enters the office and complains about how poorly planned the break-in was.

This leads to an unlikely relationship between Nixon and Betsy and Arlene. Hoping to win their loyalty (and their silence), Nixon arranges for them to be his official dog walkers. Betsy and Arlene, meanwhile, still don’t have the slightest idea of what’s going on. They accidentally bring pot cookies to the White House (which Nixon particularly enjoys) and Arlene even develops a mad crush on Nixon.

But, of course, Nixon eventually shows his true colors and Betsy and Arlene take down the government….

In many ways Dick is a one-joke film, in which Betsy and Arlene regularly find themselves blissfully unaware while history literally unfolds around them. But it’s actually a pretty clever joke and it’s also a very plausible one. People are often unaware that anything important is happening when it’s actually happening. Often times, it’s only in retrospect that historical moments are seen to be truly historical. And, ultimately, Watergate itself is such a bizarre scandal that it’s the perfect moment in history to be reinterpreted as a comedy.

Dick is ridiculous enough to be funny but plausible enough to be memorable.

Ghosts of Christmas Past #14: Dave Foley’s The True Meaning of Christmas Specials

Posted on December 14, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I came across tonight’s Ghost of Christmas Past while I was doing a search on Christmas specials that have been posted to YouTube. Apparently, this is a Canadian show that aired way back in 2002.

And, watching it, I could really tell that was the truth. This show is not only very Canadian but it’s very 2002 and as well. Fortunately, while I can pretty much do without 2002, I happen to love Canada.

Dying Is Easy, Comedy is Hard: Freeloaders (dir by Dan Rosen)

Posted on September 4, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Supposedly, the great comedic character actor Edmund Gwenn once said, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”

I have to agree because I’ve seen a lot of comedies in 2013. A few of them — like This Is The End and The World’s End — have worked. However, the majority of them have not only been bad but they’ve been so bad that they’ve invited audiences to wonder if comedy is a dying art form. For every genuinely clever comedy, it seems like we’ve had to sit through a dozen Movie 43s. These are movies where genuinely funny people get together and proceed to prove that they can be just as unfunny as the obnoxious cousin that everyone avoids at the family reunion.

Case in point: Freeloaders.

Even Movie 43 made me laugh once. That’s one laugh more than I got out of Freeloaders. Freeloaders is quite possibly the least funny comedy that I’ve ever seen. Freeloaders almost feels like a social experiment, a test to see what would happen if an audience, expecting to see a silly and crude comedy, instead found themselves trapped in a laugh-repellent environment for 80 minutes.

Freeloaders tells the story of a group of stereotypes who have spent the last six years living in a mansion owned by “rock star” Adam Duritz. It turns out that one of them is a childhood friend of Duritz’s and, since Duritz has been out touring for the past decade, he’s allowed his friends to occupy his home rent-free. However, Duritz is getting married and planning on moving to New York City and, as a result, he’s selling his mansion. The freeloaders are told that they have a week to get out of the mansion. Well, since everyone in this film is basically a total and complete dumbass, nobody can figure out how to rent an apartment. So, instead, they come up with some painfully wacky schemes to raise the money to buy the mansion themselves. Standing in their way is Adam’s real estate agent who …. well, it’s never really all that clear why she’s standing in their way. Presumably, it’s because there wouldn’t be a film unless she was standing in their way and then we would have all missed out on the chance to watch Freeloaders.

Why doesn’t Freeloaders work?

Well, let’s start by considering the fact that Adam Duritz plays himself. I actually had to go on Wikipedia to remind myself who Adam Duritz is and I discovered that he’ was apparently a big deal back in the 90s and that he’s responsible for that painfully annoying cover of Big Yellow Taxi that was playing everywhere back in the summer of 2003. Unfortunately, as both an actor and as a “fictional” character, Adam Duritz is so bland that his character serves mostly as a distraction. The use of a real celebrity (if Adam Duritz can legitimately be called a celebrity) should have provided the filmmakers with a lot of comedic opportunity but that opportunity is pretty much wasted because Freeloaders seems to be obsessed with letting us know that Adam Duritz is a really great guy.

(That might be because Adam Duritz was one of the film’s producers.)

While I doubt that Adam Duritz has ever been a funny guy, Freeloaders is filled with other actors who have proven themselves to be funny in the past. I, for one, was excited to see the name Nat Faxon in the opening credits because, while he might not be a household name, anyone who has ever seen Nat Faxon in a movie knows just how funny he can be. However, both Mr. Faxon and the rest of cast struggle with the fact that they’re playing a collection of one-dimensional stereotypes. Everyone has one overly defining, predictable trait to help us keep them straight. There’s the nice guy, the stoner, the womanizer, the nice girl, the hoodlum, and the girl who will inspire some in the audience to say, “Is that Olivia Munn?,” largely because she is Olivia Munn. Since they’re never allowed to become individual characters, all of their attempts at humor fall painfully flat. It doesn’t help that director Dan Rosen directs without any hint of timing or originality.

Freeloaders was produced by Broken Lizard, the comedy troupe that’s developed a large cult following as the result of films like Super Troopers and Club Dread. However, the members of Broken Lizard did not write or direct the film and they only appear in a rather brief cameo where they parody Boogie Nights.

The Boogie Nights parody is actually fairly clever but it also highlights this film’s biggest problem. Freeloaders was originally filmed in 2009 and then sat on the shelf until it finally got a very limited theatrical release earlier this year. (Perhaps that’s why one of the film’s characters worries about getting sent to Iraq if he joins the army.) However, the script feels like it was written back in the 90s. Everything from the premise of slacker stoners being forced to raise money to Adam Duritz being described as a world-famous star to Broken Lizard parodying a film that came out in 1997 serves to make this film feel as if it was made about 14 years too late.

I love a good comedy but, by that same regard, there’s nothing a i hate more than a really bad comedy. However, as a film lover, I will always be willing to take chance on comedy. Comedy may be hard but the rewards are great.

Sometimes, you end up with something really special.

Sometimes, you just end up with Freeloaders.