|
|
||
|
|
40 DAYS AND 40 NIGHTS - A One Gag Joke That Doesn't Take 2 Hours to Figure Out by: Rachel Deahl Review Film Critic From the booming Dot Com its hero works at to the image of San Francisco as a playground for women who just leapt from the pages of last month's Playboy, everything in 40 Days and 40 Nights feels out of place. Billed as a sex comedy without the sex, this Josh Hartnett vehicle from Miramax is hinged on a single joke that wouldn't keep the laugh track of a half-hour sitcom running. After all, even the gang from Friends knows that one dick joke is enough. Hartnett stars as Matt Sullivan, a handsome, sweet web designer who's still languishing after being dumped by his beautiful, but bitchy, ex, Nicole (Vanessa Shaw). Six months after the break-up, Matt still can't get his mind off Nicole. Although he's meeting, and bedding, plenty of women, he can't help but feel as if he's falling into a black hole-most notably he's haunted by the image of his ceiling cracking above him. So, in an effort to kill his inner demons, Matt seizes on an unusual, and slightly crazy, plan. Constantly seeking advice from his older brother, John (Adam Trese), who's a seminarian on his way to becoming a priest, Matt decides to give up sex, and all its forms (which extends to touching, kissing and masturbating) for Lent. Taking a vow to give up the thing most dear to him, Matt hopes to get his mind back in gear and his life back to normal-so he thinks anyway. But, the best plans are laid to waste. When Matt's horny roommate, Ryan (Paulo Costanzo), hears about his buddy's scheme, he spreads the word to Matt's co-workers who quickly put together an office pool. Complicating matters even further though, is Erica (Shannyan Sossamon). A beautiful and spunky girl he meets at the laundry mat one night, Matt immediately falls for Erica, but their coupling is obviously compromised by his vow. Setting Matt up as, well as Billy Corgan put it "a rat in a cage," 40 Days works off a repeated carrot motif, constantly dangling temptation in the face of its hot-blooded American male. And, as the days tick by (the film actually notes each passing day), the rat becomes more and more unwound. Looking like a junky needing a fix, Hartnett grows pale, gets bags under his eyes and begins to twitch as his celibacy stretch lengthens. The low point comes when, in a dream, he sees himself soaring over clouds made out of breasts. The annoying roommate (and Costanzo is particularly grating as a mean-spirited foil who dresses like Ricky Martin and talks like Stifler) and the office geeks combine for a disappointing peanut gallery. From the boys who spike his drink with Viagra to the girls who make out in front of him, everyone has a plan to make Matt take the dive on their day. Like the jokes that constantly miss their mark, 40 Days never answers the seminal question its hero asks: what's the point of all this? The stupidity and uselessness of Matt's vow is apparent from the get-go, and while he may need 40 days to figure it out, an audience doesn't need two hours to do the same. DRAGONFLY Click for the official site If you haven't gotten your quota of hokey stories about communicating with loved ones beyond the grave from TV's Crossing Over; you can run out to the local multiplex and get your fix with Dragonfly. Like the fiendishly farcical one-hour show hosted by the cocky psychic John Edward, Dragonfly repeatedly attempts to hide its silly baseline in veils of science and practicality; needless to say it fails miserably. An ever saggier and more wrinkled Kevin Costner stars as Joe Darrow, an ER doc who's just lost his pregnant wife in a tragic bus accident in South America. Doing Mother Theresa like doctoring for the Red Cross in foreign environs, Joe goes after Emily (Susanna Thompson who plays the uptight Karen Sammler on Once and Again) only to discover the accident has left no survivors and no bodies. Returning to his large, empty house in an upper-crust burb of Chicago, Joe tries in vain to get back to his routine. He thrusts himself into his work, much to the dismay of friends and colleagues who urge that Joe take time off to grieve. Disregarding the warnings, Joe becomes haunted by the suspicion that his wife is trying to contact him. Following up on Emily's request that he check up on her patients (she was a pediatric oncologist), Joe begins to receive odd messages from the tots about his wife. The kids draw strange diagrams and indicate that Emily is trying to get in touch with him. And, finally, after speaking with a nun (Linda Hunt) who was doing controversial work about near death experiences on the children's ward at the hospital, Joe becomes convinced that the strange-goings on aren't the stirrings of a grief-stricken mind but something more palpable: contact. The spooky messages drive Joe back to the scene of Emily's death in the hope that he can find the answer to she seems to be beckoning him to uncover. Aside from its uninventive premise, Dragonfly never manages to work up its ghostly wares to anything memorable. A paperweight falls off a nightstand; the wind rustles the door open, mysterious writing appears on a fogged-up window, yawn. If the writers weren't going to bother to come up with a moderately new storyline it seems as if they might have tried to make their ghost do some fun spooking, but no such luck here. Unable to even classify as a diversion, the only thing scary about Dragonfly is the fact that it's haunting theaters. |
|
|
|
Enable frames | |
|
home | out/about | events | personal | store | classified | real estate | forums | archives | contact |
||
