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Reviews
100 Girls (2000)
The Girl With a Curl (SPOILERS)
100 GIRLS ** (out of four)
There was a little girl, Who had a little curl, Right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, She was very, very good, But when she was bad, she was horrid.
So goes the old nursery rhyme. This movie is uneven; when it's working, it's really working. But when something about it, be it the portrayal of characters, the acting, the directing, is not working, it is so extraordinarily awful that to endure those missteps are a test of the viewer's will.
The movie is about a college freshman named Matthew (Davis), who after years of failed romantic exploits, manages to make a spiritual (and carnal) connection with a girl in an elevator while a blackout occurs in the dorm. He wakes up the next morning to find that the power has been restored, but the girl, and her laundry she was hauling around, is long gone, save for the pair of panties she took off in preparation for sex. We don't see who she is, and Matthew doesn't know either (he didn't even bother to get her name), but She Is The One, which means that the movie is building towards a payoff scene in which we discover the mystery girl's identity, and our hero does/does not get the girl.
Since Matthew is so enamored with the girl, the remainder of the movie is about how he tries to figure out who she is. He meets up with a lot of different women, most of which could be the girl, some of which can be ruled out immediately, and all the while he makes statements and observations about how men and women view themselves and each other, based on his own life experiences. When Matthew goes on one of his diatribes, the camera follows him into his frame of reference-for example, in recalling his childhood in which his mother relentlessly spanked him with a wooden spoon, we see Little Matthew, bent over the bed, his mother pounding away with all the steadfast determination of Iron Henry.
I wasn't quite sure what to make of this movie when I first saw it. It made a good first impression on me. I laughed. I agreed with some of the points made by Matthew. I enjoyed how when Matthew told a story, we saw it through his eyes. The plot was by and large predictable, but it worked nevertheless, most of the lines were solid, and James DeBello (who was the only actor I recognized from other projects), made me laugh as Matthew's roommate, Rod, a man who is obsessed with the strength and efficacy of his penis and his own masculinity. Maybe.
But other aspects of the movie are so wrong-headed that it keeps me from recommending it. Davis has more skill at writing than directing; at least that was my inference from watching this movie. Like Kevin Smith, he chooses to shoot scenes by arranging his actors, and letting the camera capture their interaction. That is also when his direction is at his best. However, a scene requiring a lot of movement in which Matthew and one of the girls he befriends is chased up a long flight of stairs by the girl's controlling ex-boyfriend, Crick (Johnny Green), is inappropriately dark and ponderous; starkly contrasting the rest of the film's light feel. Or how about another series of scenes in which Matthew dresses in drag to infiltrate the college sorority, and in spite of the fact that he doesn't look like a girl, everyone falls for the ruse anyway, including Rod? Or consider the speech he makes near the end-his attempt to woo the mystery girl (who he still doesn't know at this point) is so clichéd and contrived that to hear it makes me uncomfortable. This is a scene where the writing must work, and it fails. As for the soundtrack, the low-rent pop/ska tunes are all pretty decent, but when Kevin Bassinson's horrible score takes over, the viewer is distracted.
Is this a bad movie? Not necessarily. I've seen (and reviewed) worse. I'm not recommending that you see it, however. But what star rating to give it?
Well, you know what? Since this movie couldn't seem to find any kind of balance, be it with acting, style, pacing, wit, or music, it pleases me to bestow upon "100 Girls" its first median: a lukewarm review. Two stars! NEXT! --K.H.
Senior Trip (1995)
What an awful movie (0/4 stars)
Usually, a big indicator that a movie is worth seeing is if Ebert and his partner (Siskel, as it was in 1995) give it "two thumbs up". Most of the time, any studio that releases the movie that gets two thumbs up will rush to print the accolade on the box of the movie when it is released to video. But if it DOESN'T get two thumbs up, there's no need to worry because there is bound to be somebody who has something good to say about a movie.
I mention this because when I rented this movie a long time ago, not one review graced the cover of this train wreck. Not one. I would soon discover why.
when I watched this movie I was 15 years old, so you figure I was part of this movie's target audience. But I can tell you, as a 15-year old kid, I didn't laugh at all. The movie was totally, utterly unfunny.
The story follows a bunch of high school seniors who embark on a trip to Washington, D.C. A grab-bag of mindless high school stereotypes (handsome rebellious guy, anti-social guy, disgusting fat moron, smart goody-two shoes, computer nerd, promiscuous outcast) get thrown into detention and are assigned to write an essay, which will be sent to Washington, explaining the faults in the modern American education system. The smart goody two shoes, Miss Tracy Milford (Valerie Mahaffey) is the only one who actually writes a paper, and wouldn't you know, the President reads it and loves it. Enter the senior trip.
I hoped that at least things would get funny here, as road trip movies usually involve unusual situations/characters. It's cliche, but who cares if it's done well, right? Well, it's not done well here. Kevin McDonald, the only person in this movie I recognized from other projects (aside from Tommy Chong in an amazingly humor-devoid role as the bus driver who is a raging drug addict) plays a weird Star Trek-obsessed crossing guard, who has a personal vendetta against one of the seniors, and chases the group to D.C. Don't ask.
After a series of stupid and endless scenes, we finally end up in D.C., where the President finds out that the group of kids aren't the scholars he thought that they were. This leads to a mercilessly banal, sappy speech from the seniors about how it's too late for them, but not for tomorrow's children, or something smiliar. I can believe that one could be convinced that public education is in bad shape by parading these kids around, but I can't believe that the response solicited from such a display would be the ever popular 'slow clap', started by the President himself. After that, the movie somehow ends, but not soon enough.
I identified with none of the characters portrayed in the movie. Even Tracy Milford, who at one point looked like she was above the rest of the crew, totally betrayed me when it was revealed that she had feelings for Mark "Dags" D'Agastino (Jeremy Remner, the "star" of the movie), a punk that no girl of intelligence or ambition could ever find attractive. While most teen comedies have outlandish characters, there is always at least a grain of truth to them. I was spoon-fed a series of what looked like an out-of-touch writer's uneducated guess of what they thought high school kids were. So awful was this movie that some seven years after viewing it I can still recall it well enough to review it. Most bad movies I hope to never see again. This is the kind of bad movie I hope to repress.
National Lampoon's Senior Trip: Zero stars (out of four)