Year 16, Day 47 - 2/16/24 - Movie #4,648
BEFORE: If you look back one year in my blog, to Valentine's Week 2023 (oh, what an innocent time it was...) you may recall that i found TWO romance films that were all modern-day remakes of the classic "Cyrano de Bergerac" story - and then followed that up with the Peter Dinklage film "Cyrano" later in the Movie Year. Well, now I've found another re-telling of that tale, that means this one kind of slipped through the cracks, or I just wasn't aware of it last year, or I might have worked it in.
Also, you may remember last year, during Valentine's Week I had found FOUR films starring a very forgettable twenty-something non-star named Wolfgang Novogratz, and now I'm wondering whatever happened to that guy. I haven't seen him in a film since, so did he get the career advice to change his name, rejected that advice, and suffered career suicide as a result? Or did he stop getting roles when he no longer could pass for an 18-year old high school student? The world may never know. But James Franco - he knew that he needed to change his name to something snappy, that was good advice - his career is still going strong, isn't it?
Shane West carries over from "A Walk to Remember".
THE PLOT: A modern-day remake of the Cyrano DeBergerac tale.
AFTER: Oh, God, PLEASE let this be the last film I ever have to watch that follows the "Cyrano" formula, because this film from 2000 didn't even do it well. In order to get Ryan to help Chris win over the heart of his best friend Maggie, they had to come up with some way for him to "speak for" jock Ryan, so Chris had to have a phone with multiple lines, that phone had to malfunction in order to create a sort of three-way calling, and honestly, the scene was already complicated ENOUGH when Ryan was calling both Maggie and Chris at the same time. What's that feature when you can put one person on hold while you talk to the other one? Call waiting? Does anybody still use that? By all means, let's just change the way that phones work so that this scene in our movie is easier to write - you can't DO that!
Then Ryan just happens to be some kind of recording engineering genius, and he's able to filter the call through his sound board, and he knows EXACTLY which dials to turn and how much, to change the frequency and make his voice sound more like James Franco's. Gimme a god damned break! What high-school kid is also a sound engineer and understands what EVERY single button on the panel does to his voice? It doesn't make one bit of sense, and all this to avoid the typical "Cyrano" scene where one person is speaking to his heart's desire from afar, and the real poet is concealed nearby and feeding him lines. Again, this film came out in 2000, before texting was a thing, and I think in one of the other "Cyrano" updates, maybe "The Half of It", people just impersonated each other in texts, that really was much easier.
Please, Hollywood, no more remakes of "Cyrano", it's really really played out.
This was also clearly written before there was such a thing as "being P.C." because this is in many ways a rude sex comedy masquerading as a high-school love story. You could NOT make a film like this today, people would boycott it for being insensitive to women, gays, jocks and geeks. Again, stereotypes are real time-savers for screenwriters, they can just say "that guy plays the accordion" or "that guy programs computers" and then all the things related to music geeks and computer geeks can just be piled on top of that. The geeky guys get together here and strike out with the women, as you might expect, but remember, that's also how the Columbine shootings happened. Nine kids in Colorado got together and were upset that they didn't have any friends, so they took it out on their classmates - but there were NINE of them, why couldn't they just be friends with each other and be happy with that?
Ryan's the music geek and he drives to school each day with his best friend and neighbor, Maggie. They share everything and their bedroom balconies are practically adjoining to each other, but they don't consider each other to be ideal romantic partners for some unknown reason. Ah, ah, don't mentally skip ahead to the end of the film here, I know it's tempting, we're going to get there, as obvious as it is, so if you THINK you know what the ending is going to be, well, yeah, you're probably right. But first they have to date other people, let's say for comparative purposes - also remember, they're such close friends that it would almost be like a brother and sister dating. OK, let's let them date other people so they can then realize that the love of their life was standing right next to them from the start. You gotta walk before you can run, I guess.
Ryan and Chris meet because on the same day, they both paid the school janitor $20 to let them into the girls' locker room so they could watch the girls showering after a swimming class. Ryan just wants to see Ashley naked, I mean, come on, what's the harm, everybody's naked at least twice a day, right? Ugh, why is this always the "go to" in teen sex comedies, to be able to watch girls showering? I'll bet the number of times anyone actually did this in high school during the 1980's and 1990's is much lower than the number of times characters in teen sex comedies did this during the same two decades. It's creepy, right? And very un-P.C., because it just treats women as random sex objects and it's a total invasion of their privacy. But back then they didn't have the internet, now you can just do a Google search and you can watch all the women showering that you want, or doing just about anything you can imagine, for free. I guess if you want to see SPECIFIC women showering then you have to pay for OnlyFans, but to random naked women or ones from teen sex comedies, it's free.
Ryan wants to date Ashley, the hottest "mean girl" in school, who would never give him the time of day, BUT her cousin is Chris, who wants to get with Maggie because she's apparently the one girl in school that he hasn't slept with. He's just in it for the challenge, but Chris and Ryan hatch a plan - Chris will recommend to his cousin Ashley that she consider dating Ryan, while Ryan will sell Maggie on the concept of dating Chris. What could POSSIBLY go wrong? Well, a lot, because the film is called "Whatever it Takes", and apparently it takes pimping out your cousin or your best friend to someone else in order to have sex with the girl you want to have sex with. Yeah, that's so not cool and very un-P.C. - but again, it was a different time and a different millennium. (YES, 2000 was NOT the first year of the third millennium, it was the last year of the second millennium, I stand by this. Look it up if you don't believe me.)
Hold on, because it gets worse. Chris' advice to Ryan on how to win the heart of Ashley includes insulting her, telling her that her hair looks terrible, or her clothes look ugly, and also generally being mean to her, like pushing her into the swimming pool at a party. Because, well, at least she'll notice him now, and girls like dating a-holes for some reason, so logically if he acts like an a-hole to her, she'll be desperate for his attention. This should be terrible advice, but it also WORKS on her, so I guess she's more insecure and filled with self-loathing than anyone else realizes. Meanwhile Ryan convinces Maggie to go on a double date, so all four go to the local carnival and Chris tries to win over Maggie by playing those rigged skill games on the fairway, while Ryan goes on the rides with Ashley and she vomits all over him. Good times?
But they've managed to lay the groundwork for prom, and could there really be anything more important than that? Apparently everyone has the same idea and goes to the same hotel on prom night, and the high school has managed to book the entire fourth floor so that all the high school students can have sex in the hallway. Wait, what? Ashley drags Ryan into a room, but by this point he's realized his mistake and decides that (say it with me, now) Maggie was the better choice for him, and love was so close to him that he couldn't see it. But now he has to stop Maggie from having sex with Chris. Don't worry, mate, she's one step ahead of you, she's already tying up Chris and making him wear a blindfold so other people can draw rude things on him and slut-shame him. Meanwhile Ryan takes the key to the hotel room where Ashley is waiting for him and throws it on the floor, so random strangers can just go in and have sex with her. See, everybody wins this way, and these solutions aren't problematic at all!
What's even worse than ripping off "Porky's" with the shower stuff is ripping off "It's a Wonderful Life", because when the prom comes around Floyd, the prankster, has decided that before the big announcement of who was elected Prom King and Queen, he's going to pull the switch that retracts the dance floor so that everyone will fall into the pool below. Yeah, a couple of things here, besides the fact that someone stole this plot point from a film from 1946. First off, I don't think many modern-day high schools have giant retractable floors that cover the pool and turn the gym into a dance hall. Perhaps the screenwriter went to one of the TWO high schools in the country that had this feature, as problematic as it sounds, and so he assumed that EVERY high school has a retractable floor that covers the swimming pool, and they just don't. Also, we SAW the pool earlier in the film, and it's just a regular pool in a pool building, no retractable floor - does this high school have a SECOND pool under the dance floor that they haven't used in the last 50 years?
Once again, I'm reminded that high-school films are written and directed by adults, who simply do not remember how high school works. OR they DO remember what THEIR high-school experience was like, and they assume that everyone had a similar experience, which they did not. For example, most high school nurses (Ryan's mom in this case) don't have giant models of penises that they show to the class when they're instructing them how to put a condom on to practice safe sex. If some high-school nurse in America showed the entire student body a 5-foot penis during a demonstration in the auditorium, there would be picket lines outside the school and that nurse would lose her job for showing teens exactly what a penis looks like. Right?
The whole thing with Virgil Doolittle, who was the legendary prankster who attended the school years ago - it also makes no sense, but I can't even be bothered to get into exactly why. Instead of focusing on plot points that had any basis in reality, this film chose instead to just have vomit gags and baseballs hitting people in the crotch. It's anything but classy.
Also starring James Franco (last seen in "City by the Sea"), Jodi Lyn O'Keefe (last seen in "She's All That"), Marla Sokoloff, Julia Sweeney (last seen in "Gremlins 2: The New Batch"), Aaron Paul (last seen in "Come and Find Me"), Colin Hanks (last seen in "How It Ends"), Kip Pardue (last seen in "The Rules of Attraction"), Manu Intiraymi (last seen in "Orange County"), David Koechner (last seen in "Hit and Run"), Richard Schiff (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Kevin Ruf (last seen in "Eulogy"), Scott Vickaryous, Eric Kushnick, Nicole Tarantini, Christine Lakin (last seen in "You Again"), Shyla Marlin, Vanessa Evigan, Romy Rosemont (last seen in "Lovely & Amazing"), Rachel Kaber, Joe Gleb, Ty Granderson Jones (last seen in "Con Air"), Mason Lucero (last seen in "The Sweetest Thing"), Mami Nakamura, with a cameo from Nick Cannon (last seen in "The Misfits") and archive footage of Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman.
RATING: 3 out of 10 toothless carnies
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