Watching Slackers, I was appalled by the poverty of its imagination. There is even a scene where Ethan approaches a girl from behind, thinking she is Angela, and of course she turns around and it is not Angela, but a girl who wears braces and smiles at him so widely and for so long we can almost hear the assistant director instructing her to be sure the camera can see those braces.
But back to the dirt. There is a kind of one-upmanship now at work in Hollywood, inspired by the success of several gross-out comedies, to elevate smut into an art form. This is not an entirely futile endeavor; it can be done, and when it is done well, it can be funny. But most of the wannabes fail to understand one thing: It is funny when a character is offensive despite himself, but not funny when he is deliberately offensive. The classic “hair gel” scene involving Ben Stiller and Cameron Diaz in There’s Something About Mary was funny because neither one had the slightest idea what was going on.
Knowing that this movie will be block-booked into countless multiplexes, pitying the audiences that stumble into it, I want to stand in line with those kids and whisper the names of other movies now in release: Monster’s Ball, Black Hawk Down, Gosford Park, The Royal Tenenbaums, A Beautiful Mind, The Count of Monte Cristo. Or even Orange County, also about screwed-up college students, but in an intelligent and amusing way. There are a lot of good movies in theaters right now. Why waste two hours (which you can never get back) seeing a rotten one?
Sleepover
(DIRECTED BY JOE NUSSBAUM; STARRING ALEXA VEGA, MIKA BOOREM; 2004)
I take it as a rule of nature that all American high schools are ruled by a pack of snobs, led by a supremely confident young woman who is blond, superficial, catty, and ripe for public humiliation. This character is followed everywhere by two friends who worship her and are a little bit shorter. Those schools also contain a group of friends who are not popular and do not think of themselves as pretty, although they are smarter, funnier, and altogether more likable than the catty-pack.
In the classic form of this formula, the reigning blonde dates a hunk whom the mousy outcast has a crush on, and everything gets cleared up at the prom when the hunk realizes the mouse is the real beauty, while the evil nature of the popular girl is exposed in a sensationally embarrassing way.
Sleepover, a lame and labored comedy, doesn’t recycle this plot (the blonde gets dumped by her boyfriend) but works more as a series of riffs on the underlying themes. It moves the age group down a few years, so that the girls are all just entering high school. And it lowers the stakes—instead of competing for the football captain, the rivals enter into a struggle over desirable seating in the school’s outdoor lunchroom. Winners get the “popular” table, losers have to sit by the Dumpster. That a school would locate a lunch area next to the garbage doesn’t say much for its hygiene standards, but never mind.
Julie is the girl we’re supposed to like. She’s played by Alexa Vega, from Spy Kids. Staci (Sara Paxton) is the girl we’re supposed to hate. Julie’s posse includes Hannah (Mika Boorem), a good friend who is moving to Canada for no better reason, as far as I can tell, than to provide an attribute for a character with no other talking points; and Farrah (the wonderfully named Scout Taylor-Compton), who functions basically as an element useful to the cinematographer in composing groups of characters.
Julie decides to have a sleepover, and at the last minute invites poor Yancy (the also wonderfully named Kallie Flynn Childress), who is plump and self-conscious about her weight. Julie’s invitation is so condescending it’s a form of insult, something that doesn’t seem to occur to the grateful Yancy. Julie’s mom, the wonderfully named Gabby (Jane Lynch), lays down rules for the sleepover, all of which will be violated by the end of the evening without anything being noticed by her dad, Jay (Jeff Garlin), reinforcing the rule that the parents in teenage comedies would remain oblivious if their children moved the Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey Circus into their bedrooms.
Staci, the popular one, visits the slumber party to suggest a scavenger hunt, with the winner to get the desirable lunch table. So it’s up to the girls to sneak out of the house and snatch all the trophies, including of course the boxer shorts of the high school hunk. There is a tradition in which movie teenagers almost always have bedrooms with windows opening onto roofs, porches, trellises, etc., which function perfectly as escape routes when necessary, but collapse instantly (a) when used by an unpopular character or (b) when the risk of discovery and betrayal needs to be fabricated.
What happens during the scavenger hunt I will leave to you to discover, if you are so unwise as to attend this movie in a season when Mean Girls is still in theaters. One of the movie’s strangest scenes has Julie, who is about fourteen, sneaking into a bar because the scavenger hunt requires her to get a photo of herself being treated to a drink by a grownup. This scene is outrageous even if she orders a Shirley Temple, but is even weirder because the guy she chooses is a teacher from her junior high, who must live in a wonderland of his own since he obviously has no idea of the professional hazards involved in buying a drink in public for one of his barely pubescent students, and then posing for a photo so she will have proof.
I don’t require all high school (or junior high) comedies to involve smart, imaginative, articulate future leaders. But I am grateful when the movie at least devises something interesting for them to do, or expresses empathy with their real natures. The characters in Sleepover are shadows of shadows, diluted from countless better, even marginally better, movies. There was no reason to make this movie, and no reason to see it.
Snow Day
(DIRECTED BY CHRIS KOCH; STARRING MARK WEBBER, ZENA GREY; 2000)
Snow Day involves a very, very busy day in the life of an upstate New York teenager named Hal (Mark Webber), who is hopelessly in love with the unavailable school dreamboat, Claire (Emmanuelle Chriqui). He is, he believes, invisible to her, but that changes when a record snowfall forces the schools to close for a day, and gives him an opportunity to demonstrate what a unique and wonderful person he is—potentially, anyway.
The movie surrounds Hal with a large cast of supporting characters—too many probably for a two-hour movie, let alone this one that clocks at ninety minutes including end titles. There’s his dad (Chevy Chase), a weatherman who resents having to wear silly costumes; and his mom (Jean Smart), a woman whose career keeps her so busy that she doesn’t stop to smell the coffee or enjoy the snow.
And, let’s see, his kid sister, Natalie (Zena Grey), and his best female friend, Lane (Schuyler Fisk), and, of course Snowplow Man (Chris Elliott), whose hated plow clears the streets and thus makes it possible to go to school—not that these kids don’t wander all over town on the snow day. In a film top-heavy with plot and character, Snowplow Man should have been the first to go; played by Elliott as a clone of a Texas Chainsaw gang member, he is rumored to have made the snow chains for his tires out of the braces of the kids he’s run down.
The arc of the movie is familiar. Hal yearns for Claire and is advised on his campaign by Lane, the loyal gal pal who perhaps represents true love right there under his very nose, were he not too blind, of course, to see it. He has to struggle against a school wiseguy on a high-powered snowmobile, who claims Claire for his own, while his weatherman dad has to wear hula skirts on the air in a fight for ratings with the top-rated local weather jerk. There’s also a hated school principal and a square deejay at the ice rink (he likes Al Martino) and the programming executive (Pam Grier) who makes Chevy wear the silly costumes.