Their absolute inability to pass as women leads to another curiosity about the movie, which is that all of the other characters are obviously mentally impaired. How else to explain fraternity brothers who don’t recognize their own friends in drag? Sorority sisters who think these are real women and want to pledge them on first sight? A father who doesn’t realize that’s his own son he’s trying to pick up?
I know. I’m being too literal. I should be a good sport and go along with the joke. But the joke is not funny. The movie is not funny. If it’s this easy to get a screenplay filmed in Hollywood, why did they bother with that Project Greenlight contest? Why not ship all the entries directly to Larry Brezner and Walter Hamada, the producers of Sorority Boys, who must wear Santa suits to work?
The plot begins with three members of Kappa Omicron Kappa fraternity, who are thrown out of the KOK house for allegedly stealing party funds. Homeless and forlorn, they decide to pledge the Delta Omicron Gamma house after learning that the DOGs need new members. Dave (Barry Watson) becomes Daisy and is soon feeling chemistry with the DOG president, Leah (Melisa Sagemiller), who is supposed to be an intellectual feminist but can shower nude with him and not catch on he’s a man.
Harland Williams and Michael Rosenbaum play the other two fugitive KOKs—roles that, should they become stars, will be invaluable as a source of clips at roasts in their honor. Among the DOGs is the invaluable Heather Matarazzo, who now has a lock on the geeky plain girl roles, even though she is in actual fact sweet and pretty. Just as Latina actresses have risen up in arms against Jennifer Connelly for taking the role of John Forbes Nash’s El Salvadoran wife in A Beautiful Mind, so ugly girls should picket Heather Matarazzo.
Because the intelligence level of the characters must be low, very low, very very low, for the masquerade to work, the movie contains no wit, only labored gags involving falsies, lipstick, unruly erections, and straight guys who don’t realize they’re trying to pick up a man. (I imagine yokels in the audience responding with the Gradually Gathering Guffaw as they catch on. “Hey, Jethro! He don’t know she’s a guy! Haw! Haw! Haw!”) The entire movie, times ten lacks the humor of a single line in the Bob Gibson/Shel Silverstein song “Mendocino Desperados.” (“She was a he, but what the hell, honey/ Since you’ve already got my money …”)
I’m curious about who would go to see this movie. Obviously moviegoers with a low opinion of their own taste. It’s so obviously what it is that you would require a positive desire to throw away money in order to lose two hours of your life. Sorority Boys will be the worst movie playing in any multiplex in America this weekend, and, yes, I realize Crossroads is still out there.
Stealing Harvard
(DIRECTED BY BRUCE MCCULLOCH; STARRING JASON LEE, TOM GREEN; 2002)
The laugh in Stealing Harvard comes early, when we see the name of the company where the hero works. It’s a home health care corporation named Homespital. That made me laugh. It made me smile again when the name turned up later. And on the laugh meter, that’s about it. This is as lax and limp a comedy as I’ve seen in a while, a meander through worn-out material.
Jason Lee, who can be engaging in the right material (like Chasing Amy and Almost Famous), is bland and disposable here, as John Plummer, a young Homespital executive. The firm is owned by his fiancée’s father (Dennis Farina), who subjects John to savage cross-examinations on whether he has slept with his daughter. He lies and says he hasn’t. He might be telling the truth if he said he wishes he hadn’t, since the fiancée, Elaine (Leslie Mann), inexplicably weeps during sex.
Despite his foray into the middle classes, John has not forgotten his super-slut sister Patty (Megan Mullally), who despite a life of untiring promiscuity has a daughter, Noreen (Tammy Blanchard), who has been accepted by Harvard. Carefully preserved home videos show John promising to help with her tuition, and as it happens Noreen needs $29,000—almost exactly the amount Elaine has insisted John have in the bank before she will marry him.
Crime is obviously the way to raise the money, according to John’s best pal, Duff (Tom Green), who suggests a break-in at a house where the safe seems to stand open. The owner is, alas, at home, and there is a painfully unfunny sequence in which he forces John to dress in drag and “spoon” to remind him of his late wife. There’s another botched robbery in which John and Duff, wearing ski masks, argue over which one gets to call himself Kyle, and so on.
Seeing Tom Green reminded me, how could it not, of his movie Freddy Got Fingered (2001), which was so poorly received by film critics that it received only one lonely, apologetic positive review on the Tomatometer. I gave it—let’s see—no stars. Bad movie, especially the scene where Green was whirling the newborn infant around his head by its umbilical cord.
But the thing is, I remember Freddy Got Fingered more than a year later. I refer to it sometimes. It is a milestone. And for all its sins it was at least an ambitious movie, a go-for-broke attempt to accomplish something. It failed, but it has not left me convinced that Tom Green doesn’t have good work in him. Anyone with his nerve and total lack of taste is sooner or later going to make a movie worth seeing.
Stealing Harvard, on the other hand, is a singularly unambitious product, content to paddle lazily in the shallows of sitcom formula. It has no edge, no hunger to be better than it is. It ambles pleasantly through its inanity, like a guest happy to be at a boring party. When you think of some of the weird stuff Jason Lee and Tom Green have been in over the years, you wonder what they did to amuse themselves during the filming.
Stealth
(DIRECTED BY ROB COHEN; STARRING JOSH LUCAS, JESSICA BIEL; 2005)
Stealth is an offense against taste, intelligence, and the noise pollution code—a dumbed-down Top Gun crossed with the HAL 9000 plot from 2001. It might be of interest to you if you want to see lots of jet airplanes going real fast and making a lot of noise and if you don’t care that the story doesn’t merely defy logic, but strips logic bare, cremates it, and scatters its ashes. Here is a movie with the nerve to discuss a computer brain “like a quantum sponge” while violating Newton’s laws of motion.
The plot: Navy fliers have been chosen to pilot a new generation of stealth fighter-bombers. They are Lt. Ben Gannon (Josh Lucas), Lt. Kara Wade (Jessica Biel), and Lt. Henry Purcell (Jamie Foxx, who in his speech on Oscar night should have thanked God this movie wasn’t released while the voters were marking their ballots).
They’re all aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in the Philippine Sea, under the command of Capt. George Cummings (Sam Shepard, who played the test pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff). In a movie like this, you’re asking for trouble if you remind people of 2001, Top Gun, and The Right Stuff.
The pilots believe that three is a lucky number, because it is a prime number. One helpfully explains to the others what a prime number is; I guess they didn’t get to primes at Annapolis. In a movie that uses unexplained phrases such as “quantum sponge,” why not just let the characters say “prime number” and not explain it? Many audience members will assume “prime number” is another one of those pseudo-scientific terms they’re always thinking up for movies like this.