Day 86: Rumor Has It...

Hate to spoil the fun for anyone, but this is just awful. The premise of this film is that the characters featured in The Graduate were based on real life people and Jennifer Aniston is the daughter of the Elaine character. Kevin Costner is the Dustin Hoffman surrogate, and Shirley MacLaine is Mrs. Robinson.

This is not a bad premise by any means; it's ripe for some fun pop culture riffing, finding how The Graduate has affected Aniston's generation, and possibly exploring the differences in how personal insecurity and uncertainty about the future express themselves in each generation. What do we get? The soulless, dead gaze of Jennifer Anniston, an earnest, but misplaced Kevin Costner, and Shirley MacLaine as one of those profanity spouting, oversexed old ladies that screams out, "LAUGH AT THIS MOVIE!" Really, only Mark Ruffalo as Anniston's well-meaning fiancee is worth seeing, and even then, he's got nothing to do except shout a speech about how much he's been hurt.

This is pablum. Flat, sitcom-like lighting and blocking, more jokes that fall flat than hit, and good God almighty, this is a film that actually has the audacity in late 2005 to use the theme to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly as a joke. HA HA HA! That joke's so old! HA HA HA! I've seen that so many times before. OH MY SIDES! There's an older lady mad at Kevin Costner and they're playing music that usually plays when tough people have a showdown! HA HA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHEEHEEHEEHOHOHH.

The Graduate remains a dangerous movie about the flaunting of all societal conventions and an accurate depiction of how the passions of youth entrap younger generations into repeating their parents' mistakes. It's funny and it's poignant. It's a perfect comedy, and one of my favorite films, ever, ever, ever. This film plays with the themes at play in The Graduate, but is so coy and shy about the sexual matters, it might as well be talking about spoons. Even if we throw out the inevitable comparisons to The Graduate, the film is an unfunny muddle, a sterile and bland piece of dough with cheap, easy psychological revelations. If you were to throw this all together and bake it, it would turn into a flavorless mush. And, what's worse, it's only half baked.