There are indeed movies (usually quite a few) that "define every decade," and then there are movies like "Body Shots" -- the 900th sex comedy-drama to be released this year with the usual excitable ensemble cast and its own agenda that is minutely divergent from all the others.
Looking to get roughed up at the boxoffice, the New Line release directed by Michael Cristofer ("Gia"), who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for his play "The Shadow Box", is another pretentious, hard-to-sit-still-for investigation into the minds and bodily functions of dopey guys and dizzy gals in Los Angeles' young-adult singles scene, and it pretty much fails in the final act to tweak the agenda into a serious discussion of date rape.
Screenwriter David McKenna ("American History X") likes to have both male and female characters talk frankly about penises, ejaculation, fellatio, cunnilingus and so on, but nothing too graphic. From what guys want and what girls like to do to them (one guess) to what girls need and only a few guys seem to provide, the characters directly address the audience in one of many distracting stylistic dodges (along with highlighted sounds, titled camera angles, superimposed graphics, etc.) to cover up the shallowness of the material.
While the characters are not entirely reduced to emblems for their generation, it matters not because none of them is remotely believable to begin with. Handsome and scary, Jerry O'Connell ("Jerry Maguire") is one Michael Penorisi, a millionaire football player for the Raiders.
Sean Patrick Flanery plays his buddy, a lawyer, and they are joined by two other on-the-make guys (Ron Livingston and Brad Rowe) for a group date at a dance club with four lovely young ladies.
Leader of the femme pack is Amanda Peet, who has Flanery's semi-nice guy in her future plans, while youngest party babe Tara Reid starts off a mess when, in the first few moments of the film, she claims that O'Connell's smiley brute raped her. With a debt to but none of the depth of "Rashomon", the film is chronologically fractured and shows us several different versions of what becomes the central event of the story.
There's just nothing new about watching a group of hard-drinking, horny men converge with likewise double-minded women (make that triple-minded; these gals like to dance more than the guys) for a night of embarrassing and vaguely romantic bonding. Occasionally, a scene or shot will stand out -- Flanery urinating on a closed toilet seat, Rowe and wine-guzzling Sybil Temchen screwing in a parking lot, Livingston lying in the gutter and almost getting run over -- but on a basic storytelling level, one never gets to know half of these characters, including Emily Procter as another blond princess and Rowe's drug-and-drink fiend in denial.
BODY SHOTS
New Line Cinema
A Colomby/Keaton production
Director: Michael Cristofer
Screenwriter: David McKenna
Producers: Jennifer Keohane, Harry Colomby
Executive producers: Michael Keaton, Guy Riedel, Michael De Luca, Lynn Harris
Director of photography: Rodrigo Garcia
Production designer: David J. Bomba
Editor: Eric Sears
Costume designer: Carolyn Leigh Greco
Casting: Junie Lowry Johnson, Libby Goldstein
Color/stereo
Cast:
Rick Hamilton: Sean Patrick Flanery
Michael Penorisi: Jerry O'Connell
Jane Bannister: Amanda Peet
Sara Olswang: Tara Reid
Trent: Ron Livingston
Whitney Bryant: Emily Procter
Shawn Denigan: Brad Rowe
Emma Cooper: Sybil Temchen
Running time --- 100 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
Looking to get roughed up at the boxoffice, the New Line release directed by Michael Cristofer ("Gia"), who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for his play "The Shadow Box", is another pretentious, hard-to-sit-still-for investigation into the minds and bodily functions of dopey guys and dizzy gals in Los Angeles' young-adult singles scene, and it pretty much fails in the final act to tweak the agenda into a serious discussion of date rape.
Screenwriter David McKenna ("American History X") likes to have both male and female characters talk frankly about penises, ejaculation, fellatio, cunnilingus and so on, but nothing too graphic. From what guys want and what girls like to do to them (one guess) to what girls need and only a few guys seem to provide, the characters directly address the audience in one of many distracting stylistic dodges (along with highlighted sounds, titled camera angles, superimposed graphics, etc.) to cover up the shallowness of the material.
While the characters are not entirely reduced to emblems for their generation, it matters not because none of them is remotely believable to begin with. Handsome and scary, Jerry O'Connell ("Jerry Maguire") is one Michael Penorisi, a millionaire football player for the Raiders.
Sean Patrick Flanery plays his buddy, a lawyer, and they are joined by two other on-the-make guys (Ron Livingston and Brad Rowe) for a group date at a dance club with four lovely young ladies.
Leader of the femme pack is Amanda Peet, who has Flanery's semi-nice guy in her future plans, while youngest party babe Tara Reid starts off a mess when, in the first few moments of the film, she claims that O'Connell's smiley brute raped her. With a debt to but none of the depth of "Rashomon", the film is chronologically fractured and shows us several different versions of what becomes the central event of the story.
There's just nothing new about watching a group of hard-drinking, horny men converge with likewise double-minded women (make that triple-minded; these gals like to dance more than the guys) for a night of embarrassing and vaguely romantic bonding. Occasionally, a scene or shot will stand out -- Flanery urinating on a closed toilet seat, Rowe and wine-guzzling Sybil Temchen screwing in a parking lot, Livingston lying in the gutter and almost getting run over -- but on a basic storytelling level, one never gets to know half of these characters, including Emily Procter as another blond princess and Rowe's drug-and-drink fiend in denial.
BODY SHOTS
New Line Cinema
A Colomby/Keaton production
Director: Michael Cristofer
Screenwriter: David McKenna
Producers: Jennifer Keohane, Harry Colomby
Executive producers: Michael Keaton, Guy Riedel, Michael De Luca, Lynn Harris
Director of photography: Rodrigo Garcia
Production designer: David J. Bomba
Editor: Eric Sears
Costume designer: Carolyn Leigh Greco
Casting: Junie Lowry Johnson, Libby Goldstein
Color/stereo
Cast:
Rick Hamilton: Sean Patrick Flanery
Michael Penorisi: Jerry O'Connell
Jane Bannister: Amanda Peet
Sara Olswang: Tara Reid
Trent: Ron Livingston
Whitney Bryant: Emily Procter
Shawn Denigan: Brad Rowe
Emma Cooper: Sybil Temchen
Running time --- 100 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
- 10/11/1999
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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