Reviews

The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down

Get out of the theatre with your bad self!

By PAUL BABIN | March 28, 2007

1.0 Stars

PARTY SCENERY: Who needs it?

Sex, drugs, and stupidity become the stuff of sociological study in this simple-minded parody of the LA party scene. In his feature debut, Paul Sapiano offsets a crude visual style and flashy performances with a strait-laced voiceover about dating rituals in an attempt at satire. But he has no sense of comic timing, and his actors are just as clueless, so the jokes fizzle. And cinematographer Roman Jakobi’s manic visual rhythms don’t help, with his camera moving klutzily about the frame. The whole movie is one running gag — it’s like watching a stand-up comedian perform the same stereotyped impersonation over and over.

Related: Social settings, Flashbacks: August 25, 2006, Sports blotter: June 2, 2006, More

Social settings
Seán Curran’s dance looks like a formal exposition of movement, but after a while you begin to imagine webs of social interactions, relationships, and hidden histories.
Flashbacks: August 25, 2006
These selections, culled from our back files, were compiled by Doug Fleischer, Sam MacLaughlin, and Hannah Van Susteren.
Sports blotter: June 2, 2006
In what may be the highest-proﬁle Crips murder case since the Snoop Dogg “Murder Was the Case” incident, a Los Angeles high-school football star on his way to a full ride at Oregon was implicated last week in an investigation that reads like a Sociology 101 lesson in Crips hierarchies.
Following the evidence
“CSI: The Experience,” like a B-movie, is best if you don’t think too hard about it.
Seven questions about love
Love is in question in all seven films to be screened at the Museum of Fine Arts in a touring mini-retrospective of the work of Kenji Mizoguchi.
The Russians are coming
With one exception, the eight movies in the nifty “Cold War Cinema” series at the Harvard Film Archive are popular entertainments that treat the politics and sociology of the era in a variety of ways.
Fatal Attraction
Carter cuts apart dead people for a living. Schoeller works part-time putting them back together. And they have a year-old “baby”: a hairless cat named Spooky, who looks like an adorably wrinkled gremlin, knows how to flush the toilet, and has his own MySpace page.
Sustainable sounds
For every high-gloss record label driven primarily by commercial concerns, there are any number of smaller-scale labels putting beautiful sounds out into the ether.
Animal house
Each of Sara Gruen’s first three novels have had animal characters who were crucial to the book, but Water for Elephants has made the biggest splash.
Going ape
The truth is the truth, and we hacks must face up to it: it is no longer amusing to come up with ideas for hypothetical reality shows.
Best on the boards
Huntington Theatre Company artistic director Nicholas Martin recently announced that he would leave his post in 2008.
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Topics: Reviews , Entertainment, Science and Technology, Nightlife, More

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ARTICLES BY PAUL BABIN

DUCK | August 22, 2007
Hall, who musters up so much emotion within a narrow role, deserves better, though the Aflac duck is all he’s quacked up to be.

FOUR WEEKS IN JUNE | June 13, 2007
Who would have thought that happiness was just a leap across the generation gap?

STEEL CITY | June 06, 2007
Brian Jun’s film owes more to the family values of the Reagan era than its anarchic characters and hardscrabble style would indicate.