Christine Lahti's first movie. As a director, that is. At feature-length. Not that that persuades her to pace herself. Overemphasizing and overexplaining her points with wide-angle and computer-graphic distortions (the English teacher's vampire fangs, the high-school bimbo's ballooning lips), she pretty much punches herself out before she ever arrives at the movie's central situation: the meeting, and eventually the meeting-halfway, of two opposites, an all-in-black, seventeen-year-old Goth with a pincushion face, a few minor wounds of self-mutilation, Sylvia Plath and Anne Rice on her bedside table, and an all-in-brown, forty-nine-year-old schlemazel who manages a Century City clothing store. At first it is startling, and never really convincing, to see the demure Leelee Sobieski done over for the S&M dungeon, whereas it's highly promising (at first, once again) to see Albert Brooks taking the part of a home-by-nine stick-in-the-mud, especially now that he seems less inclined in his own films to detach himself from his on-screen persona, more inclined to flatter and coddle himself (Mother, The Muse). Certainly in Jill Franklyn's script he has some good Brooksian lines, or anyhow he has a good weary-whiny Brooksian delivery of them: "This is supposed to be an experience where we share. I share my taste with you, and you torture me with yours." But hard as it is to believe that the chasm between the two principals could be bridged, it is still harder to follow the road that leads these two friendless loners to an idyllic meadow of general fellowship, family feeling, and warm fuzzies. The road that leads, in effect, into a different movie. Carol Kane, Mary Kay Place, John Goodman. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd
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