P.S. I Love You

Director:
Richard LaGravenese

In the late 1990’s and most likely to compete with Gap’s aggressively cool “jump, jive, an’ wail” and “Kerouac wore khakis,” advertising campaign, Dockers launched their own line of commercials which featured handsome men on subways and street corners catching the eyes of flirtatious female passersby who replaced the tired wolf whistle with the sexy, succinct line, “Nice pants.” As my favorite creative writing professor jokingly told us, “If a woman told me I had nice pants, I would MARRY her.” Now admittedly, unlike my professor who was on—I believe-- wife number four at the time, I’m not one for marriage. However—and no pun intended-- if pressed, my “nice pants” weakness would be men who write letters. Sketches are flattering and songs entertain but creative men who pour their hearts out on paper with wit, passion, and ease are few and far between. Indeed, unfortunately, it seems as though they only exist in syrupy tearjerker novels, movies about death, or in foreign countries. In the latest outing from director Richard LaGravenese, he confirms this suspicion by mixing up a cocktail of all three as we have a film adaptation of Cecilia Ahern’s novel about death in which our male letter writer hails from Ireland.

Inaccurately billed, advertised and even critiqued as a traditional romantic comedy which raised enough eyebrows when one realized that Hilary Swank-- Oscar’s queen of doom and gloom-- was starring in something funny, P.S. I Love You crashed and burned at the box office, with audiences preferring to see Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman’s awkwardly characterized “feel-good” movie about death, The Bucket List. Think of this film as The Bucket List in reverse as it opens with Holly (Hilary Swank in as my dad described “Jennifer Garner mode”) and Gerry Kennedy (dishy Gerard Butler) returning home from a disastrous evening as they wait until they get to their apartment to argue to avoid making a scene.

Unfortunately, while the Kennedy’s neighbors are spared the scene, we watch the loud, chaotic confrontation escalate as the two begin with one issue, and predictably although authentically, proceed to use that as a springboard to attack each and every problem existing in their marriage. Faster than you can say, “show us, don’t tell us,” in a scene perhaps best suited for the stage as exposition literally comes spewing from the mouths of our talented leads making them grate on our nerves fairly quickly, we learn moments later that Gerry has died from a tragic illness, leaving his young, devoted wife reeling.

Cutting herself off from the world, Holly proceeds to grieve in her own way, avoiding hygiene and cleanliness, ignoring work, and instead sublimating her loss in fantasy as she imagines still speaking, holding and sleeping with Gerry as well as watching every woman’s weepie classic one can imagine starring Bette Davis and Judy Garland on her bedroom television. Things change on her thirtieth birthday, when Holly's mother Patricia (Kathy Bates) and two best friends (Lisa Kudrow and Gina Gershon) stage an intervention that nearly fails until a surprise letter arrives from the deceased Gerry who reveals that he has left Holly ten messages which will appear in mysterious ways over the course of one year.

Signing each letter with—you guessed it-- “P.S. I Love You,” Holly begins to come out of both her apartment and shell as Gerry's assignments challenge her to take part in everything from karaoke to a trip to Ireland where she meets Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Billy Gallagher, another sensitive and gorgeous lad who-- wouldn’t you know?-- was one of Gerry’s old mates.

Meanwhile, in New York, Harry Connick Jr.’s bartending Daniel hopes to become more to Holly than just a friendly shoulder to cry on, as Holly realizes that as much as she wants to move on, it’s hard to let go, especially when Gerry keeps reminding her of their love with each successive letter.

While Swank’s character never feels entirely authentic and too much back-story is crammed in awkwardly throughout the narrative, despite its contrivances and predictable plot points, P.S. I Love You isn’t quite the disaster that one would have expected going in. However with obvious parallels to The Notebook and Ghost, it’s important to note to prospective renters hoping for a romantic comedy that the film is much sadder and far more devastating than the lighthearted trailers would have one believe, which tests the patience of viewers considering its overly long running time of 126 minutes.

In addition and quite surprisingly for a chick flick that was originally penned in novel form by a woman, I was amazed by the fact that the most fascinating and rewarding characters in Love weren't predictably Holly or her friends but rather the men in their lives including Gerry, Billy and Daniel. But then again, it's easy to forgive the author's understandable indulgence; as I said before, men like these only exist in the movies… or maybe just in Ireland.

What Love Is

Director: Mars Callahan

In The Tao of Steve we learned that guys don’t do opera, in Swingers we learned that every guy needs a wingman and in the movies of Kevin Smith, we learned that guys gossip more than a sorority. Yet, having worked in the theatre, I can confidently tell you that unless they’re desperately trying to woo a date or are over the age of 55, straight guys seldom do theatre.

With undoubtedly this in mind and in an effort to blend theatre together with Swingers and Chasing Amy, writer/director Mars Callahan got in touch with his inner screwball and served up What Love Is, a film so foul it would make Kevin Smith blush and one where dialogue whips by so quickly that the Gilmore Girls heroines would tell them to slow down for fear of a speeding ticket. A raunchy hybrid of sitcoms and confessional theatre and set during a particularly raucous Valentine’s Day night, nothing about this wicked talk-a-thon feels authentic as audiences find themselves half expecting applause or canned laughs after certain punchlines and characters actually enter the room on cue like Norm on Cheers or Kramer on Seinfeld.

When he discovers empty closets and suitcases by the front door, Tom (Cuba Gooding Jr.) reads the obligatory Dear John letter left for him by his girlfriend who’s decided to walk out on him after three years of cohabitation and realizes that in addition to his heartbreak, he must contend for an impromptu party he’d obliviously decided to throw to celebrate what he’d hoped would be his engagement.

Before the other guests arrive, his four boyhood friends trickle in one-by-one (and always on cue) and, with their varied outlooks and attitudes offer Tom advice and speeches for the film’s opening forty minutes that seem so loud, chaotic, and lewd, one wonders if Callahan, perhaps budget strapped, offered a bonus to whichever actor can deliver his monologues the fastest, thereby saving precious film stock and shortening the running time to roughly ninety minutes.

Matthew Lillard sets the film’s tone early on as the self-described misogynistic and homophobic Sal who, saddled with the film’s most shocking yet memorable lines, attacks his character with a ferocity I didn’t realize the actor had in him and it’s easy to imagine that his agent will be mailing his entire opening segment to David Mamet in the hopes of scoring a role as one of the prize-winner’s legendary boors.

In fact, Lillard is so repugnant yet compulsively fascinating that the other actors are nearly helpless in his wake, although the fault seems to lie largely in the script which finds Andrew Daly faced with portraying a one-note, ridiculously penned gay stereotype, Sean Astin relegated to portraying a Birkenstock wearing, granola eating New Age hippie tired of always being labeled as the friend to beautiful women and the writer/director, who turns in a nice performance in an uninteresting role as the happily married Ken.

How and why these characters still remain friends is a mystery as San Francisco Chronicle’s Peter Harlaub memorably described his view of the group by asking viewers to “imagine if the pack from 'The Breakfast Club' were still stuck in detention twenty years later.” While they repeatedly explain that they’ve known each other since grade school, the men in What Love Is prove just as often that they haven’t evolved much since then and it’s all the more apparent when, almost halfway through the film women begin arriving at the party (played by Gina Gershon, Anne Heche and others) and as they walk through the door, must endure starring in a stripper fantasy.

Of course, women and men are as different as Mars and Venus as the media will constantly remind so with little in the way of explanation, Callahan gives the women an abridged opportunity to delineate their own pet peeves and attitudes about dating, love and sex by placing them in the bathroom (of course) where they prove that women can be just as crude as the guys. Again as Hartlaub explained, “If you’re in your late thirties and still trolling for hookups in trendy bars, these characters will probably speak to you. If not, you’re almost certain to find them annoying.”

In other words, consider this reviewer annoyed and while I held out hope that once the two sexes would coexist in the same scene, sparks and words would begin flying, the film’s final act proves to be its most lifeless when cliché induced unsatisfactory conclusions are reached. As rude and clipped as the opening forty minutes were of the film were, had Callahan kept up the pace and managed to write the rest of the supporting players with as much force as he did for Lillard’s Sal, it may have been a successful melding of theatre and film, yet as released and given a bland title destined to blend into the video store shelves, there’s not much to love about What Love Is.

Delirious

Director: Tom DiCillo

If you ask Les Galantine (Steve Buscemi), he’ll tell you that the difference between himself and his colleagues who also stake out the whereabouts of pop stars trying to snap a candid and hopefully salacious photo is that he’s “a licensed professional” and not a paparazzi. He may say this repeatedly but that doesn’t prevent apt and suspicious viewers from realizing he appears to have the same views and habits of others in the tabloid paparazzi profession. In other words, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck it’s definitely a paparazzi in Sundance Award winning writer/director Tom DiCillo’s great new “rags to riches fable” Delirious which earned five awards including the AFI Filmmaker Award for Best Director at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival.

Providing a great counterpart to his reluctant celebrity journalist in his own remake of Theo van Gogh’s Interview, Buscemi’s Les (with a fitting name as Ebert pointed out in his review) in Delirious tells his new young homeless assistant Toby Grace (Michael Pitt) that his real dream is to get signed with an agency to shoot Nike and Calvin Klein ads. However, in the mean time, he lives by his credo of rules such as knowing “where you belong” and assuring Toby that celebrities are “just people, no better than us,” as he trains him in on the ropes of staking out stars with Toby working for free most likely for both companionship and to make his rent as he becomes Les’ roommate sleeping in a closet in his cramped apartment. Schooling the angel faced, sweet Toby in on how to crash benefits and events to take as many goodie bags as they can get their hands on, Les, who feels that friends are people “just sittin’ around waiting for a chance to start talking about himself,” finds himself becoming quite attached to his protégé and feels threatened when Toby catches the eye of the successful Britney like pop star K’Harma Leeds (Alison Lohman) and begins losing him to love.

Surprisingly heartfelt with believable turns by both Buscemi, who once again changes into someone completely different right before our eyes, as well as Pitt whose face the camera loves throughout the film in some breathtaking, sharp and exuberant sequences (such as a Singin’ in the Rain styled ode after he spends an evening with Lohman) that most likely came from the innovative vision of director and former Jarmusch cinematographer DiCillo. In DiCillo’s best film in years which unfortunately was granted a limited release in art cinemas in major cities, Buscemi gives one of his finest performances in the 2000’s that, while definitely playing into DiCillo’s satirical fable intention, manages to walk the fine line between parody and truth and I found myself involved all the way. Given an exclusive initial DVD release for rental at Blockbuster, DiCillo’s Delirious is scheduled for a wider rental and purchase release in the future.