Two Words, One Answer.
Amy Brenneman
 Your Friends & Neighbors $14.98 The Bottom Line: An intense and unsparing film from Neil LaBute, who was quite a writer/director before he did The Wicker Man, Your Friends & Neighbors is a must-watch for anyone who likes their dramas unformulaic, unmanipulative, and depressing; with its excellent acting and surprisingly depth of character, YF&N is an underseen gem. 3.5/4  The Suburbans $14.94 Why did this movie even get green lighted? It has "vanity project" written all over it. Donal Lardner Ward directs and has the lead. He also wrote it, along with Tony Guma, who is also in it. Who is Donal Lardner Ward, anyway? It turns out that he is the Great-grandson of writer Ring Lardner; and the grand-nephew of Academy Award winning screenwriter and Hollywood Ten member Ring Lardner Jr. Donal's Father was co-founder of New York's Elaine's restaurant. He has about five other acting credits besides The Suburbans, but the only film I've heard of was The Royal Tenenbaums. He played a hotel clerk. Maybe his real life was like The Royal Tenenbaums, a family with a lot of nutty but talented characters. For some reason, I am reminded of back when I was in Pencey, a prep school I had the misfortune of attending, and I was reading this book. The book I was reading was this book I took out of the library by mistake. They gave me the wrong book, and I didn't notice it till I got back to my room. They gave me Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen. I thought it was going to stink, but it didn't. It was a very good book. I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot. My favorite author is my brother D.B., and my next favorite is Ring Lardner. My brother gave me a book by Ring Lardner for my birthday, just before I went to Pencey. It had these very funny, crazy plays in it, and then it had this one story about a traffic cop that falls in love with this very cute girl that's always speeding. Only, he's married, the cop, so he can't marry her or anything. Then this girl gets killed, because she's always speeding. That story just about killed me. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though. I wouldn't mind calling this Isak Dinesen up. And Ring Lardner, except that D.B. told me he's dead. You take that book Of Human Bondage, by Somerset Maugham, though. I read it last summer. It's a pretty good book and all, but I wouldn't want to call Somerset Maugham up. I don't know. He just isn't the kind of a guy I'd want to call up, that's all. I'd rather call old Thomas Hardy up. I like that Eustacia Vye. Ring Lardner, Donal Lardner Ward's Great-grandfather, was pals with F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he was published by Maxwell Perkins, who was F. Scott's editor. His first book, You Know Me Al, an epistolary novel, was written in the form of letters from Jack Keefe, a bush league ball player, to his friend Al back home. Originally published in the Saturday Evening Post as a series, Lardner thought so little of his writing that he didn't even keep copies. To publish them he had to get copies from the magazine. He thought of himself as a sports columnist whose work had little lasting value. He continued to think so even after serious people such as Virginia Woolf praised his book. He was in some respects the model for Abe North in Fitzgerald's last completed novel, Tender Is the Night. He influenced Ernest Hemmingway, who sometimes wrote articles for his high school newspaper under the pseudonym Ring Lardner, Jr. Ringgold Wilmer Lardner's son, the real Ring Lardner, Jr., and Donal Lardner Ward's Grand-uncle, was a screenwriter who was blacklisted after WWII as one of the Hollywood Ten, screenwriters who were incarcerated for contempt of Congress after refusing to answer questions posed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He won two Academy Awards for his screenplays--one before (for Woman of the Year in 1942) and one after (for M*A*S*H in 1970) his imprisonment and blacklisting. So now the story makes a little more sense, how this guy, Donal Lardner Ward, had the audacity to direct and star in The Suburbans. There is another interesting back story: it was the first script that Tony Guma wrote. Beginner's luck. He had taught High School for many years, and he just wrote a script, without ever even seeing what a script looked like. I can picture the two of them collaborating. They are scheming to see who gets to make out with Jennifer Love Hewitt. They flip a coin. They decide that Ward will get to make out with her, but he won't do anything, because he's married. Guma gets to be the rebound guy, but all the action happens off-screen. The Suburbans is not very good, but Jennifer Love Hewitt, as Cate with a "C" is great as a young record executive who wants to revive the career of The Suburbans, a band she idolized back in the 80's. She is both smart and stupid -- smart about the music business, even though with regards to The Suburbans, she may be guided more by her heart than her head -- but she can't figure out how to use a coffee filter or make a cup of tea. There is a great little scene where The Suburbans meet the label: Cate, Speedo Silverberg (Jerry Stiller), and Jay Rose (Ben Stiller). Two generations of Stillers and a Love Hewitt. I really like Jennifer Love Hewitt in this. She is the best thing about it, in my opinion. One thing I like about the script is that they have Cate with a "C" quoting William Butler Yeats, and they leave the quote in. That is something that Guma, the former High School English Teacher, probably slipped in there. Here is the sonnet that the quote is from: Never give all the heart by W. B. Yeats Never give all the heart, for love Will hardly seem worth thinking of To passionate women if it seem Certain, and they never dream That it fades out from kiss to kiss; For everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy, kind delight. O never give the heart outright, For they, for all smooth lips can say, Have given their hearts up to the play. And who could play it well enough If deaf and dumb and blind with love? He that made this knows all the cost, For he gave all his heart and lost. The Suburbans is kind of like That Thing You Do, about a group of One Hit Wonders, only this one is about a group of One Hit Wonders from the 80's, making a comeback. It is more about mid life crisis and aging regrets. ------------------------------- Mitch: Don't let Grace "Yoko" The Suburbans. ========================================= And that is not exactly a winning strategy. Why dwell on the sour aftermath, why not just take the exhilarating roller coaster ride, and deal with all that mess in epilogue? Tom Hanks got that right at least. Will Ferrell is in The Suburbans, but he doesn't play his usual perpetual adolescent. He plays a successful businessman who doesn't really want to make a comeback. The stock in his company is down 18% since The Suburbans' video aired on MTV. I still wonder why Ferrell, the Stillers, and Love Hewitt even agreed to do this project, but I figure that they just wanted to get better tables at Elaine's. ----------------------------------- Danny: [after dropping a case of beer] I should've gotten light beer. =========================================== Talladega Nights - The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (Unrated Widescreen Edition) (2006) .... Will Ferrell was Ricky Bobby Anchorman - The Legend Of Ron Burgundy (Unrated Widescreen Edition) (2004) .... Will Ferrell was Ron Burgundy, Ben Stiller was Arturo Mendes and Jerry Stiller was (uncredited) Man in Bar Old School (Widescreen Unrated Edition) (2003) .... Will Ferrell was Frank Ricard Heartbreakers (2001) .... Jennifer Love Hewitt was Page Conners The Royal Tenenbaums (The Criterion Collection) (2001) .... Ben Stiller was Chas Tenenbaum and Donal Lardner Ward was Hotel Clerk Mystery Men (1999) .... Ben Stiller was Mr. Furious I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) .... Jennifer Love Hewitt was Julie James and Bridgette Wilson was Elsa Shivers The Cable Guy (Full Screen) (1996) .... Ben Stiller was Sam Sweet / Stan Sweet Reality Bites (1994) .... Ben Stiller was Michael Grates Fresh Horses (1988) .... Ben Stiller was Tipton -------------------------- Cate: For everything that's lovely is but a brief, dreamy, kind of delight. Yeats. ====================================  Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her $2.99 I rented this not knowing I had seen the last half one late night probably on IFC. Wow now I get all the connections. Really good flick |
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