via Tenor
"You see the salt on this pretzel? Look at the stars. Some people, they say the stars are billions and billions of tons of hot gas. But I think maybe, maybe it's just God's salt. And God's just waiting to eat us."
It's time for another edition of Thoughts On in the purest sense!
1. Jennifer Love Hewitt makes her grand entrance as Amanda Beckett nearly 17 minutes into Can't Hardly Wait. Would we expect anything less from a gal with special billing? The six actors in the opening credits are Ethan Embry, Charlie Korsmo, Lauren Ambrose, Peter Facinelli, Seth Green "and" Jennifer. In the end credits, Jennifer comes first. On the other hand, Ethan was the first actor to get a close up.
2. Eww to Preston (Ethan) and Denise (Lauren) turning in their graduation gowns, which will apparently be reused. This isn't so much gross when it comes to those two, but when you consider that at least one student went commando underneath his. Makes you wonder how many of those things "smell like blue cheese."
3. The first 10 minutes of the 100-minute Can't Hardly Wait, written and directed by Deborah Kaplan & Harry Elfont, are spent setting up three stories. Two have a pair getting past what happened in high school, with the third one following that formula until its conclusion.
4. Preston thinks he has another chance with Amanda, who's just been dumped by Mike (Peter). William (Charlie) seeks revenge on his longtime tormentor, Mike, who's riding for a fall. Kenny (Seth), determined to have sex, is the object of ridicule, fascination and affection from former friend Denise. They're all guests at, you guessed it, An Out Of Control Party.
5. Just how hard did Mike whip that raisin at William for him to need to wear an eyepatch? Nowadays, the plot against Mike would make William the outright villain of Can't Hardly Wait. He planned to lure Mike and a friend to where they would be ambushed by William's friends, knocked out with chloroform, stripped and photographed, with the homoerotic photos being passed around at the party.
6. Kaplan, Elfont and many people in 1998 deserve some credit for knowing that cultural appropriation isn't cool. Kenny's antics are somewhat mitigated with things like the sight gag of the portable sex kit, the punchline of actual Black people chasing away Kenny's friends and a steady amount of physical comedy from Green. Still, Kenny is a product of his time. Thank God I'm not watching Malibu's Most Wanted!
7. Our family dog when I was pre-elementary age was named Mandy. I'm not sure if it was because of the Barry Manilow song. I can relate to Preston thinking that hearing "Mandy" on the radio was a sign that he should try with Amanda. I sometimes use "Man on the Moon" as a justification for going shopping. It was part of the music rotation when I worked at a mall.
8. God, what an ensemble. There are a lot of familiar faces in Can't Hardly Wait. I think the easiest thing to say is that every credited actor was either experienced or would become experienced.
9. The main three stories continue over Wait's next 70 minutes, but they also share time with many vignettes, running gags and one-off gags. Readers, I'd love to hear some of your favorites. I'll give shoutouts to Vicki (Melissa Joan Hart), who wants all 522 Huntington Hills seniors to sign her yearbook (Good God, why?), and the easily provoked members of the band Loveburger (including Breckin Meyer and Donald Faison).
10. "Which team has the winning play? Huntington, Huntington, hey, hey, *gets shoved by Mike* heyyyy!"
11. Jennifer Love Hewitt wasn't the youngest in Wait's cast. That honor appears to go to Chris Owen, who played the Klepto Kid. Still, Jennifer was 18 during shooting and looked it.
12. The TV ad for Wait that I remember had Seth Green in character as Kenny, talking about the party. "There's gonna be breakups." *clip* "There's gonna be makeups." *clip* While I couldn't find that ad, I did find two others. It looks like Columbia tried marketing Wait as both a wacky comedy and an earnest coming of age flick. Maybe they would have had more luck if they kept the movie R-rated with some sprawl.
Courtesy YouTube
13. "I can't believe you pointed at (Amanda)." "She didn't see me. Are you hyperventilating?" "No, I'm centering myself. I'm harnessing my chi." "You're what?" "I'm harnessing my chi. Don't laugh at me." "Were you this weird when we went out?" "Were you this bitchy when we went out? I'm trying to think." "Yeah, I was a bitchy eighth grader for that whole week, actually." I forgot that Preston and Denise were briefly a couple. This fact made me reconsider a later, also forgotten bit of dialogue.
14. You have to admit, it's kinda cute that when William tried his first beer, he thought it had gone bad.
15. Nearly a half-hour in and Mike, fresh from winning a bro off against Kenny, gets his first inkling that things will no longer be going his way. One of his jock friends (Freddy Rodríguez) has opted not to break up with his girlfriend, since they'll get to hook up in her parents' room. "... they have mirrors. Above the bed, dude. I'm gonna be like this. Look. *laughs, mimics watching himself having sex*"
16. Okay, as snarky as Denise has been, if you don't feel something for her when she's alone on that couch and the assumed other lonely girl turns out to have been sent by her friends to make sure Denise was even one of their classmates ... That situation had to have happened to or been seen by either Kaplan or Elfont.
17. I had Wait's novelization, which included the deleted scene where Kenny was given the opportunity to have sex with a girl too impaired to give consent. The novelization also made it clear that the class hippies (including Eric Balfour) were stoners. Denise got hit with a pot brownie, sending her retreating to the upstairs bathroom, where Kenny's preparing to hook up with a girl who only wants him for revenge sex. Naturally, Kenny and Denise get trapped.
18. More failure for Mike, as a quartet including Sean Patrick Thomas, Tamala Jones and Jaime Pressly are still going strong. Scoring good seats to Pearl Jam's concert in August will do that. Meanwhile, Amanda's pouring her heart out to Ron (Erik Palladino), who forcibly kisses her. Not only is it witnessed by Preston, but Ron's related to Amanda. "Through marriage. ... Shit! Oh, God! Amanda, you're not going to tell my parents about this, are you?"
19. Selma Blair! It's funny to see people in Wait who would go on to their own teen movies, like Selma, Melissa Joan Hart and Sean Patrick Thomas. Not to mention Jaime Pressly, who did Not Another Teen Movie. In his review, Emmanuel Levy of Variety mentioned that Wait was the first of at least six "promised school movies" to be released in 1998. I tend to think of the teen movie boom that started with Scream in December 1996 as concluding in December 2001 with Not Another Teen Movie. Thoughts?
20. For the record, Barry Manilow's birthday is June 17. It is possible that Huntington Hills could have had its graduation ceremony that late, but it seems odd. Speaking of other oddities, why were the parents of both the Girl Whose Party It Is and Rachel (Freddy's girlfriend) out of town on the day of their daughters' high school graduations? Anyway, hi, Jenna Elfman! Come, share your wisdom with Preston. I loved the payoff to these scenes, that the angel-costumed stripper assumes Preston loves Barry.
21. Whoa, I did not expect Breckin Meyer of all people to have said "Giggity giggity!" before Seth MacFarlane. Since Loveburger's gone bad, the stage is free for Wild Bill! Lame haircut aside, Korsmo is serving up some twink gone wild realness here.
22. Mike gets a visit from the Ghost of Peaked In High School Future, Trip McNeely (Jerry O'Connell). If nothing else, this scene gave Young Franko the valuable lesson to wear flip flops when using the shower as a college freshman. Oddly enough, Levy's review had him saying Mike shared the scene with Ron.
23. Jesus Christ, look at how young Jason Segel was.
24. It's time for Jennifer's best scene. Amanda, who has found Preston's love letter to her and is trying to find a guy whose face she doesn't remember, gets confronted by Mike. He fails at getting her back, in front of everybody, no less. "Think about what, Mike? That you're a childish, self-centered asshole?" Alas, the moment includes a female partygoer calling Mike a "f*g." "Shut up! ... I'll kick everyone's ass in this room!"
25. I'm also not that fond of Amanda having to deal with three guys immediately trying to pick her up, even if one of them was the Reminiscing Guy (Victor Togunde). "Hey, Amanda! Do you remember that time you danced with me at the sock hop? Well, I never told you, but I had the hugest boner. ..." Also, we still have a half-hour to go, so it's too early for Preston and Amanda to have their happily ever after.
26. "You were a fashion victim from the womb." Kenny and Denise's story may be slightly more predictable than Preston and Amanda's, but at least there's some good dialogue. Kenny and Denise have sex, while downstairs, the cops arrive. Well, no wonder. It's gotta be at least 4 a.m. by now.
27. The accoutrements in the naughty Polaroids of Mike and William deserve to be mentioned. Panty hose. A tiny bottle of baby oil. Some sort of chain. Little pink foam balls. A latex glove. A toy squid. A foam glove. Bottles of Old Spice and aspirin. A ping pong paddle. A whisk.
28. Meanwhile, back upstairs, Kenny and Denise's first time together wasn't the greatest.
Kenny mentioning that Denise has had sex at least once before makes me wonder if it's implied that she and Preston lost their virginity to each other. I don't think it "ruins" the Preston and Amanda story for him to have not been saving himself for her. Surely we can't believe that Mike and Amanda didn't have sex.
29. Speaking of Mike, he protected William by taking the rap for their predicament. I guess it was the least he could do as amends for torment that went all the way up to graduation day.
30. Fourteen minutes to go. Preston and Denise's last scene might be Ethan and Lauren's best work in the movie. "You know, it would have been cool to make out with (Amanda), though. Would you make out with me?" "*after playfully slugging Preston in the arm* Call me when you get there, okay?" "Definitely." Seriously, if these two were never intimate, they sure must have came close.
31. Honestly, I think Kaplan and Elfont didn't need to include "Where Are They Now?" text for the six main characters. Following up the reveal that Mike was still going to look down on William in public with the (already done to death?) punchline that the latter will be far more succesful and fulfilled undercut the reveal's surprise and impact. We also could have drawn our own conclusions about the ambiguity of Kenny and Denise's future and how genuine Preston and Amanda's romance is.
"Oh, Pres, just ... Just so you know. Just judging from my little experience last night, I do think there's such a thing as fate. It just works in really fucked-up ways sometimes."
"Especially in your case. ... I'm sorry. You gave that to me. I had to take it."
Recommended with reservations.
Thoughts:
-- "Why you all gotta waste my flavor? Damn!"
-- Box Office: Grossing $25.6 million on a budget estimated between $10-13 million, this opened at No. 4 and came in at No. 74 for 1998. I'm not sure if what Entertainment Weekly warned of actually happened, that exhibitors ran Can't Hardly Wait for a shorter than normal period out of spite against Sony after the Godzilla fiasco, but I suspect it didn't.
-- Awards Watch: Jennifer Love Hewitt lost at the MTV Movie Awards, to Cameron Diaz in There's Something About Mary, and the Young Artist Awards, to a tie between Jena Malone in Stepmom and Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap. Remember, Jennifer, Jena and Lindsay were also up against the likes of Scarlett Johansson in The Horse Whisperer and Kirsten Dunst in Small Soldiers. Who says they don't offer diverse work to young actresses?
-- Critic's Corner, the movie: "A painful and cliched feature-length music video," Michael O'Sullivan wrote.
"(It) deserves credit, both for its breezy pacing and its uncommon tendency to make its characters smarter and geekier than they might have been," Stephen Thompson wrote for the A.V. Club. "It doesn't have the zing of life and subversion that the best high school movies always have," Roger Ebert wrote. Alas, Roger ended his review rather creepily. "Or, if they don't have (zing and subversion), like Porky's didn't, at least they have mercy on us and throw in a shower scene." "For all its nonstop energy and high spirits, Can't Hardly Wait allows its characters to emerge as fully dimensional individuals," Kevin Thomas wrote for the Los Angeles Times. "They've been written with care and perception and played with equal aplomb by a roster of talented young actors." Levy: "It succeeds only partially in conveying the excitement, fear and confusion of that momentous night when adolescence ends and young adulthood begins."
-- Critic's Corner, the actors/characters: O'Sullivan found Ethan to be "genial and winsome," but Jennifer to be a "pretty but vapid cipher." I'm pretty sure Janet Maslin insulted Jennifer. "Amanda (Jennifer Love Hewitt), who has been more belivably cast than she is as the glamour queen ..." Unless Janet's saying that Amanda had more to her than what her peers saw, which is true. Gleiberman: "The characters ... exist entirely in prepackaged pop culture boxes. They're recombinant youth movie cliches ..." Ebert liked the character of Denise, saying she was the only one who was interesting, funny and the only person that "anyone of any taste would want to be friends with." Gleiberman was less impressed, saying that "a petulant remark for every occasion (is) the sum total of her 'rebel' attitude." Ambrose was considered the best cast member by Levy, but he singled out all six of the leads as "thesps hitting high points."
-- Comparison Corner: Can't Hardly Wait itself got compared to Animal House (Thomas), American Graffiti, Dazed and Confused and Porky's (Levy) and early John Hughes movies (Gleiberman). Denise/Lauren evoked memories of Janeane Garofalo (Thompson) and Molly Ringwald (Maslin and Gleiberman). Mike/Peter got compared by Owen to Michael Schoeffling in Sixteen Candles and Tom Cruise in Cocktail, while William/Charlie's "improbably impassioned performance" of "Paradise City" was deemed better than Jon Cryer doing "Try a Little Tenderness" in Pretty in Pink. Owen got in one last comparison, and it's a unique one: "Hewitt, with her wistful Lily Tomlin dimples, is very sweet, but in this movie she has more hair than personality." I feel like that was the one and only time anyone ever compared Jennifer and Lily.
-- Memorable Music: The score is 23-14, still favoring non-original songs. Wait's two entries are "Can't Get Enough of You Baby" and "Paradise City."
-- Hey, It's ...!: Besides the countless young actors, Jamie Donnelly.
-- Hey, It's 1998!: A graduate has an "I (heart) Leo" t-shirt on underneath her gown. The novelization has a different punchline to the discovery of William and Mike in their compromising position. One cop figures it had something to do with "that Marilyn Manson woman."
-- "You're a stripper?" "I'm a dancer." "An angel stripper." "Oh, I'm the weirdo. You're the one calling Barry Manilow from a phone booth at 2 a.m."
-- Next: Six Days, Seven Nights. On deck: The X-Files.
No comments:
Post a Comment