ILoveYouBethCooper Tagged Articles at Cinematical

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
Here's my problem with the picture: a furiously-filmed chase through the streets of Paris should be spectacular and thrilling. Instead, it's incoherent, routine, even disappointing. Director Stephen Sommers (The Mummy, Van Helsing) turns in another by-the-numbers action spectacle, this time starring Dennis Quaid, Channing Tatum, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Marlon Wayans, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. There are better ways to waste your time and money. Skip it. Also on Blu-ray.

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The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
Tony Scott's remake is a higher-grade disappointment, coming achingly close to delivering an unqualified success. Derailed by John Travolta's unrepentant scenery-chewing, which goes far beyond the bounds of bad taste, and an unhealthy preoccupation with explaining everything, the film motors along reasonably well, fashioning a paranoid tale of post-9/11 terror and ticking time bomb suspense. Denzel Washington is eminently watchable, and James Gandolfini has a good turn as the Mayor of NYC. Recommended with reservations. Rent it. Also on Blu-ray.

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I Love You, Beth Cooper
As I wrote in my review, Larry Doyle's very funny book has been transformed into a dreadfully boring movie. Hayden Panettiere and Paul Rust are miscast as a rule-breaking dream girl and the boy who loves her from afar, respectively. The spend a night together that seems endless. Chris Columbus directed, without distinction. Skip it. Also on Blu-ray.

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Also out: Aliens in the Attic.

Indies on DVD, more Blu-ray picks, and Collector's Corner -- after the jump!

Oh, Beth Cooper. She might have slayed readers under the pen of Larry Doyle, but she didn't gain any fans on the big screen. Here are three rants about the film's failings, and this certainly isn't a case of movie reviewers not getting it -- the Chris Columbus production couldn't even pull in its $18 million production budget (it grossed $13.5).

But I Love You, Beth Cooper also failed in its great marketing scheme. As The Wall Street Journal reports, Twentieth Century Fox had big plans for the comedy. They wanted a viral media sensation that would pique curiosity and create a whole false world of copycat fans. See, they paid a high school valedictorian $1,800 to reveal a classmate crush during her graduation speech. Actually, first she was told to share a secret, but "then the next day they said it had to be about my crush. I was like, 'Oh that changes things a bit!'' She did as she was told, infuriated school officials, and the YouTube clip was practically ignored (garnering less than 2,000 views).

It seems that studios haven't yet learned about the fickle world of the Internet, and how audience reaction can never be succinctly measured. Share an opinion one day and it will be applauded and praised. Share it again later and you'll become the scourge of rampant fandom. It all depends on the wind.

When I read I Love You, Beth Cooper -- and wrote about the book here a few months ago -- I knew that the on-the-way film adaptation would be thorny. Now that I've seen the film, I can say that it is not merely thorny; it is a textbook case of an adaptation gone wrong. Working from his own mostly delightful novel, Simpsons vet Larry Doyle is like a novice driver who, in trying to avoid potholes, veers to hit every one. And, in what he should consider a betrayal of epic proportions, Doyle gets absolutely no help from anyone involved with the film -- not from the cast, not from the editor, and certainly not from director Chris Columbus, who is utterly helpless when his material is not inherently strong.

I hasten to add that I Love You, Beth Cooper is not that bad -- I think it's a bit better than our Peter Martin lets on, and certainly better than our Eric D. Snider insists. But the movie -- still about a geeky, virginal high school senior who confesses his love for the class hottie in his graduation speech -- is sappy, muddled, and just mystifyingly unfunny. Consider that the novel is hip, razor-sharp, and hilarious, and you start to get a sense of what a rare specimen this adaptation is. So what happened?

How do you transform a very funny book into a dreadfully boring movie? I laughed more from reading the first five pages of Larry Doyle's novel than I did during the entirety of Chris Columbus' film version of I Love You, Beth Cooper, despite the fact that Doyle wrote the screenplay. Much of the dialogue is lifted directly from the book, but when spoken on screen, the lines fall painfully flat. That leaves the attempts at physical humor, which are constant, and will tickle to death only those who love to see pratfalls: "Look, Mommy, man fall down and cry out in agony! Ha, ha!"

Leaving aside the source material and the film's relative faithfulness to it, I Love You, Beth Cooper might have worked as either a joyful, gleefully mischievous, yet ultimately conservative rebel yell (a la Ferris Bueller's Day Off) or as a funny yet thought-provoking tale of teenagers finally growing up (a la Dazed and Confused). Like those two infinitely superior movies, I Love You, Beth Cooper takes place over the course of one eventful day in the life of its teen-aged subjects, but Columbus can't decide whether the movie should be an uncomfortable comedy of embarrassment and humiliation or a sweet, sentimental romance. The tone wavers uncertainly throughout -- often within individual scenes -- and the film's general inertia quickly becomes wearisome.

Hayden Panettiere makes for an unlikely Beth Cooper. She's meant to be a high school dream girl, a fantasy figure concocted by the awkward, hapless Denis Cooverman (Paul Rust) through all the years that he's sat behind her in class and stared at her picture on his bedroom ceiling.

I've had my share of all-nighters, and sure, some of them were for a perfectly legitimate reason like studying, but I'll be honest with you: most of them were for reasons that for the sake of propriety, I shouldn't go into here -- and I know I'm not the only one. Who doesn't have a story about that one great night? Or that one party that couldn't be missed? Exactly, we all do, and maybe that's why we all love a good story about some wild and crazy all-nighter.

This Friday, audiences will be treated to another tale full of all-night shenanigans with I Love You, Beth Cooper, which follows a high school nobody who changes everything when he utters those five words during his graduation speech. So just like every 'all-nighter' film to go before it, Cooper is about breaking out of your comfort zone and watching the best laid plans go to waste -- and usually our hero or heroine gets to fall in love along the way. So with that in mind, let's take a look back at seven other films that are about our search for a good time.

1. The Allnighter
Well, you can't have a list about all-nighters without including this 80's turkey starring The Bangles' lead singer, Susanna Hoffs. Even Joan Cusack (the patron saint of 80's comedy) couldn't save this story about a group of girls looking for a good time on their last night before graduation. The Allnighter was written and directed by Hoff's mom, and was meant to be the singer's big break into acting. Unfortunately for her, the film was so bad that not only did it fail at the box office, it managed to turn the gal off from ever pursuing a film career at all.

After the jump: find out which other all-nighter flicks made the list...

Quick: what actress said she would only go naked for an Oscar-caliber role? If you answered Hayden Panettiere, you'd be right. (Of course, if you answered Megan Fox or a few dozen other actresses, you'd also be right.) Two years ago, the budding Heroes starlet claimed: "I'd never go nude or shave my head – unless it's for an Oscar!" Either things have changed, or I Love You, Beth Cooper is a sleeper contender for an Academy Award. Chris Columbus' film, based on the book by Larry Doyle, opens on Friday. Panettiere stars in the titular role as a freshly-graduated high school student who decides to show a nerdy valedictorian (Paul Rust) the night of his life. And her breasts.

Panettiere confidently drops her towel in front of Rust in the locker room scene. "It didn't bother me much," she told People. "I don't think it takes much thought, and I don't think it takes much preparation as an actor," she explained to Parade. "I didn't find it very hard being naked. It's like I drop my towel and that's it." How naked was she? "I was really naked," she elaborated to E! Online. "I had these little sticky petals on my boobs, but that was about it."

Sounds like a hot, naked scene -- except the movie is rated PG-13 ("for crude and sexual content, language, some teen drinking and drug references, and brief violence") and you may be able to see more of the 19-year-old Panettierre's body in a bikini (the trailer hints that her exposed flesh is limited to her bare back, above the waist). Kudos to Panettiere for getting as much publicity as possible for her movie while keeping her private parts private -- for now.

I Love You Beth Cooper
A high school nerd proclaims his love for the most popular girl in school during his graduation speech and in response she decides to give him the night of his life. In some ways this looks like a by the numbers high school comedy, but there's charm and wit at work here. And there's no denying the appeal of Heroes' Hayden Panetierre as the object of our protagonist's affection. Here's William's take on the trailer, and you can see the movie on July 10.

Lesbian Vampire Killers
This movie wears its Shaun of the Dead influence pretty obviously and it's hard not to love a concept like lesbian vampires. Fun little homage or humorless knock-off? Time will tell, but I'm feeling optimistic about this one. Two Welsh lads (one hefty, one not so much) have their hiking excursion interrupted by a pack of blood sucking lesbians. No U.S. release info for this one just yet.

I'd like to think that our own Eric D. Snider knows what's funny, if only twice a day, so when he recommended Larry Doyle's "I Love You, Beth Cooper" last summer, I swiftly added it to my List of Stuff to Read Eventually and have succeeded in putting it off ever since. (I did, however, get around to "Apathy and Other Small Victories," and was consequently amused. Maybe I'm only off on these things by a year or so.)

Anyway, it's been long enough that we're getting a movie of the same name, and Fox has posted the first trailer on its official website -- scary timing, given Eugene's From Page to Screen column last week, on which Doyle himself wrote: "The first trailer should be popping up on the net any day now." (Oh. Guess I should've read that part first.)

Anyway, it does seem to be the PG-13 all-in-one-night humiliation fest that all previous descriptions had suggested. Paul Rust does look like the ideal dweeby valedictorian, and Hayden Panettiere does look like exactly the kind of girl one might throw it all out there for. (Did I say that out loud?)

Like it or not, I Love You, Beth Cooper opens July 10th, and should not be confused with this year's I Love You, Man or I Love You, Phillip Morris.

So there are these two high school dudes, right, and though they're seniors, they're so aggressively geeky and socially inept that losing their virginity doesn't even seem like a real-world prospect. But before they leave for college, they have the opportunity to have one last craaaaazy night of adventure that could well culminate in getting laid – in addition to drunk, beaten up, and/or arrested.

Wait: have you heard this one before? You could be forgiven for thinking – or at least hoping – that Superbad was the last word on this subject. But like it or not, here comes I Love You Beth Cooper, adapted by Simpsons vet Larry Doyle from his own novel and directed by that stalwart of the bland and inoffensive, Chris Columbus.

The book reads, indeed, like Superbad by a Simpsons writer: hyperactive, incessantly self-referential, with occasional bursts of sincerity in an attempt to give the proceedings some emotional heft. It's often very funny, though usually due to an oddball choice of words by Doyle rather than anything situational. ("This is... odd," he she-grunted.") Where Superbad balanced out the raunch with a disarming sweetness, Beth Cooper goes for a sort of detached, intellectual cool, obviously sympathizing with its besotted protagonist (Doyle claims that "Denis Cooverman" is inspired by his own high school experience) but also taking not-inconsiderable joy in pounding him into the dirt. Mileage may vary; I can see how this approach would seem insufferable to some.

With the R-rated comedy becoming one of the hottest trends of the past couple years (thanks, in part, to a dude named Judd Apatow), we're starting to see a bunch more creative, down-to-earth (albeit foul-mouthed) comedies hit theaters -- with some, like Tropic Thunder, Burn After Reading and Knocked Up, fighting for awards consideration. But what will 2009 bring? Are we on a similar path as both 2007 and 2008, or will the new year bring back the boring, familiar plot threads and idiotic characters? Here's what we're looking at:

*Film(s) to watch that month
++Apatow involvement
# Best comedy of the year

January: Bride Wars, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, New in Town (Grade: C-)
February: *++Fanboys, He's Just Not That Into You, Pink Panther 2, Confessions of a Shopaholic, Miss February, Fired Up, *Youth in Revolt (Grade: B)
March: All About Steve, *I Love You, Man, This Side of the Truth, The Accidental Husband, Adventureland, The Janky Promoters, *Monsters vs. Aliens (Grade: A-)
April: The Ugly Truth, *Observe and Report, 17 Again (Grade: B+)
May: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, My Life in Ruins, Next Day Air, *Bruno, Night at the Museum 2, *Up (Grade: B)
June: Land of the Lost, The Hangover, *++Year One (Grade: B+)
July: Ice Age 3, *I Love You Beth Cooper, 500 Days of Summer, G-Force, *++#Funny People, *They Came from Upstairs (Grade: A)
August: Julie & Julia, *Shorts, Dance Flick, Post Grad, Max's Mardi Gras (Grade: C)
September: *Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Grade: B)
October: *Toy Story (3-D), Zombieland (Grade: B)
November: Tooth Fairy, *The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Three Stooges, Old Dogs (Grade: B)
December: Alvin and the Chipmunks 2, *The Princess and the Frog (Grade: B)

So based on early buzz, trailers and so forth, I'd say the best months for comedy in 2009 will be March and July. What do you think about the upcoming slate, and which comedies are you looking forward to the most?