The Screengrab : freddie prinze

Summerfest '08: "Summer Catch"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:00:00 GMT

I knew when I started the Summerfest project, in which I review one movie each week with the word 'summer' in the title in hopes of giving faithful Screengrab readers something to do when it's too hot to wash your car, that there would be sacrifices. Since my only criterion for inclusion was the presence of the word 'summer' and Netflix availability, I knew that there would be a couple of movies that would be pretty lousy, especially given the sort of movies that come out in the summer. But I didn't realize until the 2001 Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle Summer Catch arrived in the mail that I truly understood to what depths I was willing to sink in pursuit of the project. A lot of things should have warned me off: the uniformly negative reviews; the fact that I couldn't find anyone who remembered the movie being released, let alone actually seeing it; the dire circumstances predicted by the words "Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle". But I made a promise to you people, and I'm not one to break a promise, even one that involves a hundred minutes of Jessica Biel reading inspirational slogans from an insurance company calendar in voice-over narration. I'm not saying you should watch this movie; I'm not even saying you should go into a room where this movie once sat. I'm just saying:

Put on your cleats and spit on your hands, because we're about to slide face-first into Summer Catch.

THE ACTION: Freddie Prinze Jr., who looked like he might have a career at one point until he kept making movies like Summer Catch, plays a hotshot local playing in the prestigious Cape Cod baseball league. (Much as lame platitudes stand in for dialogue, and Jessica Biel in a bikini stands in for a plot, North Carolina stands in for Massachusetts in the film.) He's got a chance to make it to the big leagues as a pitcher, but first he must overcome a variety of challenges: his dad and his coach, who alternate between telling him that he's the greatest thing since Walter Johnson and telling him that he's the worst thing since Jaime Navarro; his rival, who is heavily tattooed and is an arrogant jerk (well, the rest of the players are arrogant jerks too, but they don't have a lot of tattoos or a demeanor that makes it seem like they're on their way to tie Polly Pureheart to a railroad track); and his complicated love life, which requires him to choose between Brittany Murphy, who does an interesting trick involving beer, and Jessica Biel, who does an interesting trick involving wearing a bikini.

THE PLAYERS: Directed by the guy responsible for Radio and written by the guy responsible for The Temp, Summer Catch clearly wants us to pay no attention to the men behind the curtain. Instead, all of our energies are meant to be devoted to the young hunks and beautiful babes on screen, but in the case of the lead actors, it's difficult, because Prinze has no personality and Biel has a bad personality. Some decent character actors, including Fred Ward and Brian Dennehy, are brought in to class things up a little bit, but both of them are both looking off camera a lot to get a high five sign from their accountants that the check cleared and don't really bring anything to their roles. As for the rest of the cast, this is a movie where guys named Marc, Christian, Corey, Wilmer and Gabriel play guys named Miles, Dale, Rand, Auggie, and Calvin, or something like that, and it's really hard to keep track of which one is which. They're all supposed to be wacky, though. I think.

SUMMER FUN: Although Summer Catch is built around the all-American summer sport of baseball, it's really about the all-American summer sport of attractive teenagers making out with each other. Oddly enough, though, it fails to satisfy on both counts: the baseball action is pretty tissue-thin and there's not enough at stake that you really give a shit whether any of these dufuses make it to the bigs or not, and, by the same token, the supporting characters are all so obnoxious that you begin to actively hope that none of them ever get laid, either. The class conflict angle is undersold and the romantic leads are terminally boring, so the script tries to distract us with the wild-and-crazy antics of Prinze's teammates. Unfortunately, the movie's idea of high-larious comic action is making one of the players an unrepentant chubby-chaser, leading to some highly dignified scenes of him seducing fat girls for comic effect. Oh and also there's the guy who keeps farting in an umpire's face.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Unfortunately for all of us, this is a very different era than the 1980s, and no teenager is going to pay nine bucks to see James Van Der Beek or Freddie Prinze Jr. wearing a Hawaiian shirt. There was a time when they would have made one of the ballplayers a fat guy and let him wear a Hawaiian shirt, but in a movie like this, the only people who are exempt from being blindingly attractive are the fat girls that Marc Blucas uses as slumpbusters a la the ever-classy Mark Grace. It's slightly possible that Brian Dennehy's character, the irascible baseball coach, owns a Hawaiian shirt, but he hasn't worn it in several decades because he's been too busy crushing the dreams of impressionable teenagers.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: By this point, I think I may have already mentioned that Summer Catch features footage -- and rather extensive footage, at that -- of Jessica Biel crammed semi-successfully into a bikini. I'm not going to lie to you folks: if all you're looking for in a summer movie is Jessica Biel in a bikini (and I will by no means condemn you if that is in fact what you're looking for), then Summer Catch will give you what you want in spades. However, that will have to be all you're looking for, because it ain't going to give you anything else, unless you're a devotee of dumb voiceovers, half-baked inspirational speeches, and Freddie Prinze Jr. standing around looking awkward. And while both Biel and Murphy are fun to look at, their characters' first names are Tenley and Dede, which is just upsetting. My advice to you is to search the internet for the images of Ms. Biel in her two-piece (which are plentiful), download them, and look at them for one full minute. Then do this one hundred times, and you will have had a more enjoyable experience of watching Summer Catch than I did. See you next week, summer movie fans!

The Most Unnecessary Movies of 2007

Phil Nugent — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Here at the Screengrab, we've pitched in our two cents on the best films of 2007, and my esteemed colleague John Constantine has weighed in on the year's worst. But to paraphrase the late Roman Hruska, don't mediocre movies deserve a little recognition too? They make up the bulk of each year's crop of movies that get released (and probably also the bulk of those that will barely see the light of day), and every so often you see one whose unexceptionalism really stands out. So now, as the new film year begins to heat up with the arrival of the Sundance Film Festival and the first big commercial releases of 2008, let's take one last minute to salute 2007, by remembering the movies that everyone has already gotten a head start on forgetting.

BROOKLYN RULES: This '80s-set tough-neighborhood movie attracted a little attention upon its release because it was written by Terence Winter, who won acclaim for his work on The Sopranos. Winter must have been worried about being accused of repeating himself if his movie too closely resembled The Sopranos, so he wrote something that, like 98% of the tough-neighborhood movies of the last thirty-odd years, rather resembles Mean Streets, except there's no crazy young Robert De Niro figure, and he is greatly missed. Instead, we have our audience surrogate, the clean-cut young dude who's going to grow up to be a writer and tell this story, played by Freddie Prinze, Jr.; his buddy who ever since he was a kid always wanted to be a gangster, played by Scott Caan; and their harmless goofball pal who was born with a target on his back, played by that asshole who plays the unendurable Turtle on HBO's Entourage. The cast also includes Alec Baldwin as the local hot-tempered mob boss, who demonstrates that his transformation into a comedian hasn't been so complete that seeing him carve someone's ear off at a deli counter isn't exactly on a par with seeing a post-Airplane! Leslie Nielson playing a hooker's mean trick in the 1987 Nuts. The best way to tell this movie apart from a thousand other Mean Streets/GoodFellas knock-offs is that it's the one that goes the farthest to pull its punches; it keeps hinting that terrible things are on the verge of happening to the principle characters, and then nothing really terrible ever does, unless for some reason you think there's something regrettable about finally seeing Turtle get his.

I'M REED FISH: Better you than me, as they say. This strained exercise in indie quirkiness was written by Reed Fish and stars Jay Baruchel (the goofy aspiring boxer in Million Dollar Baby) as Reed Fish, who everyone in his small town loves and counts on to help them make sense of this crazy old world. But Reed has relationship troubles: he's engaged to Kate, played by Alexis Bledel (of Gilmore Girls), but what is he supposed to do about these tender feelings developing between him and Jill, played by Schuyler Fisk (the fetching and talented daughter of Sissy Spacek and There Will Be Blood production designer Jack Fisk)? These are the kind of problems you'd sell your soul to the devil to have. The movie has been failing to involve the audience for quite a long time before it pulls a whammy and reveals that what we're watching is a movie within a movie, and that the actual Reed, Kate, and Jill are in the audience, and experiencing mixed emotions about seeing their intricate love lives captured on film. The "real" Reed, Kate, and Jill are played by actors named, respectively, John Penner, Valerine Azlynn, and Shiri Appleby. It's all very meta. There apparently really is a Reed Fish who wrote the thing; at least, he has his own IMDB and MySpace pages and blog, which is about as real as you can get these days. On the blog, he celebrated the mixed reviews and middling box office of his labor of love by writing, "We didn't do crazy big business or anything, but hey, most movies like ours don't ever even get the chance to get into theaters, so no sweat." Low aspirations can seem an appealing thing compared to full-blown show business megalomania, but you don't really want them to show up quite so nakedly on the screen.

NEXT: Ever since Blade Runner made science-fiction guru Philip K. Dick a recognizable name in the movie industry, Hollywood has practically developed a whole subgenre in big, noisy, cluttered action pictures that are ostensibly "inspired" by Dick's work. In 2006, with his rotoscope-animated A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater actually found a way to film one of Dick's late novels so that the black-comic eeriness would slowly, quietly envelop the viewer and the ideas would have room to breathe. Hollywood gets back on track with this big-budget slice of sound and fury, directed by Lee Tamahori, once the respected director of the emotionally searing Once Were Warriors, now a man who tells the actors where to stand so they'll be properly positioned in relation to the exploding fireballs that the CGI guys will fill in later. Nicolas Cage plays the hero, a man who can see what's going to happen a couple of minutes into the future. This is a talent that comes in handy when he hits the casinos, or tries to evade an FBI capture team led by Julianne Moore, who recites her lines as if she were only using as much of her brain as she can spare while silently counting her money and memorizing her lines for the next Todd Haynes picture. (As for Cage, for all the abuse he takes these days, he remains a talented guy who does generally try to stagger his roles so that he does one picture of at least nominal artistic credibility for each sewer-dwelling money gig. As it happens, this movie came out between Ghost Rider and the National Treasure sequel, suggesting that he may have gotten his calendar dates screwed up.) The whole thing ends with a shockeroo twist ending that effectively cancels out everything that's come before it, which is fine by me, and that also could be seen as a threat to launch a sequel, which is not.

EVER SINCE THE WORLD ENDED and BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF VERNON LESLIE: These aren't as grating as some movies I saw this year, and Angela Goethals does give a very winning performance as the heroine of Vernon Leslie. But between the two of them, they do a lot to sum up why the fake documentary, usually presented in the guise of sci-fi fantasy or satirical comedy, has fast become the most half-assed, tedious subgenre popular among low-budget indie filmmakers. You can see the reasons for its appeal: it enables filmmakers to patch a movie together largely from simple shots of actors talking directly to the camera or "interviewing" one another, and it allows them to pass off things like shitty lighting and cruddy visuals as a mark of "authenticity." But when you set out to use this form to do something like depict life in a world that's been nearly depopulated by a killer virus (as in Ever Since the World Ended), you'd better have a script that's cleverly worked out to the nth degree instead of one that makes it seem that you're just aimlessly kicking the idea around the parking lot. Vernon Leslie is more professional — the supporting cast includes Scott Wilson, Zelda Rubinstein, and genre-movie stalwart Robert Englund — but that just makes its disposable feel that much more irritating. (It's also more derivative; it's about a film crew that's making a tag-along documentary about a serial killer, an idea that, fifteen years earlier, served the makers of the Belgian black comedy Man Bites Dog. The big difference between the two films is that Man Bites Dog was supposed to be about a "real" murderer, whereas Vernon Leslie is set in the B-movie universe inhabited by Michael Myers and Freddy Kruger. It's built on a familiarity with the rules of the slasher-movie genre that makes you want to get the filmmakers a library card.) There's been a bit of an explosion in fake documentaries these last few years, and most of them seem to have been made by people who have no grasp of how much care and planning goes into making something like Zelig seem like a real movie. With any luck, Cloverfield will help to blow the wheels off this particular bandwagon.