20130819: Comedy Review--Lovelife

Name: Lovelife (1997) 
IMDb: link to Lovelife

Genres: Comedy, Romance, Drama.  Country of Origin: USA.

Cast: Saffron Burrows as Zoey, Bruce Davison as Bruce, Sherilyn Fenn as Molly, Carla Gugino as Amy, Peter Krause as Tim, Matt Letscher as Danny, Jon Tenney as Alan.

Written and directed by: Jon Harmon Feldman.

The Three Acts:

The initial tableaux:
The film is set at some university in the Los Angeles area that has a graduate program in English. The 1997 set looks suitably dated.

In terms of the players,  Danny and Zoey are together, as are Alan and Molly; Amy is interested in Danny; Danny wants Amy to be interested in Tim, but she's not.

Delineation of conflicts:
The film continues to be slow after the introductory passages.

Amy tries to be with Danny, but he's not over Zoey yet. Zoey is with Alan, who breaks up with Molly in a bad way.

Molly is considering Bruce, while taking his TV writing class.  Tim and Amy meet by chance, have dinner together, and more.  Danny drops out of the grad program and takes a job at a video store.  Molly tries to direct Danny back to Amy, but it's a bit late (or early?) for that.

Resolution: do not miss the last three minutes of the film; all the final packaging is done in that interval.

One line summary: Poor as comedy, sludge as romance.

Statistics:

Cinematography:  9/10 Good on fundamentals.

Sound: 7/10 Well done, but not inspiring.  A bit too much like 'Love Boat' moved up to 1997.

Acting:  5/10 The actors follow the script, but few of them are engaging.  Jon Tenny was particularly wooden.  Matthew Letscher was worse; his attempts at wittiness just fail.  Carla Gugino was fine as always, but Sherilyn Fenn was disappointing and Saffron Burrows insufferable.  Bruce Davison gave one of his better performances.

Screenplay: 4/10 All too soon, I was asking myself, 'What will the next round of changes be?' but not really caring.  About 60 minutes in, I hit a wall that was hard to get over---was this thing even worth finishing?

Sure enough, the next 30 minutes were like slogging through mud with a heavy pack.  There were histrionics enough to term the film a whine-fest.  During the last 3 minutes, resolutions did occur, but it seemed a bit late.  Judging from the earlier material, I wondered whether the last match-ups had any chance of permanence.

Final Rating: 5/10 Proceed at your own risk.