
Victoria
The best thing about Victoria isn’t actually its technical prowess—it’s the lead performance from the mesmerizing Laia Costa as the title character.
The best thing about Victoria isn’t actually its technical prowess—it’s the lead performance from the mesmerizing Laia Costa as the title character.
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What a grim experience.
Mainly incompetent, "Behaving Badly," directed by Tim Garrick (he also
co-wrote the screenplay with Scott Russell, adapting it from a book)
tries to maintain an ironic and cynical tone, hoping that irony and
cynicism will automatically translate into "comedy." It doesn't. What
ends up happening is that the so-called irony tips over into Tucker
Max-esque nihilism from almost the first moment of the film, which could
certainly be funny in some cases but isn't here. The proceedings are
then complicated further with half-assed spiritual considerations that
are barely taken seriously by the film-makers and yet clearly are meant
to be taken very seriously by the characters, as well as a sweet and
shmoopy romance that doesn't work at all in the craven environment set
up in the film. I found myself grasping at straws, a desperate woman, as
I watched: The principal (Patrick Warburton) was doing some funny
character work. And Selena Gomez is adorable and manages to float away
unscathed. But other than that, it's an unfunny comedy, populated by
irredeemable sociopaths.
Rick Stevens (even his name sounds fake) is played by Nat Wolff, who was
so troubled and interesting in "Palo Alto," and he plays a similar
character here. Rick, like Ferris Bueller, talks directly into the
camera and narrates his own life, although without Ferris' charm or
humor. His face shows no expression as he tells us all of the horrible
things that have been happening: his mother attempting suicide, a dead
body found in his trunk, etc. The film opens with a shot of his bulging
crotch, and his deadpan voice telling us that, on top of everything else,
he has crabs. Things go downhill from there.
Rick's mother (Mary Louise Parker) is a falling-down drunk who goes to
rehab every April, bottle of vodka stashed in her purse. Rick's older
sister Kristen (Ashley Rickards) is a stripper who is applying to
Stanford. Rick's father (Cary Elwes) is out of the picture, except when
he shows up begging to borrow Rick's video camera for nefarious
purposes. Rick, clearly, has some strikes against him in the DNA
department.
He is secretly in love with a girl named Nina Pennington (Selena Gomez),
who is so pure that she wants to be a priest when she grows up, and
spends her free time volunteering. Rick pays strippers for awkward
blow-jobs, and then brags about it, and also makes a bet with a kid at
school that he can somehow bang Nina.
At the same time as all of this is going on, Rick is also busy losing
his virginity to his best friend's mother, Mrs. Bender (poor Elisabeth
Shue, whom I wanted to airlift out of her own scenes to safety). Mrs.
Bender comes on to Rick the second her son leaves the room, and Rick
stammers, "Are you trying to seduce me, Mrs. Bender?" "The Graduate" did
it better.
The set direction is painfully generic, the houses looking uninhabited
by real people, and decorated by those who are interested in renting
their homes out to porn directors.
"Behaving Badly" wants to have it both ways. It wants to be a gross-out
comedy, with bodily functions spewing forth in almost every scene, and
naked girls, and kids behaving badly, and debauchery, and horrible
parents, and oh, how funny and gross it is when women over a certain age
still want sex. But then it also wants to have a serious sweet side,
where our hero contemplates what God wants him to do, and where he gets
to have an innocent pay-off kiss with the saintly girl of his dreams.
There are other films that do manage to have it both ways, but "Behaving
Badly" isn't one of them.
The view of women is appalling in "Behaving Badly," which I suppose
shouldn't be a surprise, but it's disheartening nonetheless. Women are
either pure, and therefore valuable and worthy of respect (when they're
not being plotted and schemed over, that is), or they are sexually
active, and therefore monstrous and diseased. Good times. In one of the
scenes involving a stripper, the stripper whips her shirt off, exposing
her breasts, and Rick the narrator drones to us, "I know this is bad,
but..." and then the scene rewinds again and again and again to show her
taking her shirt off, three times in a row.
Yes, "this is bad." You said it, not me.
This message came to me from a reader named Peter Svensland. He and a fr...
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