Planet Sick-Boy: http://www.sick-boy.com
"We Put the SIN in Cinema"
© Copyright 2004 Planet Sick-Boy. All Rights Reserved.
I love me some Jennifer Garner. I might love her more than her own parents
do. Get between me and Alias, and you'll have a real problem on your hands,
Bub. Sometimes, when I'm not watching Alias, I look up on the wall at
Garner's Elektra poster from Daredevil and pretend she's starring in
whatever crappy show I have on. Sometimes I look at that same Elektra
poster, and then at my Tomb Raider poster, and imagine Lara Croft and
Elektra duking it out in my living room, while I play with my Lego.
But enough about me. Let's talk about how frigging god-awful Garner's new 13
Going On 30 is. I mean, it'd have to be really god-awful for me - a
borderline Garner stalker - to speak ill of, wouldn't it? Yet here I am,
telling you Going is god-awful. And here's something even worse: Garner is
god-awful in it. But she still looks really nice, and that's the only thing
that kept me from bolting out of the theatre like I had diarrhea.
Going starts way back in the mid '80s, where little Jenna Rink (Christa B.
Allen) is celebrating her 13th birthday. Jenna desperately wants to be part
of a Heathers-type clique called Six Chicks, and she'd do just about
anything to accomplish this important feat. That would include giving the
hook to her chunky best friend Matt (Jack Salvatore, Jr.), who spent weeks
creating a very special, personalized birthday gift for the ungrateful,
brown-nosing Jenna. A disastrous round of Seven Minutes in Heaven later,
Jenna loudly announces her hatred toward Matt, declares her wishes to be 30,
and thanks to some pixie dust, she wakes up as Garner the next morning.
I know you're all thinking about Big right now, but Going doesn't have
nearly as much going for it as it would need to deserve the comparison. In
Big, Josh Baskin wished and woke up as an adult, only no time passed between
those two events. In Going, Jenna wishes and wakes up as an adult, but it's
17 years later. And that means that, in addition to the regular
fish-out-of-water stuff, we also have to deal with various - but
frustratingly inconsistent - time and setting adjustments. Jenna isn't at
all freaked out by a cordless phone but just about craps herself over a
cell. She has no problems using a computer, holding her liquor, or dealing
with her "first" menses (the latter, had the filmmakers chosen not to ignore
it completely, could have been an actual teaching tool for Going's target
audience, instead of spoon-feeding them the tired "be nice to your friends"
message).
In Big, it wasn't really a stretch to believe Josh could get a job
test-marketing toys. In Going, Jenna re-designs an entire fashion magazine
from the ground up, amidst sabotage attempts, no less. And if you can
swallow that bullshit, there's a lot more of it to gobble up. Like when
Jenna realizes what has happened and runs, inexplicably, into the arms of
the adult Matt (Mark Ruffalo, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), a guy
she hated more than anything else in the world during her last cognizant
moment. Like Jenna befriending her nauseatingly convenient 13-year-old
neighbor. Like those horrifying "Thriller" (which you know is coming, thanks
to the trailer) and "Love is a Battlefield" dance sequences (which you get
blindsided by). Like Matt being a hip Greenwich Village photographer who
wears a CBGB t-shirt.
And then there's Jenny/Jenna, whose performance is so forced, over-the-top
and, at times, wincingly awful, there isn't a sane person alive who won't be
saying, "So that's why Tom Hanks got an Oscar nomination for Big." You'd
expect this kind of train wreck from the writing team that brought us What
Women Want (turns out they want the same thing as Men - their money and time
returned to them), but Going also has the misfortune of being the film that
could derail the previously promising career of Gary Winick, who
wrote/directed/produced films like Tadpole, Pieces of April, The Tic Code
and Personal Velocity. In terms of Winick's involvement, Going is akin -
though not quite as bad - to Kevin Smith crapping out Jersey Girl. And when
that's your standard bearer, you're in big trouble.
1:37 - PG-13 for some sexual content and brief drug references
========== X-RAMR-ID: 37637 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1274534 X-RT-TitleID: 1131771 X-RT-SourceID: 595 X-RT-AuthorID: 1146 X-RT-RatingText: 3/10
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews