When Will I Be Loved (2004)

reviewed by
Jon Popick


PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com

"We Put the SIN in Cinema"

© Copyright 2004 Planet Sick-Boy. All Rights Reserved.

It's the latest from James Toback and you know what that means: Lots of

talking, a really swank loft apartment in Manhattan, Central Park orgies,

weird cameos (Mike Tyson, Lori Singer, Damon Dash) and plenty of sex scenes

featuring love being delivered from behind. Neve Campbell renders and

receives the aforementioned romance (sadly, the girl-girl scene with Joelle

Carter is short and relatively skin-free).

Neve's Vera is the daughter of wealthy parents who have set her up in a

ridiculously nice loft despite their objections to boyfriend Ford (Fred

Weller), a fast talking street hustler. We don't know they're in a

relationship immediately, as Toback shows them separately and uses

contrasting music to tell both of their stories (Vera: Classical; Ford:

Hip-hop). Things eventually end up in an Indecent Proposal situation, where

Ford essentially pimps Vera out to a wealthy Italian count (Dominic

Chianese) so he can turn a quick buck. I mean, it's not like Vera needs the

money, right?

I dug Toback's Two Girls and a Guy, but he lost me with Black and White.

Loved is a step in the right direction, but it still plays like a film made

by an aging writer-director who is still trying to prove he's hip. Instead,

it comes off as Larry Clark-Lite ®, with the sex included and glorified just

to be titillating. Campbell's performance is the type that people will call

"brave" because she spends a lot of screen minutes in the buff, and has the

aforementioned girl-girl scene. It's too bad she's wasted in such a middling

picture.
==========
X-RAMR-ID: 38678
X-Language: en
X-RT-ReviewID: 1318700
X-RT-TitleID: 1136559
X-RT-SourceID: 595
X-RT-AuthorID: 1146

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