KISSING A FOOL *1/2 (out of four) (My apologies for an awkward Sphere review; I posted the wrong draft. But you can read it restored on... MY WEBSITE! FILM FrEaK CENTRAL http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Set/7504 Enjoy the show, and remember that I have a section where YOU, the surfer, can recommend movies to ME and other surfers. Just click on "Can't Miss". Do I ever shut up?)
starring David Schwimmer, Jason Lee, Mili Avital, Bonnie Hunt written by James Frey & Doug Ellin directed by Doug Ellin
Post-Chasing Amy, a slew of love-triangle movies: this month we have Kissing A Fool, co-starring Amy's own Lee, and April brings us The Object of My Affection, which may as well be titled Chasing Allan, for it is the story of a woman who falls in love with her gay roommate. (To be absolutely Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon about it, that film stars Schwimmer's Friend Jennifer Aniston.) If only Kevin Smith could write them all...
Schwimmer stars as womanizing Chicago sportscaster Max, who falls in love with his best friend Jay (Lee)'s book editor Samantha (Avital) a mere twenty-four hours after meeting her. They are soon engaged, and Max, because of his own raging libido, grows suspicious of Samantha's fidelity. He convinces Jay to flirt with Samantha during the development of his book, to "test her". The trouble is, Jay might be secretly in love with her.
To stretch this flat, sitcom premise to feature length, the plot is framed by a climactic wedding, at which Bonnie Hunt recounts the triangular tale--the events leading up to the nuptials--to an annoying fat man and his silly girlfriend. Hunt has the best comic timing of anyone in the film; Schwimmer can spin bad dialogue into mildly humorous dialogue; and Lee, poor Lee, is miscast. So hysterically funny in Chasing Amy, here he is forced to repress his comic instincts: to swear, to yell, to talk about oral sex... The script's idea of a character trait is to stress that Jay is a "sensitive man", and then show him drinking Pepto Bismol when he's stewing over his girl trouble. As for Avital, an Israeli actress, she is warm and sweet, but we don't know anything about her character other than that it takes her an incredibly long time to realize the most obvious things. She also too closely resembles the stunningly beautiful Kari Wuhrer, who plays Schwimmer's assistant and personal temptress, turning that particular subplot into an unintentional riff on Vertigo.
There are a handful, a smattering, of good scenes in Kissing A Fool. I enjoyed a moment in a comedy club, during which Jay gets up and asks "Has anyone here ever hated their girlfriend so much you wanted to kill her?" over and over until he's booted off stage. There are also a few obviously improvised lines that are fresher than anything that's on the page. Kissing A Fool is never as clever as the Thursday night joke-machine Friends that spawned Schwimmer's movie career, so save yourself eight dollars and watch three episodes of that series back to back.
-Bill Chambers; March, 1998 (wchamber@netcom.ca)
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