Planet Sick-Boy: http://www.sick-boy.com "We Put the SIN in Cinema"
© Copyright 2001 Planet Sick-Boy. All Rights Reserved.
If you think turning one of Hitchcock's greatest thrillers into a romantic comedy is a silly idea, just wait until you see how it shakes out on the screen. Not only is the amateurish Head Over Heels based on a lame premise, but its co-stars are supermodels, too. Have you ever seen a supermodel act? There's a reason Cindy Crawford has been banned from appearing in feature films.
Heels' voiceover opening introduces us to Amanda Pierce (Monica Potter, Patch Adams), who moved from Podunk, Iowa to Manhattan, where she restores Renaissance paintings for the Metropolitan Museum of Art with her lesbian best friend (China Chow) and three elderly women who warn her of the dangers of not having a personal life. Amanda has, like, the worst judgment in men and stuff, catching her latest beau (Timothy Olyphant, Gone in 60 Seconds) in bed with a lingerie model.
Even though she's completely written off the idea of finding the right guy, Amanda falls for a handsome neighbor named Jim Winston (Freddie Prinze Jr., Boys and Girls), whose apartment is visible from her window. Amanda becomes obsessed with Jim, trying to convince herself that he is flawed in one way or another. When she witnesses an apparent murder in Jim's flat, nobody believes her, and she starts her own investigation into Jim's surprising life. Could it all be a big misunderstanding? What're you, retarded?
Instead of being laid up with a broken leg like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, Amanda's handicap is her roommates. There are four of them, and they're all super-tall, super-thin supermodels. In typical Hollywood fashion, they're a predictable cross-section of what us normal folk assume prowl the catwalk - a WASP (Shalom Harlow), an Aussie bumpkin (Sarah O'Hare), a husky-voiced Russian (Ivana Milicevic) and an African-American (Tomiko Fraser). They teach Amanda how to take advantage of men and give her the obligatory makeover, even though she's better (and more healthy) looking than any of them are.
Potter's Amanda is tongue-tied, clumsy and comes off as a less talented Julia Roberts (with a bad blonde wig), or a more talented Christina Applegate, depending on if she's whored up or not. There are worse people to be compared to, I guess, but Potter looks so much like Roberts, it's almost distracting. Prinze is too young and too goofy to be taking on roles like this, but it is interesting to point out that, like Traffic's Javier Rodriguez, his character has a hard-on for kids and baseball. There's a scene where Prinze punches someone in the face, but his wrist is as limp as Ricky Martin's.
Most of the jokes in Heels' script (penned by a hodgepodge of four writers) revolve around the fact that supermodels are shallow, which is hardly a revelation. Director Mark S. Waters, who displayed a talent for successfully handling dark comedy with The House of Yes, adds nothing to the weak script. The Go-Go's song which shares the same name as the title seemed to be added as an afterthought.
1:40 - PG-13 for sexual content, crude humor and language
========== X-RAMR-ID: 28935 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 173004 X-RT-TitleID: 1104725 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