Side Effects (2005)

This is a film about the marketing process involving pharmaceutical reps and doctors. It was written and directed by a woman who was a pharmaceutical rep for ten years.

"So," you are thinking, "is that a good idea?"

Well, let me ask you a question. Do you think Raging Bull would have been a better movie if it had been written and directed by Jake LaMotta?

Apply that same answer here, driven by the same logic.

It might have been a good movie if the auteur had told her story to a professional writer, who then could have crafted it into something worthwhile, and they had then taken the project to a professional director, who might have been able to present both the drama and the humor without stepping all over it. Unfortunately, while the actual writer/director may have a vast amount of knowledge about the subject of pharmaceutical reps, she doesn't have any knowledge about writing and directing. To say this film is amateurish is to offend capable amateurs everywhere. To say this is sophomoric is to insult every sophomore of normal intelligence. Everything about it is ham-fisted. Watching it feels like those embarrassing moments when unfunny, unsubtle people take the stage at a comedy club on open mike night. The auteur has no sense of storytelling, nor what to do with a camera, nor how to design or light a set. Worst of all, she uses silly sitcom background music.

And that only scratches the surface of the film's problems.

I don't know where they dug up the actors, but at least half of them have absolutely no sense of what to do when a camera is pointed in their direction. As the Chicago Tribune wrote, "Several scenes are so excruciatingly awful that one is forced to wonder if there are so few reasonably talented working actors these days that director Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau had to resort to recruiting random people off the streets?"

Cable Access TV has better performances.

Not to mention better production values.

The budget was $190,000 - and the film brags about that fact. I would have guessed much less. All I can say is that none of that money is on screen. The Our Gang kids used to put on more professional-looking shows in their clubhouse. The budget must have used about $188,000 to pay Katherine Heigl (of Grey's Anatomy), and spent the rest leasing a digital camera from Rent-a-Center. One must admit that Heigl was a very good sport about the whole endeavor. She not only supplied the only credible line readings in the film, but even removed her shirt and bra for the team, thus assuring that at least a few people would watch.

Me, for example.

It's a shame that this film turned out to be so bad, because the script has good intentions and probably has some good, if unsurprising, insights - or I least I am assuming that, based upon the author's industry credentials -  but it simply has no idea how to present its points.

Based on this description, this film is an H. It's the worst comedy since Adam Sandler's Going Overboard (which may be the worst ever), and the worst romantic comedy I've ever seen, period. And it looks and sounds like a Cable Access show. Normally our ratings can't go below G (which is essentially an F with Jeff Fahey), but in this case the film defied the laws of the universe in that it actually would have been better with Jeff Fahey in it. Adding Jeff would make it a G, so it has to be below G now.

 

Katherine Heigl

 1900 (1976)

1900 is an ambitious five hour film from one of Italy's greatest directors, Bernardo Bertolucci, and it was supposed to be his masterwork, his overview of Italy's modern history. He hired the best actors in the world. His cinematographer was Vittorio Storaro, who had already done two great Bertolucci films and would eventually go on to win three Oscars and be nominated for another. The music was composed by Ennio Morricone, who was eventually nominated for five Oscars - and those weren't even close to being his best scores! He could easily have been nominated for ten Oscars or more. Morricone was inexplicably not nominated for The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Cinema Paradiso, or Once Upon a Time in America, three of the best original scores written since WW2.

Lots of talent.

The film is also epic in scope. It tells the stories of two boys born on the same estate on the same day in 1900. One is the son of a wealthy landowner (played by Robert DeNiro), the other (Gerard Depardieu) is the bastard son of one of the peasants who works that land. They play together as boys, and remain friends throughout their lives, despite two world wars and great political differences. Their stories are used to tell Italy's story in the 20th century: the class struggles, the gap between rich and poor, how the rich gradually turned toward fascism to establish order, while the poor embraced socialism.

I suppose I've made my point. Five hour film, the best talent in the world, virtually unlimited money and artistic freedom for one of the world's great directors. It also included daring, arguably pornographic scenes featuring big stars in explicit sex acts. As you might guess, 1900 was the hottest ticket at Cannes ...

... until people saw it, whereupon the guys in the business side of the industry started to think it might be marketed as a cure for insomnia. The first half of the movie stays almost entirely in multi-generation family saga territory, while the second half is political, practically a love-poem to socialism, and is greatly oversimplified by cartoon characters. Donald Sutherland, as the local Fascist, turns in a Snidely Whiplash performance of moustache-twirling evil in which he sodomizes children and tortures family pets. I'm not kidding. His performance is so lacking in nuance that he makes Burt Lancaster (also in the movie) seem to be a master of subtlety in comparison.

If you are a mainstream film fan, this is not for you unless you're really into Italian politics. It's long and boring and one-sided. If you are a major film buff, however, 1900 is required viewing just because it is what it is, because so many great talents collaborated on such an ambitious project. You will probably find it deeply flawed, but you may like it, and you may even love it. Although it received some harsh reviews at the time (Ebert and Canby both panned it, and I didn't care much for it either, although I love many of Bertolucci's films), many people praise its genius, and about 70% of IMDb voters score it 8.0 or higher.

 

Dominique Sanda

Stefania Casini

The film is now available for the first time on DVD. It is a Region 2 PAL disk from Finland. (With English sound, and many different languages available in sub-titles). It can be purchased from an American importer. (Click on the image below for details.)

Other Crap:

Movie Reviews:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

Naked Killer (1992)

Rose Ashton.

Hysteria (1998)

Emmanuelle Vaugier

Lynn Snelling