Movie Review: Here On Earth (2000)

A stultifyingly atrocious teen romantic triangle drama, Here On Earth is a stinking miracle of rehashed ideas mixed with bad writing and lousy acting.

Rich teenager Kelley (Chris Klein) is about to graduate as the class valedictorian from a prestigious private college located near a working class suburb of Boston. Demonstrating ridiculously poor judgment on the eve of graduation, Chris goes for a wild joy ride in a brand new Mercedes, antagonizes local blue collar teen Jasper (Josh Hartnett), and makes a move for Jasper's long-time girlfriend Samantha (Leelee Sobieski). The evening ends with an old fashioned car chase and the two boys wreck the local (but fortunately empty) diner in an impressive fireball.

Kelley and Jasper get away with a light sentence that requires them to rebuild the diner, with Kelley forced to stay with Jasper's parents over the summer. The boys spend their days sneering at each other at the construction site, while Sam starts openly flirting with Kelley. They fall in love, but a devastating disease is waiting to dramatically enter the story.

Possibly one of the worst written movies to somehow receive respectable financing and a studio release, Here On Earth was scripted by Michael Seitzman and directed by Mark Piznarski with a reported $15 million budget. While some moments of adequate cinematography and lush scenery are pleasing to the eye, it is otherwise difficult to see how this turkey could have consumed millions in production dollars.

The black hole at the heart of the drama is a script devoid of any genuine emotion, sympathy or believable characters. Kelley and Samantha emerge as the romantic leads, and both are distinctly unlikable and incomprehensible characters, their on-screen behaviour totally inconsistent with their background. Kelley is supposed to be the class valedictorian yet spends the first 30 minutes of the film behaving like a total jerk, and then somehow he has to become the heart of the story. Seitzman throws in an oh-so-original stern dad and dead mom to justify Kelley's actions, and so he's not such a bad kid after all.

Meanwhile Samantha discards a life-long friendship with Jasper to chase after the kid who destroyed her family's business. Desperate to make his heroine more appealing, Seitzman hatches a serious ailment for the young lovers to contend with. They may be a dreadful couple, but they have tragic issues to deal with.

Klein, Hartnett and Sobieski read their lines with dead looks in their eyes, with Klein and Hartnett breaking out into shirtless macho fights at regular intervals. The supporting cast features actors who should know better than to appear as the parents of these kids, including Michael Rooker, Bruce Greenwood and Annette O'Toole.

Somehow in amongst the dross there are dreamy lines of dialogue about what heaven must be like. Never mind that, Here On Earth is cinematic hell, unearthed.

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Movie Review: American Pie (1999)

A teen sex comedy that not as much pushes the envelope as shoves it through the shredder, American Pie is a wild and raunchy film that reset the standard for a questionable sub-genre, and it is also much better than it has any right to be.

Four horny high school friends are about to graduate, and they are all still virgins. Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas), Oz (Chris Klein), Jim (Jason Biggs) and Paul (Eddie Kaye Thomas) make a pact that by the end of prom night, they would each have had their first sexual encounter.

Kevin and Vicky (Tara Reid) are a steady couple: she wants to hear from him that he loves her before they sleep together; Kevin is not so sure that he can utter these words. Oz is a jock on the school lacrosse team; he decides to recast himself as a sensitive choir singer to improve his chances with girls. Sure enough Oz meets Heather (Mena Suvari), and she has to decide whether a reinvented Oz can be trusted.

Jim is hopelessly awkward around girls, and has to deal with a terribly gawky if well-meaning dad (Eugene Levy). After a massively failed attempt to have sex with hot foreign student Nadia (Shannon Elizabeth) is broadcast throughout the school intranet, Jim has to settle with taking blabbermouth Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) to the prom, and she can't stop yacking about band camp. Despite his best efforts to create a fake cool persona, Paul has no prospects when prom night starts; but he unexpectedly meets a cougar in the basement.

Earlier generations had Animal House (1978) and Porky's (1982) as defining films in the never-ending young male's quest to discover the joys of mating. In the very late 1990s, American Pie created it's own mini earthquake of a cultural impact. Sexy pies, MILFs, horny teens watching scrambled cable porn, early internet sex broadcasts, and fun with laxatives: the script by Adam Herz captured and then extrapolated what it meant to be a sex-obsessed teenager at the turn of the millennium, and made no apologies for being all about wanting to get laid.

The young cast of unknowns help make the film relevant to its intended audience, the only surprise being that none of them broke through to a significant career beyond the obvious sequels. The guys mostly disappeared into grade C productions, and the girls generally descended into Maxim photoshoots and faux celebrity status.

Accepted for what it is, American Pie is consistently funny, and wins high marks for boldness and originality. And for a generation of boys who grew up with the film, freshly baked pies would never look the same.

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