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The Shape of Things
(Reviewed April 15, 2003)
-
No exaggeration, this movie is so bad that I kept expecting the camera to pull back and reveal that we were watching a purposely awful "movie within the movie" being filmed. No such luck--it stays lousy all the way to the end.
I had high hopes for this one, since it is written and directed by Neil LaBute, but he sure is a "hit and miss" kind of guy. "In the Company of Men" and "Your Friends and Neighbors" were good, "Possession" was pretty decent up until the ridiculous action-packed ending, and "Nurse Betty" was a muddled mess. "The Shape of Things" is his worst film by far, like a badly written string of talky set pieces pounded out by a peevish college hump who couldn't get laid and wanted the world to see how terribly mean and unfair life is. Looks matter and people can be manipulative--wow, what a pair of deep revelations!
Rachel Weisz plays a flakey art student (note: redundant?), a role for which she is at least 10 years too old--but she also is one of the movie's producers, which must have been good for some job security. She is a gratingly annoying "free spirit" (God help us) who we are supposed to believe a pudgy loser would find irresistible. Uh...don't think so.
Paul Rudd plays the frog she badgers and cajoles into becoming, well, less of a frog. To give the guy some credit, I would guess that he (or, indeed, nearly anyone) can act better than what we see onscreen; he seems to have been directed to come off like the biggest dipshit in the universe. This makes a scene in which another girl (the delicious blond babe Gretchen Mol) admits to always finding him "cute" baffling in the extreme, because all we see is a creepy kind of overeager forced good-naturedness combined with childishly stupid naivete. But hey, maybe chicks dig that.
Frederick Weller is the only character I enjoyed watching, because he was such a rude, direct but often strangely low-key prick. He was the only member of the cast that had any classic "LaBute"ness to him, in that I could picture his character sharing a drink with the two vicious bastards from "In the Company of Men."
One last complaint: The Elvis Costello soundtrack is fucking horrible. If you like that tone-deaf douchebag's music, maybe you'll eat the stuff right up, but to me it only made a bad movie even worse.
Back Row Grade: D-
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