What Trump Said When About COVID
Recent Reviews
The Cagneys
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
Something to Sing About (1937)
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
A Lion Is In the Streets (1953)
Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)
Never Steal Anything Small (1959)
Shake Hands With the Devil (1959)
Thursday December 17, 2015
Movie Review: Entourage (2015)
WARNING: SPOILERS
This is the first line we hear. It comes from Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon), as the boys of the title (Drama, E, Turtle) are taking a speed boat to a yacht, where movie star Vince (Adrian Grenier) is partying with bikini-clad and/or topless starlets:
I may have to jerk it before we even get there!
Believe it or not, that's as classy as it gets. That's its high point in class.
Last summer, “Entourage” got slammed for being horribly misogynistic—for showing slinky women humping stars and their hangers on without showing them as fully developed characters—but it’s actually worse than that. Because the more we see of a woman, the worse she is.
Take the tribulations of E (Kevin Connolly). Please. Longtime girlfriend Sloan (Emmanuelle Chriqui) is pregnant with his child, but she broke it off with him for sleeping with ... I forget. Some relation. In the past. Anyway, he’s now humping some blonde starlet (Sabina Gadecki), who texts him, “I want your cock”; but then she breaks it off with him a minute later. I forget why. That night, he meets a nice brunette and bangs her in Turtle’s room. The next day, just as Sloan is saying she’s ready to make it work again, Blondie texts him that she’s pregnant. Oops. At the restaurant where they’re supposed to meet, Brunette shows up and confesses she’s got an STD. Oops again.
Punchline? They’re roommates, and messing with him because he had the temerity to sleep with both of them on the same day: Blondie in the morning when they were dating, and Brunette 12 hours later after Blondie broke up with him. They’re getting back at E for ... um ... what exactly?
Chicks, man.
Meanwhile, the better female characters from the TV show—Ari’s wife, Shauna, Dana Gordon—are given zilch to do.
The main plot point is Vince’s latest movie, “Hyde,” which he’s also directing. So far, he’s spent $100 million but needs more. So the moneyman, Texas yahoo Larsen McCredle (Billy Bob Thornton), sends his yahoo-er son, Travis (Haley Joel Osment), to LA to see if it’s worth it. He says it’s not. He says Johnny, who has a supporting role, has to go; then he says Vince has to go. His recommendation, in other words, is to throw away the star of the film and eat the $100 million and start over. That’s like getting rid of Johnny Depp in a Johnny Depp movie. Why would he ever suggest such a thing? Because, it turns out, Vince is schtupping Emily Ratajkowski, the girl from the “Blurred Lines” video, and Travis wants to bone her, too.
So our boys win by meeting someone even douchier than they are.
God, maybe this thing is even more insulting to men.
“Hyde,” of course, winds up critically acclaimed, grosses $450 worldwide, and Drama wins a Golden Globe for best supporting actor. At the podium he shouts “Victory!” his catchphrase from “Viking Quest,” the bad 1990s-era TV show he starred in. That’s our merciful end.
“Entourage,” in contrast, was critically maligned (20% from top critics on RT) and died at the box office ($32 mil, despite debuting in more than 3,000 theaters). In terms of TV adaptations, if you adjust for inflation, it’s 66th out of 84, behind such humdingers as “My Favorite Martian,” “The Nude Bomb” and “A Very Brady Sequel.’
Here’s the bright side.
One, Turtle is always wearing a Yankees cap, so it’s nice to associate those bastards with this shitty movie.
Two, the people here, the stars and players of L.A., are so shallow and pointless that it may help us take at least one step toward curing our long, international, nightmarish obsession with celebrity.
Three, the ride is most assuredly over.