My best guess is that Lawrence, Reeves, et al. get away with Constantine precisely because it is so flagrantly wrong. It patches together myth, history, and fiction with such postmodern glee that no single injury or injustice in its plotline piracies can be found. (LEK)
HITCH
Alexander “Hitch” Hitchens (Will Smith) gives crash courses in getting to that next level. He is New York’s “date doctor.”
The narrative thread follows Hitch’s newest project: shy accountant Albert (Kevin James) tries to woo heiress Allegra Cole, (Amber Valletta) paralleling Hitch’s own relationship with gossip columnist Sara (the sultry Eva Mendes).
The film is the next and most successful step in director Andy Tennant’s (Sweet Home Alabama) path to becoming the next Gerry Marshall (Pretty Woman) and Will Smith’s quest to become the most non-threatening African-American in popular culture since Fat Albert.
This is not When Harry Met Sally, but Hitch does perform one of that film’s most astonishing tricks: Hitch believably turns Kevin James into a romantic lead worthy of Amber Valletta. If nothing else, the film is inspiring for all those goofy, awkward, smart Harvard men with few social skills. (SAW)
INSIDE DEEP THROAT
Inside Deep Throat is not the documentary stuff of your father’s History Channel. It’s not quite Discovery Channel fare, either, though some scenes on the finer points of procreation and the location of genitalia might lead you to believe otherwise.
Inside Deep Throat combines recent interviews with extracts from period movies, music, and television to recreate the rocky history of Deep Throat. The low-budget pornographic movie became both “the most profitable film in motion picture history” and the cause of a national moral and legal debate.
After its initial tour-de-force presentation of an unusually volatile chapter in history, Inside Deep Throat begins to lose steam about two-thirds of the way through. It loses sight of its principal and most compelling storyline—the rise and fall of its stars Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems and director Gerard Damiano—and begins grabbing at socio-historical miscellany to spice things up. The resulting mishmash of music, fashion, and other cultural trivia resembles a bad VH1 “I Love the (insert date here)” special, when the demigods of yesterday’s pop culture are dragged out and rehashed for those of us who’d either never cared or had forgotten. (LEK)
—Movie reviews written by Steven N. Jacobs, Laura E. Kolbe, and Scoop A. Wasserstein.