Call a leer a leer

True confession: Who doesn't want to see Jennifer Love Hewitt playing a Texasmom turned massage parlor hooker?

The Client List is another opportunity for Jennifer Love Hewitt to show off allher wardrobe choices.
Deep sociological study? No. Maxim magazine cover come to the small screen? Yes.
Jamie-Lynn Sigler explored similar territory in an equally-classy USA originalmovie.

OK, I'll admit. it. I'll be watching Lifetime at 8 Monday night or more likely DVRing it.

Unlike Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurawik, I'm not going to pretend there are some deep sociological examination motivations behind the unlikely tune in either. No, this is all gratuitous viewing, all about seeing Jennifer Love Hewitt playing a hot mom turned massage parlor prostitute. (As a bonus, she's a Texan in the movie from a fictional town, guaranteeing unbelievable accents).

Yes, it really is as classy as it sounds.

Like many in my generation, I grew up watching Jennifer Love Hewitt on Party of Five (though I was much more of a Neve Campbell man back then) and while this show choice is a largely embarrassing admission today (re-watch Party of Five these days and it's so over-the-top angst-riden that it's hard to imagine anyone could have ever enjoyed it let alone made it appointment TV like I did), it's a key to Lifetime's original movie The Client List.

The formula for basic cable networks' most buzzed-over productions is pretty simple these days: Put a beautiful former TV series star in a role where she'll have good cause to wear a lot of lingerie.

See Jamie-Lynn Sigler in the USA original Call Me: The Rise and Fall of Heidi Fleiss. High-brow marketing it's not.

Which is fine as long as people don't pretend it's something else. There's nothing wrong with some trash TV. The reason that Jennifer Love Hewitt has been dominating Google search trends for most of the weekend has absolutely nothing to do with a desire from budding amateur sociologists to investigate what could cause a young mom who lost her job to go into massage parlor hookerdom. Instead, it's all about a desire to see what basic-cable-testing outfits Lifetime's stuffed Hewitt and her considerable assets in.

Still, critics like Zurawik (and he's not the only one) cannot help themselves.

"Normally, I wouldn't be writing about a made-for-TV movie on prostitution," the Baltimore Sun's prominent TV voice begins his piece. "But The Client List starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, is different. The sociology of this Lifetime film that premieres Monday night at (8) is what matters."

Sure it is.

Zurawik continues later, "That's what makes The Client List worth looking at and thinking about: It is all about prostitution as it relates to the economy. Furthermore, I believe it is barometer, as only pop culture can be, of how bad the economy is still perceived to be by middle-class Americans. And that means big trouble for Democrats come November. But let me explain how Jennifer Love Hewitt as a prostitute speaks to the anxiety and pain middle-class Americans are feeling today."

Yes, he made the argument that a titillating tone Lifetime original could hurt the Democrats at the ballot box four months from now. Come on Zurawik!

You've seen the clips on The Joy Behar Show where Jennifer Love Hewitt talks about the movie with Joy as a running montage of scenes of Hewitt in negligees from The Client List plays on a big screen in the background (by my count, there are three different babydolls alone and a whip cream scene, not that I could concentrate on such frivolities while concern for the Democrats' hold in Congress was racing through my mind).

And Lifetime's own poster of the movie features a basic cable nude Hewitt sprawled across a bed while a shadowy man leers in the background. In other words, the poster shows what most of the viewers of this "classic character study" will look like.

Even Hewitt isn't trying to sell the movie as basic cable's version of an Oscar winner. This isn't HBO. They're not even pretending it's high art.

Trash TV may rule the world, but let's not pretend it's saving it too.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a DVR to program.

A preview of the deepness that is The Client List:

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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