When Will I Be Loved

This movie got a lot of undeserved juice from Roger Ebert's four-star review, and it's just awful. I've liked some of Toback's other work, particularly "Fingers", but this thing feels like a really boring home movie on autopilot. It's purportedly about the non-adventures of this bratty little rich girl (Neve Campbell) and her no-account boyfriend (Fred Weller) and, ultimately, their scheme to seduce a rich Italian count (Dominic Chianese) out of some major money. But it takes some time to get to this plot point, and up till then, the movie just meanders in a cinema-verite sort of way that makes it seem like Toback can use it as an excuse for the picture being a dud. It's like he's saying, "Well, whatever we shot, we shot. I can't be held responsible for the randomness of events."

The movie goes from Neve Campbell meeting one person on the street to another in what I'm sure Toback would insist was "character development", but it's done in such a way that it all rings false. It's scripted without being scripted. In another words, it's contrived. When Neve's college professor (played by Toback) explains what he thinks is going on with Neve and her head games, you can almost hear the gears locking in the background. It might be the most mechanical ad-libbed sequence in history.

Toback's use of celebrity here is also peculiar. The Mike Tyson cameo is pretty funny; he actually gives the movie a momentary spark. But when Toback has Neve recognizing a bit actress like Lori Singer on the street like she's Jane Fonda, I wonder what world he's living in. This whole "expository" part feels like padding, like Toback didn't have enough legit material to go around. Then, when the action shifts to the "scheme" in the final twenty minutes, it's good - it's the best part of the film. But the effect is a little jarring. Toback goes from a lazy, dawdling atmosphere to a sequence that's scripted tighter than Abbott & Costello's Who's on First, and it just doesn't work. The two forms don't really mesh, and you get the feeling Toback only had twenty good minutes in him to begin with - the rest is like a warm-up, like running in place to get the circulation going. And I hate to sound like an old prude (which I'm far from being), but the nude shower scene is an absolute cheap shot; Neve Campbell is just being exploited here. It has nothing to do with her character or anything else; it's completely gratuitous. But I guess anything goes when you have no material. Minus credits, this thing is barely over an hour and fifteen minutes. It hardly seems worth being made.

I found Toback's earlier film Black and White mildly diverting, so gave this one a whirl. The scuttlebutt was that this was Neve Campbell's best (and sexiest) performance so far. Well, that much may be true-ish, but the rest of this film is, in places, almost unwatchably bad.

Most of the characters (or should I say caricatures - take the Italian mogul: did anybody find this man even remotely believable?) are without a shred of originality, and in the case of Ford, bear virtually no resemblance to human beings of the sort you or I might actually meet. It may be that his relentless hustling is *intended* to show him as a pathetic individual - but there is a fine line between depicting characters we may not like but in whom we can invest some interest as to their fate; and, as happens in this film, showing people who are irredeemably ghastly, and about whose fate we don't give a toss.

In Black and White, Mike Tyson had a very funny cameo, in which Robert Downey Junior's character tries to seduce him. Here, it looks as if Toback has simply raided his address book and shoehorned as many celebrity cameos as he could into what passes for the plot. Ooh, look, there's Lori Singer! Wow, there's Mike Tyson (again). Ooh, that really is Damon Dash! Toback's own performance as the "hilariously" named cross-cultural enabler is pure smugness in a bottle. The only honest moment is when he confesses to wanting to get into Neve Campbell's knickers. We can only speculate as to whether that is a case of art imitating life.

And Neve Campbell? Yes, she is good in this. She gets some decent dialogue to get her teeth into and delivers it with aplomb. I still think Wild Things is a better showcase for her talent.

The incident towards the end of the film was certainly unexpected; but then again, any idiot can make unexpected things happen in a film. The trick is to work up to it in *some* way. Toback is either incapable of doing this, or simply can't be bothered. The dénouement left me shrugging: so what? Who cares about these cardboard cut-outs?

I watched this movie to look at Neve Campbell.....possibly the reason the movie makers made it. She is beautiful and a fine actress. A lot of the dialog was interesting,seemed to be a lot of ad libbing. What the heck was Lori Singer doing in the movie? Neve's character meets her in the park and says "Hi Lori" and they talk a few minutes about movies. Mike Tyson also makes an appearance as himself and seems to have some acting talent. The film starts and ends with Neve Campbell in a shower. The rest is a waste of eyes and ears. I usually agree with Roger Ebert,but he was one of the very few critics that liked the film. He gave it a top rating. Maybe he loves Neve more than me.

I am sorry, but this might have been the absolute worst film I have ever seen. I am not usually a harsh critic, but this movie made me ashamed to call myself a fan of Neve Campbell's work. It has no plot, makes no sense, begins stories that it doesn't finish, and goes nowhere. In a word, it sucks. I mean, who cares about a spoiled, rich girl and her sexual escapades. And wow - she's like girls too. A novelty in twenty-first century film-making. Not even the sex scenes were stimulating. Personally, I could have done quite well without being subjected to Neve's pained expressions while being done from behind by her slimy pimp of a boyfriend. And what is with the "African" professor? He is there in the beginning, and then suddenly he's just gone (thank god). I'm not sure if the fact that it is barely over an hour long is a positive or a negative. Negative, because who wants to pay what it costs today to see a film for a mere hour of movie-watching, but positive because I don't think I could have stood a minute longer of such utter crap. I don't think I have ever seen so many people walk out of a theatre mid-movie. The only reason I didn't leave myself was my unfulfilled hope that somehow the movie would redeem itself with an interesting ending. Apologies for my crudeness, but crap is truly what this wannabe Cruel Intentions meets Wild Things meets Indecent Proposal is.

Why the film was even made is the first and lesser of the two puzzles I came away with. The second was that the Chicago Sun Times and Roger Ebert went totally overboard in praising it. I can imagine that some misguided individuals in Hollywood thought the film would "work" or at least make a profit, but how some big-time media people be so taken with so awkward an effort really surprises me. I noticed that many professional reviewers rated the film well below 50/100 but the few comments by ordinary viewers were even more telling in terms of negative reaction. This film seems to me a perfect example of how too many of the media pros quite often give far more praise to a film than do ordinary viewers. I always read all the professional reviews and find them cleverly written and well worth the reading, but I very often turn to the comments from the crowd to bring me down to earth.