Bar Hopping

A friend of mine rented this movie, and I have to admit, I thought it would be good. It has Kevin Nealon and John Henson, so it should be funny, right?

NO! This movie sucked! Let's set up the movie: It's a bunch of characters on a Saturday night at different bars. Simple enough, but the movie never finishes some of their stories! This one character goes to a bar with her boyfriend and his 9 cousins...and it never tells you what happens!

Also, what is the deal with cutting to the bartender (Tom Arnold) who is narrating? His narration was utterly pointless! It shouldn't even had been in the movie. Then sometimes, this one woman looks at the camera and narrates! She wasn't even a main character, and she only does that two times the entire movie during the few scenes she was in! I must also bring up Sally Kellerman in the tub. At that point, I wasn't paying attention, but I saw some old man, fully clothed, get into the tub with her. Who the hell knows?

The only bright spots in this entire movie were Kevin Nealon and Nicole Sullivan. He played his depressed character well. I only liked Nicole's performance because she kissed another woman. Even THAT wasn't enough to save this stinker. Do yourself a favor and don't rent it. If you do rent it, do me a favor and light yourself on fire.

"Bar Hopping" seems to be trying to be about the stereotypical bar tender and lay "shrink" serving up pearls of wisdom followed by example vignettes played out by the cast. However, this turkey is a jumbled mess with a script full of simple-minded cliched nonsense: Hard to follow, herky-jerky flow, unsatisfying, and not worth the time. (D)

"Wow," I thought. "What the hell is this? Scott Baio in a movie made in 2000? With Tom Arnold?" So I turned it on. And there was John Henson. All in the middle of one of these 'hip' movies about obsessively selfish people that live in L.A. Hey, there's the girl from MAD TV, whose best friend (and apparently sometimes more) in the movie is one of the ugliest creatures I have ever seen, who's supposed to be John Henson's girlfriend(?) who he has asked for more space from, and both are HEARTBROKEN over it. Then we get wildly random commentary from Tom Arnold behind an unknown bar that none of the characters are "hopping." Then you get Baio, who is an extremely smooth guy named Damian who has another crazy, obsessed girlfriend after him. One of his lines in the bar is, "Pretend I'm a werewolf. Lock me out of your bed, your house, your heart, your life, because I am very, very dangerous and I might just tear you to pieces." Then he pauses and says, "How'm I doin'?" "Oh, you're good. You're real good," the girl says. OK, so that line is actually one of the better ones, but no , he's not good. Nor is any of the screenplay or acting in this movie. The closest thing is Kevin Nealon's appearance as a lonely off-duty cop who keeps thinking he sees the Pauli Girl (or Paley Girl here) on his bottle winking at him. This is one of those wired gen-X movies that tries to do so much that it doesn't succeed at any of it.

This film essentially begins with a young woman by the name of "Lara" (Linda Favila) crying to her friend "Mara" (Nicole Sullivan) about a recent breakup with her boyfriend "Roger" (John Henson). Although Mara is quite sympathetic to her friend's emotional state of mind, as it so happens, it's also during this time that she gets a phone call from another friend named "Kyra" (Romy Walthall) who is also experiencing a similar problem. Eventually, one thing leads to another, and both Lara and Mara decide to go to a local bar to hang out and possibly meet other men. Likewise, Kyra also decides to go bar hopping in the hope that she will meet her former boyfriend "Damien" (Scott Baio) as well. What none of them realize, however, is that this late-night excursion won't necessarily turn out the way any of them could envision. Now, although the synopsis of the film made it seem like it might be quite entertaining, it never came close to meeting that standard. Not by a long shot. The writing was terrible, the characters were all unlikeable, and most of the dialogue consisted of one random comment after another which never really amounted to much of anything. In short, this was an incredibly boring movie, and I have rated it accordingly.

All in all I loved this movie , but not because of the acting or who was in it or anything like that. I loved this movie because I liked the idea of this movie. This is actually art imitating life. The fact that the situations that where going on and the things that they were talking about really does happen is an interesting perspective to me. While one person is at the bar thinking about one thing, another person is sitting there minding his business and seeing everything that is going on around him.There is always a conversation about nothing, a psycho waiting to blow, a relationship that is so dysfunctional that they'll be together forever no matter what. I liked the fact that they would show that while one thing is going on in this bar, at the same time, another thing is going on at the other bar.This movie reminded me of that song by elton john," the piano man." Everyone is at the bar, everyone has different things on there mind, and everyone has a distant goal and wants to be somewhere else in there lives. At the end, nothing was accomplished and nothing was solved, and just like a usual night of drinking, a lot of wasted time but at least you feel better.