I-See-You.com

I wanted to like it, but just couldn't buy into it.

Couldn't believe Bridges, in the early scenes he's pure ham with a rancid edge. Comedy is not his genre.

Couldn't believe Bridges would be married to Arquette and having hot sex all over the house.

Couldn't believe the premise that the world would keep watching, even after it became clear that everyone knows they are being taped.

Could have worked, if the scale had been kept realistic: if the success of the show and commensurate payday were such that the family could have at least pretended NOT to be in on the joke. A little less would have been so much more...

Instead, it just insults the intelligence of every character, and the audience as well.

I saw this film at the Waterfront film festival and thought it was hysterical. What a biting satirical snap shot of our society's mindless obsession with 15 minutes of fame, Paris HILTON and getting rich quick. Think of it as FEAR FACTOR meets DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS... on STEROIDS! The story was refreshingly original and did not succumb to the typical dumb formulas of most studio comedies today. I was in a crowd of nearly 700 regular movie goers and it was interesting to see a Midwestern audience not only get the jokes, but belly laugh out loud at a pretty sophisticated farce that did not resort to the obvious Will Farrell and Ben Stiller shtick.

I hope it makes it to the big screen.

Having lived in the Los Angeles all my long life, I have watched it change from a hard working, sharing, caring type attitude to a "skys the limit" fun filled me first ego type attitude. Here is a movie that does a great job at poking fun at our present way of life. It probably will get a R rating for sex and language, which is definitely LA today.

The cast did a really great job portraying their characters. It looked like they were having a lot of fun making this very funny, ridiculous, spoof of todays life style and the toys we "adults" play with. They take the usage of the credit cards, the computers, the video cams and our other "adult" toys to the nth degree.

If you can laugh at yourself, you will laugh at this. The audience that I was in liked it so much that they applauded at the end.

I saw this movie as part of the "selling to distributors" process. The test audience was peppered with media PTBs and you could tell them apart from the "civilians" because they were seated in taped off areas.

Anyway, the movie...

Before the movie started I had doubts about the timeliness. Because of the "dot gone" bust and "reality TV" I was concerned I was about to see a movie that was a little anachronistic. Five minutes into the movie and I was no longer worried - I was laughing too hard. Beau Bridges and Mathew Botuchis' performances are OK, but the girls (Rosanna Arquette, Baelyn Neff and Shiri Appleby) steal the show. Rosanna plays the mom and she does a great job as the sex/day-trading addicted counter to Bridges "toilet bowl" salesman. Ms. Neff is great in the role of "daddy's little princess" providing the foil to Mathew's "Colby". But the best had to be Shiri Appleby as "Randi Sommers". Ms. Appleby, always understated and extremely watchable, takes what could have been a throwaway role and works it until the closing scene when everyone in the theater clapped.

All in all, I really liked the film. I don't recommend it for "date night" - it is definitely a "guy film" but us guys need one of those every now and then.

I didn't laugh once for the last hour of the movie. The preview looked promising: the premise seemed original and edgy, and even in the event that the plot fell through, there also appeared to be ample sex scenes to hold your interest. Wrong. The acting was poor all around, especially on Beau Bridges' part - WAY over-the-top. The writing was dull; there is scarcely a funny joke to be found... predictable, lowest-common-denominator humor. The plot is full of holes and loose ends. Basically the film falls flat on its face. In a word: Boring. There was not a single joke that I didn't see coming from a mile away....I felt like I'd seen this movie a hundred times already. And in case you're wondering - the "sex scenes" are phony and PG-13. Could have maybe, somehow, been made into something cool....but it wasn't. Skip it!