B.S. I Love You

With so much denigration by those who've posted comments, I felt it was time for someone who likes the movie to post something.

I saw it in the theatre in 1971 and came away feeling like I'd seen something special. Now, I was already quite a fan of Peter Kastner for his wonderful performance in 1966's 'You're a Big Boy Now', so it's quite possible my liking of him coloured my critical thinking.

But I don't think so. I liked it a lot - in fact, I like the counter-culty free-sex vibe of so many movies from those magic years 1970 and 1971. And apparently there's a reviewer with the New York Times (Howard Thompson) who found it to be as delightful as I did.

Peter Kastner was a very likable young man. He was capable of expressing many emotions in a really charming way. He should have become a better-known actor.

It has been a long time since I have seen this and can't remember much of it. However, I just wanted to respond to the other person that posted thinking it wasn't much of a satire of advertising. To today's audience it may not seem so, but at the time I think it was considered pretty cutting within the industry as the people portrayed were recognizable parodies of well-known people in the field. For example the character played by Joanna Barnes would seem to me to absolutely be based on Mary Wells Lawrence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wells_Lawrence).

It definitely was not the first film to satire advertising and others may have been earlier and better (Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?) but at the time, it was exploring a theme that might still be considered if not cutting edge, not yet done to death.

I finally got to see B.S. I Love You in its entirety recently. I had seen part of it before but not the entire thing/travesty/debacle.

I can safely report that the reviewer from Denver is correct: it is indeed a mess. It's shot bad, cast bad, written bad, musically scored bad and just all around bad. Definitely not in the category of 'so bad it's good' either.

Where to begin.. let's see. OK the main character played by Peter Kastner(RIP). It might be difficult to find a more awkward, sweaty, unattractive actor to look at for 90 minutes. Sure you could cast a sickly old man with one eye, but Kastner was available for this blatant Graduate rip-off. Woody Allen isn't always the easiest to look at either, but the key difference is Allen is a cinematic genius.

Now before I proceed further with my review I'd like to provide the link to the New York Times review dated April 1st, 1971: http://tinyurl.com/3exoxpw

(IMDb links to it in the critics review area)

I'm not sure if Howard Thompson's review of BS I Love You was an April Fool's joke or not, but apparently this guy loved the movie, gushing about the "gifted people" people involved in making this "neatly organized morality comedy with bright contemporary trimmings". Keeping in mind that he wrote his review in 1971 when this movie opened, makes me wonder what drugs Mr. Thompson was on when he viewed the movie. He goes on to say that "The best thing about the picture is the funny, blithely warm performance of Peter Kastner".

Wow, really Thompson? Funny? Warm? Kastner comes across like a dead wet fish. He's about as funny and warm as the flu on a hot Summer's day. Thompson goes on to gush about how "appealing" Kastner is and such. Read the review, it's a milestone in up your ass opinions, meaning your opinion is certainly up your ass because that's where you pulled it from. Unless of course it's all an April Fool's gag. I don't know.

What I do know is that BS I Love You is an atrocious film. The classic "what not to do film". For starters, yes it liberally borrows some elements from The Graduate, a movie that apparently Mr. Kastner was up for but thankfully didn't get. Dustin Hoffman won the lead part in that one(whew! can you imagine Kastner's Bejamin Braddock?). Kastner's character sleeps with an older lady and finds out that a young lady that had been pursuing him is her daughter. Whatever. We've seen this before and done infinitely better.

You know what else we've seen before? The ad agency guy that loses the big account etc etc. It's usually done in an interesting way(see every other movie dealing with ad men)

Anyway let me cut to the chase. So Kastner's extremely unappealing and difficult to look at, yet we have to look at him in his angst-ridden, over-emotional behavior, running like an absolutely ninny towards the end of the movie.

The man runs like a ninny. And that's being kind.

Practically every actor is sweating up a storm in every scene. Was there even a makeup person involved in this picture? It's an uncomfortable movie to watch because of all the sweat alone! The crappy dialog from the actors is difficult to hear; thanks sound guy. And to top it off, it's filmed like a really poor student film with really bad lighting(most scenes are very darkly lit) or angles that just don't work(never let shrubbery upstage your actors).

Story-wise you don't care for any of these losers and you have to wonder why a couple of these attractive women would want to be associated with Kastner's character because he's Such. A. Loser!

And the music.. Yikes! They got some local band to sing all the music and it's just wrong, especially when they inject it into practically every scene of the loser life that Kastner lives. A pathetic man appears even more pathetic when back by pathetic sounding music.

If there were a category of movies called "Suicide Movies", movies by which you can commit suicide to, this one would fall safely into that category.

Only to be seen for the morbidly curious, I'll close by adding another quote from the New York Times' Howard Thomspon: "This marks the first feature written and directed by Steven H. Stern, produced by Arthur M. Broidy and photographed in color by David Dans. Nice going, men. Let's have another. Soon."

How about not. Ever.

Poorly acted, semi-coherent, badly shot, shoddily-scored, lame ripoff of "The Graduate" with not one iota of the skill and talent that went into the film it shamelessly cribs from. Plot: Hip, trendy TV commercial director sleeps with a lot of women, has problems, wanders around the Bowery, steps over drunks passed out on the sidewalk, has life-changing revelation (he loves his girlfriend), runs around New York City a lot, finds girlfriend, the end. TV Guide's review of this film said that it was made to lose money as a tax-shelter for its investors. That actually makes sense, because seeing how 12th-rate this film is in every conceivable manner, it couldn't possibly have been made with the idea of making money. The "acting" is overwrought and so over the top that it doesn't seem like the actors had any direction at all and just winged it. The score is a cheesy--and as far as I could tell, uncredited--version of "MacArthur Park" that sounds like it was recorded by a Vegas lounge band. The camera-work is awful--fuzzy, often out-of-focus and lingering way too long on headache-inducing close-ups of unattractive lead Peter Kastner--the sound is tinny, even the end credits are so "arty" they're virtually unreadable.

There's one scene near the end of the film when Kastner is trying to stop his girlfriend from leaving on a ship going to Europe, and when he gets to the dock the boat is gone and he shouts to a guard, "Where's the boat?" and the guard replies, "You missed it". That, more than anything else, describes this movie--it misses the boat by a mile.

The basic plot of this film is about a producer (or was it director?) in the advertising industry and his problems with his profession and women.

This had been described to me as a satire on advertising, but it really isn't (though it does poke fun here and there). I won't dislike a film for not being what I thought it would be, but I will if the film isn't what it tries to be. Half the time I didn't know what it wanted to achieve, and during the first half hour I often found it to be a little confusing. It almost seemed like it had been heavily cut, and since I saw it on FMC maybe it was.

The main reason this film fails is because it can't decide if it wants to make a statement, be a comedy, be hip (for the time), be different, be traditional. It pretty much tries to do all that and it doesn't have the ability or resources to do so.

The last twenty minutes or so really sunk the film for me, when it decided to try and become dramatic but instead became what almost seemed like a parody.

If you find 1970s cinema or culture interesting you may want to watch it. I do give it credit for being somewhat distinct, though I think that happened accidentally.