Can't Hardly Wait (1998)

Director: Deborah Kaplan, Harry Elfont

Cast: Ethan Embry, Charlie Korsmo, Lauren Ambrose, Jennifer Love Hewitt

Have I Seen It Before: Never. I was 14 when it came out, so the idea of graduating from High School seemed like a completely different planet. Which is weird, considering that 1998 was one of those summers (there have been a lot of them since) where I insisted on seeing everything I could get my eyes on. I looked up the box office figures from its opening weekend in search of a point I make later in the review, and realize without much doubt I opted to see Dirty Work that weekend, and remember enjoying it immensely.

Maybe I have seen it, and completely forgotten it.

Did I Like It: Which would explain a lot. Look at the film stacked against the great teen comedies, and it is left wanting. It reads like a shopping list of things one might want to include in a teen comedy. Throw in a soundtrack album someone might want to listen to, and you can make back your money as counter-programming to other summer fare (see above). That’s all that needs to happen, and that’s all the studio and the filmmakers are either capable of or interested in.

I’m left with questions after watching this film. No, not questions like one might have after finally seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) on the big screen. There are more fundamental question that betray a film not terribly thought through.

If Denise (Ambrose)—the character I most identified with—never bothered to get her senior pictures taken, why is she showing up to the party? I once got into a verbal argument with a parent moments before my own graduation, when she wanted to stamp my hand for the official graduation party, and I insisted that I was not going, and that she really should not be grabbing my wrist*. I didn’t get my senior picture taken, and I wouldn’t have been caught dead at any party graduation night. One wonders why I didn’t watch the movie for nearly thirty years.

This one is more of a personal note. When X-File #1 (Joel Michaely) and X-File #2 (Jay Paulson) are eventually taken up in a flying saucer**, they should have offered a coda—as they did with other characters—saying that they are still missing, and that anyone with information as to their whereabouts should call the FBI. That at least would have been the right follow-through for that gag. Then again, had I graduated in 1998, I would have skipped the party and gone to see The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998) instead.

Here’s the best question: For what precisely are these unable to hardly wait? You let me know, and maybe I’ll get turned around on the film.

*I really enjoy that story. If you’re out there, random helicopter mom: Thank you for one of those sterling examples of my own personality.

**Yes, that is how the characters are credited in the end-credits. Yes, it is the fate of the characters.

What About Bob? (1991)

Director: Frank Oz

Cast: Bill Murray, Richard Dreyfuss, Julie Hagerty, Charlie Korsmo

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. Relatively sure I saw it in theaters.

Did I Like It: If pressed, I would say that the peak period of Bill Murray probably started with the famous Saturday Night Live sketch where he admitted that he wasn’t really doing so great on the show*, and goes up to about Scrooged (1988). His current era is a bit more reserved and attracts some awards, give or take a handful Ghostbusters legacy sequels. Then there’s that middle era, where he was a holy terror to everyone he worked with. Starting here, and culminating with him not being asked back for a second Charlie’s Angels film.

What we have here is a basic, even erring on the side of too-broad-for-its-own good comedy. This is especially true in the third act, where the wide-release sensibility prevents the story from reaching its natural conclusion, where Dreyfuss strangles the life out of Murray, and instead culminates in a comedy of error that sees Dreyfuss blow his own house up.

What the film has going for it is that it is perhaps the perfect matchup of two actors who make it a point not to get along with people. Their chemistry is palpable and might very well have propelled a far less competent screenplay to be just as watchable. What we may all have missed in that is that a far less competent director than Oz would have had no hope at all of keeping this all together. He doesn’t get nearly enough credit for his work behind the camera, in favor of his work as a puppeteer.

*One might make the argument for the moment when he called Chevy Chase a “medium talent” back stage and then got into a physical altercation, but we mostly have to imagine how that one played out.