Imagine Meg Ryan strutting around in Julia Roberts’ “Erin Brockovich” hand-me-downs and you’ll have a good idea of what this movie is like. Dressed in an increasingly distracting series of skintight get-ups that ultimately resemble dominatrix gear, Ryan stars as female boxing manager Jackie Kallen in a story based extremely loosely on Kallen’s life. She tries way too hard to be tough as nails as the only woman in a man’s world, where nearly every man is a stereotypical chauvinist. Omar Epps plays the fighter she helps mold into a champion and Charles S. Dutton, who also directs this pile of sports-movie cliches, co-stars as his trainer.
Rated: PG-13 for crude language, violence, brief sensuality and some drug material. Rating: 1 1/2 out of 4 stars.
‘Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen’
Despite earnest performances from Lindsay Lohan and her teen co-stars, this girl-power comedy is a painfully unfunny affair dolled up with hip fashions and a gazillion-dollar music budget, none of the trappings able to disguise the shallowness of the story.
Lohan plays a die-hard Manhattanite uprooted by her mom to New Jersey, where she finds friends and foes in her quest to elevate local cultural sensibilities – and score tickets to the farewell concert of her favorite band.
Rated: PG for mild thematic elements and brief language. Rating: 1 1/2 out of 4 stars.
‘Welcome to Mooseport’
It sounds like a splendid comedy ticket. Gene Hackman as an enormously popular president who leaves office, retires to his summer home in a sleepy Maine town and blunders into a farcical mayoral race against local plumber (Ray Romano).
The talented leads are backed by an excellent supporting cast (Marcia Gay Harden, Rip Torn, Maura Tierney, Fred Savage and Christine Baranski). Yet director Donald Petrie’s pacing is sluggish, while Tom Schulman’s script is awkwardly constructed and just plain not funny.
Rated: PG-13 for some brief sexual comments and nudity. Rating: 2 out of 4 stars.
“Eurotrip” – A formless, shapeless bit of teen gross-out drivel that surprisingly manages a few fresh and funny laughs. The thin story centers on a new high-school grad (Scott Mechlowicz) in his quest to find his cyber dream girl in Germany, accompanied by his pals (Jacob Pitts, Michelle Trachtenberg and Travis Webster). While the movie merits its hard R rating for nudity, sex and out-of-control partying, the coarse sight gags still are a cut above the body-fluid jokes that litter most teen flicks. And the young, largely unknown cast is so dopily unassuming that the result is one of the more inoffensive offerings in the offensive teen sub-genre. R for sexuality, nudity, language and drug/alcohol content. 91 min. Two stars out of four.
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