standing still
Directed by: Matthew Cole Weiss
Written by: Matthew Perniciaro and Timm Sharp
Considering how much effort we know it takes to make a movie, it is often surprising which films actually get made. I’m sure that in 2005 there were a lot of top notch scripts that went into somebody’s bottom drawer in order to make way for this hipster, Big Chill knock off, but it still doesn’t explain how something like this even draws finance, much less attracts the kind of actors who graced this stinker with their presence.
Michael (Adam Garcia) and Elise (Amy Adams) are getting married in the morning. In a night of booze, sex, and not-interesting revelations, a group of college friends come back together to celebrate this momentous occasion and selfishly figure out in loads of endless dialogue what it means for their own lives.
The queer content comes in the form of Elise’s old college roommate Jennifer (Lauren German), who isn’t part of the core group and who has flown in from London mostly because she still harbours feelings for Elise. She’s rejected solidly by Elise in the first ten minutes, so we are left wondering at that point what the hell else she will have to do until this rather abysmal film is over.
When the boys take a private jet to Vegas and spend the night gambling and dancing with strippers and lap dancers, the girls hang out at the house with weed and a stripper of their own. Once the boys return, the drunken party spends the night revealing old wounds, sleeping with strippers, each other, or in the case of the engaged couple’s best friends, angsting over whether they too should get married.
Halfway through we realise that Jennifer has now taken a shine to complete hot mess Lana (Mena Suvari), though why she would bother since this girl is so screwed up as to be almost irredeemable and she needs to fly home to London when the weekend is over is beyond anyone’s guess. I’ve never seen Lauren German have less to do on screen, and when she is there she’s either scowling or smoking.
Lana decides that what’s been troubling her all these years through her failed relationships with men is that she’s probably actually gay, something Jennifer teases out of her with one night of hot sex and a morning-after set of bedroom eyes. Way to be reductive about the entire process of someone’s sexuality. Oh, I’m not fucked up, I’ve just been gay this whole time!
This film has aged and dated in the worst ways, and gives us no redeeming performances from any of the stars who all went on to make better things. Every single character is a spoiled, ill-mannered and entitled brat, and all of the men are written as vomitous arseholes (one literally vomits onto the table in front of him), which doesn’t say a lot about men in any decade, much less this one. If I were a man I’d be wildly offended.
If you were even considering watching this movie to be completist in following anyone’s career (in my case, Lauren German) go into it expecting the absolute worst. That way, if there’s a line or two that tickles your fancy you’ll be pleasantly surprised, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve watched this R-rated piece of crap so that you don’t have to.