‘Abbots’ fails to reinvent romantic comedy
Well, the Academy Awards are over, ‘The English Patient’ cleaned house and now Hollywood is already wondering what the nominees will look like this year. I have a prediction: ‘Inventing the Abbotts’ will have absolutely nothing to do with the Oscars. The plot goes like this: The local rich family, the Abbotts, includes three daughters, Alice, Eleanor, and Pamela. The local poor family, the Holts, consists of a single mother and two sons, JC and Doug. JC (Billy Crudup) thinks that the Abbott father is responsible for the death of his father, and to get revenge he proceeds to sleep with all of the Abbott girls. Meanwhile, Doug (Joaquin Phoenix) just wants to go out with Pamela (Liv Tyler), but one of them is always mad at the other one. Many sappy, cliched scenes follow and then, mercifully, it ends.There are a lot of problems with this movie. For one, it is excessively and poorly narrated by Michael Keaton, who sounds like he just took a dose of ‘NyQuil.’ He reads with the inflection of a sponge. Then there’s the acting. Liv Tyler (who was decent in ‘That Thing You Do!’) and Joaquin Phoenix (who was excellent in ‘To Die For’) both look like they’ve been taking classes at the Keanu Reeves School of Theatre. It’s not entirely their fault, though. The lines they have to read are so cheesy that I couldn’t help but laugh. I think the screenwriter must have gotten drunk, watched ‘American Graffiti’ and ‘Singles’ with the sound off, and then wrote this movie based on a dream he had. There is not an ounce of originality in the entire film.Near the end of the movie, we see a theater marquee with the title ‘Wake Me When It’s Over’ on it. Friday night, I think half of the people in the audience said this to their dates. In fact, through the last hour, the biggest response from the spectators was when a yellow stop sign was seen in the background. ‘Look at that stop sign!’ several people whispered. That’s about the height of excitement in this movie.
