Tuesday, July 29, 2003

HE ALSO APPEARS TO BE WEARING TED DANSON'S TOUPEE FROM 'CHEERS': Of course, officially, there's an embargo on Gigli reviews until Friday, when it's unleashed on the public.

But if Roger Friedman of FoxNews.com is going to break the embargo, I guess I can report on his findings on Academy Award winner Ben Affleck's latest work.

"It's not so easy to make a great howler of a bad movie," Friedman writes. "In recent years, Madonna 's made more than her share: "Shanghai Surprise," "Swept Away," "Who's That Girl," among them."

How bad is it? Let's look at some not-exactly-blurb-worthy phrases in the review:
"Witless, coarse, and vulgar"; "worse than its advance buzz could have indicated"; "a total, mindless disaster"; "stupefying"; "What were they thinking?"; "ridiculous, offensive, unfortunate dialogue".

Not only that, Friedman reports on a TT favorite who has a cameo:
Al Pacino, whom Brest directed to an Oscar in the very bad "Scent of a Woman" 11 years ago, appears in one interminable scene as a New York crime boss. This one bloated moment may completely unravel Pacino's esteemed career from "The Godfather" to "Insomnia."

His expressionless, frozen face -- though included in the film's trailer as a big deal -- appears about three-fourths of the way through the film. It's not clear even if Affleck and Lopez, who Brest cuts to occasionally for stupefied reactions, were even on the set when Pacino delivers his numbing monologue. The fact that it ends in his character committing a sudden act of bloody violence doesn't help.

Click here for the whole thing. I'm still hoping it's bad in a Showgirls kind of way, but as of now, it just looks bad in an anything-Demi-Moore-did-after-Indecent-Proposal kind of way. Ugh.

And here's the really sad thing: J.Lo can act. She's great in Out of Sight, does fine in romantic comedies . . . but this was just a bad, bad decision.

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