Riding in Cars with Boys

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Far from the rip-up comedy that ads presented, this depressing "Papa was a heroine addict and Mama dried weed in our oven" melodrama ruined my weekend. The over-acted performance by James Woods as the cop-dad who can't make up his mind if he feels selfish, compassionate, caring or heartless towards his good-girl gone bad, socially inept and unparented daughter was the kick that booted me out of the theater about 1h20m into the film. -- Riding in Cars with Boys was too much like someone's disappointing and depressing life to bother going to see. -- If you want to experience life like that, volunteer to work with teenage moms. -- If you want to be entertained, go see Monsters, Inc. or Harry Potter.

This movie is supposed to be based on a book by Beverly D'Onofrio. However the screen writer appears to have taken a well-written book and turned it into a movie where we are supposed to feel sorry for a woman who is a teenage mother. The main flaw is that the writer chooses to focus on how awful Beverly's life is, they show her working twice, and never explaining why, if she has this amazing writing ability she doesn't write for a local newspaper. It also never shows us how she got out of subsidized housing. All this movie succeeds in doing is making us feel bad for a woman who made a mistake. In every scene she is sulking and is always blaming others for her problems. She never once in the movie admits that she messed out and ruined her own life. The plot aside the acting is horrendous at best. Drew Barrymore overacts in every scene and the only person who isn't "please slit my throat" painful on screen is Steve Zahn. Everyone else apparently thinks that this movie is Oscar-caliber and is out there to make a name for itself. I watched this movie with minimal expectations and was disappointed. This is easily one of the worst movies I've ever seen and I've seen Friday the 13th 7: Jason takes on Manhatten.

This was one of the worst movies I have seen in years. And I am (was?) a fan of Drew Barrymore. The movie was boring, long, and as much as I can tell, completely without a point. There was no character in the entire movie that you could identify with at all. All I can say is do not waste your time or money. (and Drew did not even look good in this one!)

Riding In Cars With Boys, aside from being one of the most heavy-handed, tragically artless films directed by a supposedly seasoned director (Penny Marshall) that I have ever witnessed, is also one of the most pathetically written. The movie makes us sit through the (long, lonnnnnnng and dreary) story of poor Beverly D'Onofrio, saddled with a drug-addicted loser of a spouse (a believably muddled Steve Zahn) and a little boy (who's, let's face it, adorable), who longs to leave her small town banality and become a writer. We are forced to see her thwarted at every turn, betrayed by everybody she loves, blah blah blah...until finally her son is grown and she shows up at her heroin-addict husband's new hovel to find him married to (get this) Rosie Perez. We find out that Beverly has moved to NYC, gotten a job at a newspaper and has completed a book. But guess what??! We are never shown (or even TOLD) HOW she finally broke away and created a new life for herself. The only interest I had in this soap opera from hell - in fact, the only real drama IN the story - would have been the satisfaction of seeing Bev free herself from her suffocating non-life, but that transition was LEFT OUT, leaving us to slog through more heavy-handed (and WAY beyond tedious) scenes of supposed closure between Beverly and her now-grown son, in which every brutal banality in the book is foisted upon us in an attempt to make us feel something other than battered. We do not. Even a wonderful actor like Drew Barrymore can't save this movie from its own mired muck. If you're thinking of renting this tripe, I suggest you drive down to your local In and Out Burger and ask for it "Animal-style" instead. MUCH more rewarding. (AND far less time-consuming.)

To give you an idea of how bad "Riding in Cars with Boys" truly was I give you this. This is a chick-flick movie where even the chick (i.e. my date) hated it. Needless to say, I was pounding my forehead with solidified concessions, hoping to KO myself until the movie was over. Unfortunately, Nirvana did not await me, and I was forced to see the whole thing. I saw poor Steve Zahn made to look more and more hideous with each scene he was in. Poor guy, this was not his type of movie. The only things that really made me happy was seeing all the bad things happen to Barrymore's character (I applauded when her kid cost her admittance to a university) and when the credits began to roll I teared up at the realization that now I could have my life back and be free of this awful film.

Beverly knows more than others how your life can change direction with one simple action. She had dreams of becoming a writer as a child but when she got pregnant at 15 all of that changed and she found herself married and living in a cheap house raising a son while trying to study for her exams. This is the start of her struggles where her husband never aspires beyond his next beer and she struggles with responsibility towards her son Jason. Years later, riding with her adult son on a trip, she thinks back over her years. The title and trailer pretty much let me know that this was aimed at a certain demographic that I am not part of, but I decided to give it a go anyway. The plot is a tapestry of moments across Beverly's life from her dreams to middle age; it is a mix of the comic and the tragic and it doesn't sit that well. Penny Marshall seems to want the comedy to come out – even when it is not appropriate (for example Beverly allowing Jason to continue drowning for comedy effect) and this sits very uneasily with the more dramatic character side of the film. In fact the more serious (and interesting) aspects are mostly badly handled and fall a bit flat. In particular Marshall cannot cope very well with the fact that her lead character is a deeply flawed person that the audience easily dislike at times; the film gets close to examining this at the end but, typically, chickens out big time. The story is mainly quite dull then and the moments that are meant to be funny just seem strangely out of place. The cast don't help at all. Barrymore is serviceable but can't get to the heart of her character. OK, she isn't helped by the material but she swings wildly from playing "silly" at one moment to overdoing the histrionics. Zahn is not the first choice you want for a film with a story; he goofs well enough but finding depth is not really his forte and he adds to the shallow feel of the main story. Gilbert is hardly in it but Murphy is actually quite good, but then the material doesn't really ask much of it anyway. Woods and Bracco add familiar faces but really nothing else, in tiny roles. Perez plays a money grabber in a small role and made me wonder if she goes out of her way to find such characters? A minor thing that got to me as well was the fact that this is meant to play over years and years but mostly, nobody ages convincingly: apart from costume and hairstyle Barrymore looks the same at the start and the end of the story and this pretty much goes for everyone. A minor quibble but it bothered me. Overall this is an average and uneven film. The story is interesting because it features such a flawed lead character and could have been interesting but it is roundly mishandled. The comic moments sit uneasily with the story as a whole, but Marshall seems happier with these touches than actually delivering the drama goods. The cast match her approach and their performances vary wildly depending if the scene they are shooting that day was a "happy scene", "sad scene" or "angry scene". Target audience might like it but it is far too flawed to have wider appeal.