12-05-2019, 05:07 PM
House of Yes (1997)
You can actually watch this whole movie for free on Youtube. I watched it in search of "alternate Thanksgiving" movies. Is it ever. Just another one of those wacky incest/murder/mental illness comedies. You know how they are. All of those. …And how ‘90s could this be? Freddie Prinze Jr., Tori Spelling, indie darling Parker Posey, and Josh Hamilton, who I unfortunately recently saw suffer through another supposed '90s indie "gem", Kicking And Screaming. It looked like he was going to be the "It Guy" for a minute in the late '90s, but it seems that Freddie Prinze Jr. survived these bad film choices and took that honor instead.
To be fair, all the actors are pretty good here. Prinze does his lovable doofus thing, and even though I read a lot of flack online about Spelling, she does just fine. Parker Posey gives a fantastic performance actually. She's magnetic when she's on screen. The story and dialogue is the weak point of the whole thing, which aside from the cringey material, is just so very obviously stagey. The whole thing takes place with a couple characters in a couple rooms in 1 night, mostly them having oh so very quirky and clever repartee in a series of 2-person scenes. I do wish they had tried to add more to the stage play, but maybe there's nothing they could do. The incomparable Roger Ebert summed it up best: "While it was running, I was not bored" but "When the film was over I was not particularly pleased that I had seen it; it was mostly behavior and contrivance."
You can actually watch this whole movie for free on Youtube. I watched it in search of "alternate Thanksgiving" movies. Is it ever. Just another one of those wacky incest/murder/mental illness comedies. You know how they are. All of those. …And how ‘90s could this be? Freddie Prinze Jr., Tori Spelling, indie darling Parker Posey, and Josh Hamilton, who I unfortunately recently saw suffer through another supposed '90s indie "gem", Kicking And Screaming. It looked like he was going to be the "It Guy" for a minute in the late '90s, but it seems that Freddie Prinze Jr. survived these bad film choices and took that honor instead.
To be fair, all the actors are pretty good here. Prinze does his lovable doofus thing, and even though I read a lot of flack online about Spelling, she does just fine. Parker Posey gives a fantastic performance actually. She's magnetic when she's on screen. The story and dialogue is the weak point of the whole thing, which aside from the cringey material, is just so very obviously stagey. The whole thing takes place with a couple characters in a couple rooms in 1 night, mostly them having oh so very quirky and clever repartee in a series of 2-person scenes. I do wish they had tried to add more to the stage play, but maybe there's nothing they could do. The incomparable Roger Ebert summed it up best: "While it was running, I was not bored" but "When the film was over I was not particularly pleased that I had seen it; it was mostly behavior and contrivance."
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