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Nominate-best-2010

Review: Play the Game

A slow, painful, embarrassing death of dignity.
By SHAULA CLARK  |  August 26, 2009
0.0 0.0 Stars

 

This is the kind of movie you stagger out of in a stunned trance. Actually, it's the kind of movie that must've been conceived and financed in a stunned trance as well. Smug young stud David (Billy Campbell) drops ludicrous dating tips on widowed Grandpa Joe (Andy Griffith!).

Yet David's mack-daddy powers run out when he meets Julie (Marla Sokoloff). Writer/director Marc Fienberg must think of old people as childish Martians: in his world, they call movies "talkies," don tracksuits to sputter words like "dope" and "tight," and have never heard of Viagra. And you have not known pain till you've been forced to sit through the great Andy Griffith making a puffy "O" face during fellatio.

Early on, a depressed Gramps threatens to slit his wrists: "I figure if I've got to go, it should be a big bloody mess." This is, instead, a slow, painful, embarrassing death of dignity.

Related: The Big Hurt: Checking the Billboard Hot 100, Review: Shadow Complex, Review: Taking Woodstock, More more >
  Topics: Reviews , Andy Griffith, Andy Griffith
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ARTICLES BY SHAULA CLARK
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    "We're sitting here . . . and we're talking, but nobody's actually saying anything."
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    Your usual lackadaisical approach to New Year's Eve — just see what happens and go with the flow — is not going to cut it this year. Sure, the end of this decade may not have the same kind of new-millennium pressure riding on it as the last one, but the plunge into 2010 is a milestone nonetheless.
  •   REVIEW: BROTHERS  |  December 09, 2009
    Operation Enduring Freedom seems to have replaced Vietnam as Hollywood's go-to military quagmire from which to dredge gut-wrenching meditations on the psychological carnage of war.

 See all articles by: SHAULA CLARK

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