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Ben and Jen in romantic comedy
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March 11, 2004
By Gary van Dyk
Ben and Jen in romantic comedy
There's a romantic mood in tomorrow's batch of new movies, but also a touch of crime as some young people go bad in high school.
Screenwriter John Hamburg directs his second film (since his 1998 debut Safe Men) with the romantic comedy Along Came Polly.
Ben Stiller plays Reuben Feffer, a professional risk assessor who never takes chances in any aspect of his life. When his new bride, Lisa (Debra Messing), leaves him for a European scuba instructor named Claude (Hank Azaria), he finally decides to take a risk of his own.
At a party he meets free-spirited Polly Prince (Jennifer Aniston), whom he remembers from the seventh grade. Unlike the control-freak Reuben, she's spent her life living on the edge. They reluctantly begin a romance and Polly introduces him to a new world of spicy food and suggestive dances.
The film also stars Alec Baldwin as the obnoxious insurance company boss, Stan Indursky.
l Novelist and screenwriter Peter Hedges makes his directorial debut with the comedy drama Pieces of April.
Family outcast April Burns (Katie Holmes) lives in a
beat-up apartment in New York's Lower East Side with her boyfriend, Bobby (Derek Luke).
In order to spend some time with her dying mother, Joy (Patricia Clarkson), April invites her conservative suburban family to her place for a Thanksgiving feast. She discovers that her oven is broken on the morning of the big day, so she goes around her building trying to find a sympathetic neighbour with a working oven.
Though she doesn't know them, neighbours Eugene (Isiah Whitlock) and Evette (Lillias White) offer the use of their oven, but only for an hour. While she frantically tries to complete the meal, the family drives in from Pennsylvania sharing less-than-pleasant opinions about April's lifestyle.
Dad Jim (Oliver Platt) tries to think positively, while daughter Beth (Alison Pill) flaunts her good-girl status and son Timmy (John Gallagher jun) captures it all on film. Shot with digital video, Pieces of April is a project of the Independent Film Channel's InDigEnt production company.
l In Better Luck Tomorrow, a group of unlikely high school pupils take up crime as an extracurricular activity.
Ben (Parry Shen) is a 16-year-old high school boy who is the living embodiment of the stereotypical Asian over-achiever. Ben obsessively studies even though he gets straight As and takes part in a dizzying variety of school activities and community volunteer work, which he thinks will look good on his resume to colleges - and is even a member of the basketball team.
He also hopes being part of the team will help him win the heart of Stephanie Vandergosh (Karin Anna Cheung), a cute but equally obsessive girl who is on the cheerleading squad.
When the big man on campus, Daric (Roger Fan), publishes an article in the school newspaper that points out that Ben's true role on the team is to add a touch of ethnic diversity to satisfy Board of Education requirements, Ben is so embarrassed he quits the team and imagines his academic future going up in smoke.
Daric seizes the opportunity to propose that he and Ben go into business, creating and selling detailed cheat sheets for school tests and placement exams, with disastrous results.
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