Cheap Harvard Man (DVD) (Adrian Grenier, Sarah Michelle Gellar) (James Toback) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Harvard Man

A odd and good movie experiance
The movie starts off, with Alan Jensen ( Adrian Grenier )and
Cindy Bandolini ( Sara Michelle Gellar ) having moaning sex before a havard basketball game. Cindy is a cheerleader and
Alan is a harvard baketball player. Alan is moving quickly with his love life, juggling to different girlfriends, Cindy Bandolini
and Chesney Cort ( Joey Lauren Adams ). One day when Alan and Cindy are having a drink in a bar, Alan hears that a tornado
hit where his parents live, He immediatly hops a plane to his parents and find out that they need $ 100,000 to rebuild there ruined home. Alan, worried about his parents finds out that Cindy's father, Andrew Bandolini ( Gianni Russu ) is a local mofia man , and desperatly asks him to borrow the money for his parents. Andrew says yes as long as he misses a couple of games
and sheds some points. On the way back Cindy and Alan
have sex yet again , and that is the plot. After that Alan
get in trouble every minute of the movie, with the FBI , mafia

and 3/4 through the movie evens takes an overdose of old fasioned
acid, or LCD. The director, James Toback did a great job on the LCD scenes , making peoples faces mush round in circles, after a while it makes you feel like your on LCD. Sara michelle gellar
was facinating as ever, Adrian Grenier did a great job in the acid seens, and Joey Lauren Adams was good to. I know alot of people have said this is an awful movie, who gives a crap what they say, who gives a crap what i'm saying, Only you can decide , so just rent the movie when it comes out and watch it, if you hate it then return it , just don't watch it because someone else said not too , screw them, see it for yourself.

---

Actually, Sarah Michelle Gellar is more than eye candy here
I watched this movie because it had Sarah Michelle Gellar in it and I am a big fan of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." I am not, in common parlance, hot for Gellar (Alyson Hannigan's smile does it for me), but for those who check out "Harvard Man" specifically to enjoy the actress this film starts to deliver while the image on the screen is still blank. However, it will not take long for you to figure out that Gellar is just eye candy in this film (even more so on the DVD) because the real focus is on the character of Alan Jensen (Adrian Grenier), the alter-ego of writer-director James Toback who takes a kitchen sink approach to loading problems on this particular Harvard student to make his life explode for our cinematic enjoyment.

Alan is the point guard for Harvard's basketball team, who is "seeing" Cindy Bandolini (Gellar); she is not only a cheerleader at Holy Cross, but her father (Gianni Russo) is also the chief Mafioso for the Northeastern United States. He is also seeing Chesney Cort (Joey Lauren Adams), a Harvard Philosophy professor with one of the more interesting lecturing voices in the history of academia. But then Alan's life is disrupted by a tornado in Kansas that wipes out his family's uninsured home and a chemistry student friend who has baked up some new and improved LSD. So Alan needs $100,000 and suggests to Cindy that maybe her father can float him a loan. Cindy reports that this can happen, but Alan would have to do something in return and suddenly we are into the wonderful world of point shaving in the big Harvard-Dartmouth game. If this was not enough fun, Alan pops the acid just as the FBI are about to make their presence known. Almost all of the above action takes place to the accompaniment of music by J. S. Bach.

"Harvard Man" will remind you of some of Toback's earlier films, especially his first script for "The Gambler" and his 1987 "The Pick-Up Artist." These a films where not only are we watching interesting things happening to the characters, but where the characters tend to explore themselves and their actions in great detail (a tendency that extends even to the Mutt and Jeff Mafia hitmen running around in a sub-plot). For those of us who remember drug sequences from Sixties films trying to represent acid trips, "Harvard Man" is relatively tame and Toback ends up trying to pull a rabbit out of the hat at the end to set things right. Still, Gellar actually does end up with more to do in this film than look good and the story managed to get Eric Stoltz, John Neville and N.B.A. superstar Ray Allen on board. "Harvard Man" ends up being a high-paced roller coaster ride in which you have no idea how it is all going to play out, which is certainly nothing like being boring and predictable.

...

---

Actually pretty good
First off, as a rather big SMG fan, I cannot believe this film has received lower ratings than "Simply Irresistible"! That was a limp, wooden "romantic comedy" featuring a couple who lacked any chemistry.

"Harvard Man", on the other hand, has a modicum of style, plot, and intelligence behind it. It doesn't really work in the final analysis - not because of any failings of the acting, which is mostly excellent (although I just can't overcome my aversion to Joey Lauren Adams' squeaky voice), but because the movie doesn't quite hit the pitch of danger that I felt it needed to sustain the drama. Toback, however, does compelling things with sequencing, flash forwards and back, and with camerawork, split-screen and so on, and the dialogue is mostly fine. The lighting has a nice grainy amber texture to it and the soundtrack is a fun mix of hip-hop and classical.

Grenier in the lead does well, Stolz and Gayheart are great, and Sarah Michelle - and yes, I do have a slight bias - proves again that she has excellent range. As well as being a cutie-patootie. "Scooby Doo" and all is fine, but please, SMG, pick a project that will demonstrate your dramatic chops to the non-believers out there! I'd love to see her do work on the big screen as fine as that in "The Body" or "Innocence" in BtVS...