Movie Box Review

NEW YEAR'S EVE:  Not At Any Price - Calling it a "Sit-Com" Insults TV

NEW YEAR'S EVE is such a calculated piece of commercial manufacture that it deserves a Powerpoint presentation more than a review.  Although strictly speaking it isn't a sequel to Valentine's Day (and in fact a few of the same actors turn up in this one playing different roles), everything has been done to duplicate the style and execution of that $216M worldwide grosser, including hiring the same screenwriter (Katherine Fugate) and director (Garry Marshall).  But the joke's on them, because this one is even worse than Valentine's was.

The setting this time is NY rather than LA, but the format is the same:  intercut between a dozen mostly  romantic comedy storylines featuring recognizable actors, all taking place on the same holiday night.  (It's quite cost-efficient because since the episodes are mostly self-contained, the actors are each only needed for a week or so, making them available at a bargain price.)  That date, of course, is December 31, and the focal point of the various stories is Times Square, the dropping of the ball, and the splashy party that's supposed to be taking place afterward. 

To the extent there's any one central character, it's probably the woman trying to make sure the ball-drop goes smoothly (Hilary Swank, uncomfortable as usual in a standard Hollywood role).  The other stories radiate outward from that.  We get the rock star singing as part of the Times Square festivities (Jon Bon Jovi) and his ex who happens to be catering the party (Katherine Heigl); the back-up singer (Lea Michele) caught in an elevator--let me repeat that, caught in an elevator, because that plot hasn't been used since 1964--with a neighbor who hates New Year's (Ashton Kutcher); the teen (Abigail Breslin) who's desperate to get to Times Square for the sake of a boy and her mother (Sarah Jessica Parker) who's trying to find her; the guy who works for the company throwing the party (Josh Duhamel) and has to be at a certain corner after midnight to meet the mystery potential love of his life; the drone office worker with tickets to the party (Michelle Pfeiffer) who offers them to a delivery boy (Zac Efron) if he'll fulfill her fantasies--and no, not those kinds of fantasies; and so on.  In a nearby hospital we also get a dying old guy who wants to see one last New Year's (Robert DeNiro) with the help of his nurse (Halle Berry) because he seemingly (accent on "seemingly") doesn't have any family, along with a truly cringe-inducing race between Jessica Biel and Sarah Paulson to be the first to give birth in the new year and win a cash prize--this one should have had a separate soundtrack, although screams of horror might have been more appropriate than a laugh track.  There are a few supposed mysteries about how the stories will connect, all easily guessable, moronic or both, and since this is a Garry Marshall movie, Hector Elizondo shows up.  And Ryan Seacrest.

Marshall has never been a subtle craftsmen, but his best romances have some grace and charm.  New Year's Eve, though, is a slack assembly of flat scenes, given the illusion of pace by the fact that double-digit plotlines are jumbled into 2 hours.  Worse even than the holes where laughs should have been is the shameless sentimentality that's wielded throughout with utter cynicism.  Even though he's considered an "actors' director," Marshall doesn't do any of the stars favors:  the cinematography by Charles Minsky is so ugly that many of the performers look awful, and there's no chemistry between any of the couples (particularly Heigl and Bon Jovi, whose scenes together are like a traffic accident).  It's embarrassing to see Sofia Vergara, consistently hilarious on Modern Family, reduced to playing a sidekick with a funny accent, and simply painful to watch Robert DeNiro, once one of the great actors of his day, collecting yet another bored paycheck.  Also, someone should have told Heigl that the last thing her career needed was a role where she constantly screams and complains stridently.  The survivors include Breslin, who is able to appear half-way human, and Pfeiffer and Efron, who have a ludicrous storyline but manage to skate above it.

Complaining about a movie like New Year's Eve is like complaining that the sun will go down in the evening:  with its cast, and the fact that it owns the romantic comedy genre for the next few weeks (Young Adult is only barely a comedy and definitely not a romance), it's going to make money.  Which means in a year or two, it may well be our duty to sit through "Fourth of July" or "First Night of Passover."  Sadly, the calendar will run out of holidays before Warners runs out of ways to exploit them.

We've gotten this far without using the word "ghastly" to describe any of the busted pilots from this year's development season, but that streak is about to end.  HELP WANTED, which was produced by Warner Bros for NBC, is unaccountably bad.  Partly that's a function of its awful timing:  it's a sitcom about a company that helps laid-off employees find new jobs, and while any subject can be funny if done well (and Up In the Air tackled similar subject matter brilliantly), squeezing laughs out of that very topical misery would require some finesse--which is not exactly this fiasco's strong point.

At every step, Help Wanted chooses the broadest, dumbest form of comedy.  Our heroine Mary (the usually very talented Sarah Paulson--one of the few bright spots of Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip--here desperately unfunny) had quit her own job at an outplacement agency when she slept with the boss and he didn't leave his wife for her.  This experience seems to have struck her directly in the IQ, since in the pilot she appears to be very close to an actual imbecile; she smiles, laughs, talks and even walks inappropriately.  (If Mary Richards had died, she'd be rolling in her grave.)  Mary has started her own company with the help of prissy Joss (James Adomian) as office assistant, and therapist Ken (Tim Meadows) to counsel the clients.  Ken is apparently meant to be colorfully crazy as only TV shrinks can be--he suffers from Seasonal Affect Disorder--but he comes off as far more rational than anyone else on screen.  

The contrivance count increases when one of the first ex-employees Mary has to deal with turns out to be Brad (Adrian Pasdar), who had a one-night stand with Mary, which in the pilot is treated as an event on the scale of a Victorian Age loss of virginity.  By the end of the pilot, of course, he's joined the company and his painful will-they-or-won't-they-again byplay with Mary would have been part of the series.  Meanwhile, the laid-off clients that the company is trying to help are treated as buffoons (you don't cast Jennifer Coolidge as a guest star when you're looking for subtlety), and one can only hope that these characters will find somewhere else to go for career advice.  (Maybe the actors, too.)

Why is Help Wanted so stridently bad?  Hard to tell.  The writer was Kari Lizer, a seasoned sitcom veteran of shows like Will & Grace and The New Adventures of Old Christine, so there wasn't a lack of experience here.  Paulson, Pasdar and Meadows are all talented actors, and director Craig Zisk has handled nuanced shows like Weeds and Nurse Jackie successfully (although he's done very little multicamera comedy, which may not have helped).  This might have been a case of a bad idea made worse by the network and studio--certainly it wouldn't be the first time that's happened.  In any case, the show is just a lousy mess, and its makers will hopefully go on to better forms of employment.