Harvard Man (2001)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Wonderful character development!

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

There is nothing at all to like about this movie. Joey Lauren Adams shows that it is not just her voice that is like nails on a chalkboard. While Adrian Grenier shows off the horrible acting that became so famous on Entourage. All the while the director was confusing annoying with interesting. I can't imagine too many people sat through the acid trip without getting fed up and walking out. It was annoying for the sake of being annoying. All with no payoff to redeem it. I just can't imagine what anyone was thinking making a movie with such a prolonged act that was literally painful to listen to. Which would have been bad enough if the ENTIRE movie wasn't also painful to listen to. IT was as if the audio was recorded in a toy microphone with harsh audio levels. I would literally prefer to sit through 2 hours of nails on a chalkboard that this movie.

James Toback has a wild spirit as a filmmaker and it lets itself out in Harvard Man in both the good and the bad that one finds in self-indulgent artists (I mean that as a compliment, sort of, since art has to be indulgent to a great degree). He takes a story of a basketball player at Harvard, Allan (Adrian Grenier), and transforms his conflicts with his multiple love interests (mob-daughter girlfriend played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, philosophy professor Joey Lauren Adams), his big gamble that he has to take a dive at a game to get his parents money for their house, the FBI after this backfires, and, mostly, his adventure into fifteen thousand milligrams of pure LSD, into a delirious little epic. Yes, epic.Toback's style is all over the place from start to finish. His camera reaches up high and is usually moving, even when there is absolutely no real reason to. The excess in the camera movement is also complimented (or not) by an over-written script, which is something that doesn't happen usually unless a writer, like Toback, doesn't know when to stop with his characters. He compensates by having them talk fast (that or his editor takes out the little catch-my-breath beats in a conversation), and while not as annoying as the camera movements in most scenes in the first half of the film, it's noticeable. It's a filmmaker reaching far, maybe too far, into a realm of personal expression and putting the story into a modern setting - check the Bach mixed with rap and rock for more of that.And yet it's hard to totally begrudge what Toback does get right here. When we're meant to take a lot of this seriously in the first half (the deep philosophical talk in Chesney's class about Kierkegard and Lichtenstein or that mob 'family' of caricatures), it's interesting but it never really works dramatically. But when Toback suddenly shifts the tone in the second half, when Allan takes the three cubes of LSD, it suddenly becomes a full-on comedy of errors and surprises. To be sure, some of the visual jokes and whacked-out faces that Allan sees could be attributed to the same style as Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, it still works. Especially funny is how Allan just seems to slip out of the FBI's hands (watch the one really strong scene of cinematography, sound, and acting all combined in the FBI interrogation room), and a masterpiece of a cameo appearance from Al Franken (like Toback also former Harvard alum).It also helps with the comedy in the second half of the film that the acting, more or less, is pretty strong. Sarah Michelle Gellar actually gives one of her most convincing, well-rounded performances as a B-word whose intentions are not very well hidden but puffed up with rich-girl sass and sex appeal. Grenier also goes for broke as a guy with a good sense of himself, until he bugs out from the acid and runs all over town. Adams might be a little more of the one-note performance, the stable voice but not as intriguing as Gellar and Grenier in their roles. They're all put in a movie that is mixed up and has a lot to say about sex, drugs, life, living, betting, sports, and lots more. I respect Harvard Man, and if those trip-out scenes come on TV I'll be sure to watch again. But recommend? No. 5.5/10

I'd give it a zero if I could. Thank goodness I didn't rent this (saw it on TV). The bloatedly egotistical writer/director, who's way too in love with his Harvard degree, wasted a decent idea by creating one-dimensional characters and then casting with second-rate actors -- none of whom is a complex-enough/bright-enough person or skilled-enough actor to convince viewers that they're Harvard students or instructors -- who turned in one-dimensional performances. I can only imagine that he was jumping on the youth bandwagon and thus cast some of the names of the moment, but he would have done better had he gone with unknowns who are actually gifted. Utter waste of time; do not watch this.

Basketball is a winter sport, right? Hmmmm. Based upon this movie, it's interesting that, in Cambridge, MASSACHUSETTS the weather during basketball season allows for sleeveless clothing outdoors, leaves on the trees and no snow or ice on the ground. Trust me, I live in the Boston area - even a freak warm spell during the months of b'ball season would not look like this.So - aside from the fact that this is just a very bad movie - they didn't even try for authenticity. Especially when so much of the movie's backdrop is the Harvard campus and Cambridge. No wonder I had never heard of this movie until it was broadcast on TV and nothing else was on to watch!Well, I'm sure I can find something else . . . gotta go find the remote!