Hollywood hues
Campus caper disappoints
Ervell E. Menezes

Hollywood’s campus films have come a long way since the 1980s. Remember Breakfast Club and their ilk? Now they range from the fair to the banal and the ridiculous. 13 Going on 30 is just another instance and it does the genre no good.

Take Jeena Rink. She’s 13 and on the brink of adulthood but she doesn’t want to be original, she wants to be cool. The trouble is that adulthood isn’t arriving fast enough, so she’s confused. No longer content to spend time only with her best friend Matt Flamhaff, Jeena invites her cool kids for her 13^th birthday but the party is a disaster.

Still she has a chance of making a wish and guess what, wishes are horses and Jeena rides into the future: "30, flirty and thriving." She’s (Jennifer Garner) a magazine editor and with her are her cool kids, also grown up. But there’s no Matt anywhere nearby. When she does spot him he’s quite distant, and guess what, about to be married. Meanwhile, Jeena has a rough time competing with her grown-up, cool kids.

The unlikely plot has some possibilities but scriptwriters Josh Goldsmith and Cathy Yuspa are not able to cash in on the situation. And director Gary Winik shuttles between the incredible and the blas`E9. That rat race of life comes across marginally but poor Jeena is neither here nor there and she knows it.

In between you have songs like I’m Crazy About You and Love is a Battlefield, the former may be the best part of the film, the latter as much a letdown as the rest of the film.
When the climax comes, well it’s a bit of an anti-climax and though Jennifer Garner and Mark Ruffalo, who plays the grown up Matt, do their best to seem credible it is more like a lost cause. The net result is that the viewer, the poor, poor viewer, has to grin and bear it most of the time, wondering what the next campus film will be like but happy at any rate that he’s (or she’s) come to the end of this one.

To use a clich`E9, it’s like looking for two grains of wheat (read Jeena and Matt) in bushels of chaff and chaff is chaff, after all.

Tom on TV trip

American actor Tom Hanks is being considered for the coveted role of Robert Langdon in the television version of the biggest bestseller of the year The Da Vinci Code.

Tom who did the hilarious sex farce Bosom Buddies and other sitcoms like Family Ties, Taxi and Happy Days will be back on TV after almost two decades.

In the interim, he has done over 40 films which have brought him fame, adulation and over 20 prestigious awards, including two back-to-back Oscars for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump.

However, TV never really left Tom and he produced, wrote, directed and performed television’s, Fallen Angels and From The Earth To The Moon that won a truckload of Emmys, Golden Globes, and Critics’ Society awards.

Buoyed with the success, Tom went on to write, direct and produce Band of Brothers and West Point.

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