Buffy, How Far We Have Fallen

February 2, 2008 | Filed Under Movie Reviews | No Comments

Every once in a while Special Ops Media sends me a movie for review.  Sometimes they are a two-thumbs up hit, like “Children of Men”, but  this time it was a real dog.

“Suburban Girl” stars Sarah Michelle Gellar (of Buffy the Vampire fame) as Brett, a young associate editor at a New York publishing house, and a rather portly Alec Baldwin who plays Alex, the Managing editor at a competing publisher.

This is your stereo-typical may-December romance, with an entirely unlikable controlling father-figure in Baldwin, who tells Gellar’s character what to wear, what to write and what to say, and unfortunately, through most of the movie, she sees this as a good thing.

I promised I’d write a review, so that’s the only reason I sat yawning through the entire thing.  There was almost no lead-up to Alex and Brett’s first meeting and nothing in the encounter that made their hooking up believable in the least.

They had ZERO on-screen chemistry.  In fact, every time I saw Sarah getting romantic with Alec Baldwin, all I could think was EWWWWWW! Just EWWWWWWW!

My son watched it off and on with me, and the most generous thing he could say about this movie was, “I have been walking around all day and I’ve got to say, I’m chafing, and I’m enjoying that more than I’m enjoying this movie.”

It was supposed to be a “romantic comedy”, when in reality it was littered with annoying, painful, disjointed and pathetic attempts at wit.  The plot was utterly predictable.  I didn’t even find myself smiling throughout the entire movie.

Any of the powerful women were caricatured stereotypes – the wizened overly-made-up bitchy socialite, the new boss who dumps her work on her underlings, and doesn’t wear underwear…. you get the picture.

I couldn’t believe the number of times characters in the film said that Alex was “good looking and charming”.  Ick. Ick. Ick.  Do you suppose Baldwin had the writers put that in, just so he could get more ego strokes from this waste of celluloid?

The only redeeming part of the movie was that Brett left Alex at the end.  And no, I’m not spoiling it for you – the movie does that just fine on its own.

It’s pretty obvious why this went direct to DVD, but they could have saved a small piece of the environment by not producing yet another a DVD destined for the trash bin.

We give it a solid 2.5 out of 10.