Jeremy Piven

  • Lucas (1986)

    Lucas (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, June 2019) There’s an entire cluster of 1980s movies that, if you weren’t around to see them upon release, now feel like strange artifacts of another era. You can watch them for a cast of actors who later went on to do other things, but they usually feel so familiar in the story yet so detached from now that they’re artifacts. At least that’s how I feel about Lucas, a wholly unremarkable high school drama that had the good luck of featuring actors (Corey Haim, Winona Ryder, Charlie Sheen, Jeremy Piven) who became better known afterwards. The plot has something to do with a nerd picking up football to impress a girl, but as a coming-of-age comedy, it’s about as sweet as it needs to be with our hero learning about unreciprocated crushes and earning the respect of teammates through one of the big prototypical slow claps of the 1980s. Lucas is probably more meaningful to those who dabbled in high-school football, saw it at the right age, or were around for it in the 1980s. For everyone else, well, it seems as if there’s been endless variations of the same thing since then.

  • Entourage (2015)

    Entourage (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2016) I know of the HBO show Entourage despite never watching it, which puts me in a strange position when trying to figure out its movie adaptation. The basics are easy to puzzle out: Here’s one successful actor; one manic agent; three hangers-on; industry satire; obvious Hollywood wish fulfillment for young men… I could see how it would work, if it weren’t that I found few of the main characters to be interesting or sympathetic. Oh, I’ll agree that Jeremy Piven is a force of nature as an uber-agent (his helicopter assault on a business meeting is everything I’d expect from a powerhouse like his) and Adrien Grenier is halfway interesting as an actor who manages to direct a great movie. The rest are annoying. (Rhonda Rousey isn’t much of a thespian, even though this is her best performance to date.) The film’s misogyny is repellent enough, but the boys-will-be-boys shtick is its own brand of exasperating as well. Entourage’s Hollywood satire isn’t particularly biting (although I’m thinking that after five seasons of the TV show, much of it has already been done) and the general humour doesn’t fly all that well either. Some of the wish-fulfillment does work (especially considering the swank locations, prototype car and sunny California weather) but that’s a meagre return for a film that’s more confounding than anything else for those who are not already a fan of the series.