Rating :: Sour Patch Kids...enjoyable but you can't eat too many or else they burn your taste buds off.This little indie film – with an all-star cast (David Duchovny, Signorney Weaver, Ioan Gruffudd, Justine Bateman) and an up and coming director Jake Kasdan (Freaks and Geeks and Orange County) – is a blazing ball of satire.
As an aspiring writer of a TV series, this film was amazing. It’s the classic conflict of artist versus institution. Duchovny plays Mike Klein a long-time struggling writer who has continually tried to get his shows picked by the network but to no avail until now. His latest show "The Wexler Chronicles" originally about a brother dealing with suicide gets changed by the network to be about his mother dying… which turns his dreams into a living nightmare. Change after change takes his material from decent into the abyss. He watched his dream get flushed by executives making decisions on shows based on their kids' opinions. The dumbing down of TV...
When the credits rolled and there was Judd Apatow's name I knew this was more than a movie trying to point a general finger toward network executives...this was an indictment film. Both Kasdan and Apatow were heavily involved in 'Freaks and Geeks' , a show now thought of as a cult-classic but at the time NBC shoved it on Saturday nights at 8pm. The show was a hard on to nail down...not a 'Wonder Years' because it was too realistic and not as sweet; but in contrast, it was also not a classic teeny bopper show like 'Dawson's Creek' because it had character in its character. So off to the TV graveyard with it… yet fans have continued to this day to keep the show's legacy alive.
This well-done film crackles with energy and humor as well as its stinging criticism of a system that promotes mediocrity often.
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