director
Richard Benjamin
screenwriter
Paul Rudnick
producer
Scott Rudin
cinematographer
Robbie Greenberg
music
Mervyn Warren
songs by
Marc Shaiman
Mervyn Warren
editor
Jacqueline Cambas
cast
Lisa Kudrow (Marci)
Damon Wayans (Dr. S)
Richard Benjamin (Ben Feld)
Christine Baranski (Senator Spinkle)
Paula Garces (Yolanda Quinones)
Jane Krakowski (Lauren Farb)
Veanne Cox (Caitlin)
Sherie Rene Scott (Kirstin)
Billy Griffith (Tubby Fenders)
Andrew Keenan Bolger (Chip)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 100m
u.s.
release: August 22,
2003
video
availability: TBA
official
website
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Marci X is the kind of terrible movie I'm
almost glad I've seen, because this year probably won't bring
a worse movie than this. Lisa Kudrow must also be glad that it's
finally come out (after something like two years on the shelf),
so that she can deal with it and move on with her life; she may
have been dreading the film's inevitable release the way a failing
student dreads a report card. Marci X ties with Almost
Heroes as the worst movie featuring a Friends
cast member, and the saddest part is that Kudrow is the best
actor on the show (rent The
Opposite of Sex if you don't believe me). This is an
entirely laughless comedy written by, of all people, Paul Rudnick
(In
& Out, the Addams Family movies), who usually
knows what's funny; he sure as hell forgot while writing this
one.
Kudrow is Marci Feld, a Jewish-American
Princess whose dad (director Richard Benjamin) owns a rap label
that's just put out a raunchy, "controversial" new
album by the smooth gangsta rapper Dr. S (Damon Wayans). A conservative
senator (Christine Baranski) condemns the album, which features
such gentle ditties as "The Power in My Pants." The
resultant hubbub hospitalizes Marci's father with a bad case
of stress; Marci takes over and tries to convince Dr. S to apologize
or at least clean up his image. Combative at first, the white
Jewish darling and the black playa learn to respect each other
and even fall in love.
Rudnick approaches this story
as a farce ungrounded in any reality known on Earth. The narrative
beats in which Marci and Dr. S warm to each other are completely
fake -- ironic for a movie that keeps talking about "being
real." When Dr. S forces Marci to rap in front of a hostile
club audience, she stumbles at first but then improvises a hip-hop
number called "The Power in My Purse," and everyone
in the house goes nuts over it. I don't think so. When Cameron
Diaz did this sort of thing in Charlie's
Angels, giggling through her geeky white dance moves
on Soul Train, we bought it because we, as well as the
primarily black people in the club, got caught up in her sincere
joy at being up there. No such luck with Kudrow, who looks faintly
embarrassed.
The movie shows affection for
pampered Jewish women -- Marci's three debutante friends (Jane
Krakowski, Veanne Cox and Sherie Rene Scott) are mildly amusing,
a sort of Huey, Dewey and Louie Greek chorus supporting Marci.
But Rudnick doesn't have the same instinct for hip-hop culture
-- he seems to base his satire on stuff he's seen on entertainment
TV shows. A sequence lampooning the P. Diddy/J.Lo gunplay-in-the-club
incident falls flat, and most of the black characters are cartoons
seen from the outside (whereas the cartoonish Jews at least come
from Rudnick's own firsthand observation, one assumes -- look
at his long-running "Libby Gelman-Waxner" columns in
Premiere magazine, for instance). Marci X is too
airheaded to be truly racist; it's just clueless.
An interesting comedy could've
been made about the unlikely parallels between the baubles of
rich Jews and the bling-bling hip-hop culture, and there is
a quick scene in which Marci and Dr. S rather bitchily compare
furs and jewelry. That bit shows Rudnick in his element -- a
generous satirist commenting on surfaces -- but the rest of the
movie feels like padding; even a meant-to-be-wicked sequence
recasting a boy band (here called Boys R Us) as wholesome gay
boys misses the mark. (Rudnick, who's gay, must've been wanting
to parody crypto-queer boy bands for ages and finally saw his
chance here, but couldn't he have made it funnier?) As for Kudrow,
the most encouraging thing I saw regarding her career was the trailer for
Wonderland,
an upcoming drama she's in, that played before Marci X.
She'll bounce back from this, if she remembers to stay away from
"high-concept" comedies.
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