DVD Review: Bart Got a Room: William H. Macy, Cheryl Hines: Movies & TV
DVD Review: Bart Got a Room: William H. Macy, Cheryl Hines: Movies & TV
Amazon.com
Bart Got a Room isn’t the first movie comedy about nerds, high school, and the senior prom, and it undoubtedly won’t be the last. It may not be the best, either, but writer-director Brian Hecker’s 2008 concoction has enough laughs, charm, amusingly-drawn characters, and winning performances to more than hold its own. For Danny Stein (Steven J. Kaplan), a high school student in Hollywood, Florida, the imminence of the prom is the source of considerable distress; even more distressing is the prospect of booking of a hotel room for himself and his date at the end of the evening. Problem is, Danny (who’s a bit of a schlub, but far from a total, like, loser), doesn’t have a date yet. The obvious choice is his “best friend” Camille (Alia Shawkat), who’s available and clearly interested, but Danny thinks he can do better–say, with Alice (Ashley Benson), the sophomore hottie who drives to school with him every day. Wrong. As the days, then the hours, dwindle down, Danny, whose parents’ separation is an added distraction (William H. Macy and Cheryl Hines are perfect as Ernie, who’s looking for love on the internet, and Beth, who has a new beau), realizes he’s in big trouble, not least because even the titular Bart–a geek so geeky he makes Danny look like Tom Cruise–already has the room thing covered. All of this plays out in ways that are neither surprising nor especially hilarious, but the movie has heart, not to mention a number of cute, quirky scenes (many involving Danny’s well-intentioned, but mostly clueless, family). Movies like Bart Got a Room aren’t really about the destination, anyway; they’re about the journey, and this one’s a fun ride. –Sam Graham
Stills from Bart Got a Room (Click for larger image)
Product Description
Nerdy high school senior Danny has spent six hundred bucks on the hotel room, the limo and the tux for his prom. He’s only missing one thing - the girl. Hampered by well intentioned but clueless advice from his newly divorced parents and unsympathetic mocking from his best friends, Danny battles peer pressure, teen angst and his own raging hormones as he desperately searches for a prom date. Danny’s luckless quest turns to panic when he learns that even Bart - the school’s biggest dweeb - has secured not only a date but also a hotel room for the night.
A Quirky Teen Comedy With a Difference,
By The Movie Man “tenebre89″ (Maywood, New Jersey USA) -
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What’s this?)
What I liked about “Bart Got a Room” is its easygoing charm. This is not one of those frenetic, loud teen comedies in which implausible characters engage in outrageous actions that in no way resemble reality. Here we have the story of high school senior Danny (Steven Kaplan), who’s spent a small fortune on the hotel room, limo, and tux for his prom. What he doesn’t have is a date. The always-wonderful William H. Macy, complete with black curly wig, and Cheryl Hines play Steven’s divorced parents, both self-absorbed with seeking relationships of their own. “Bart Got a Room” is not a rollicking movie with wisecarcks issuing forth from precocious teens’ mouths every few seconds. The comedy is more about Steven’s awkwardness in deciding who to take to the prom. Since he’s not the cliched football hero girls would be eager to accompany to the prom, Steven is sympathetic with his ordinary looks, gentle temperament, and overall sweetness. Alia Shawkat is very good as Camille, Steven’s longtime friend, and Jennifer Tilly pops up as an overly amorous woman Steven’s dad met online. There are wonderful little moments here and there of South Floridians doing what they do — hanging out on the beach, playing cards, having the Early Bird Special, listening to a sparsely-attended concert of 40’s music — which add nice atmosphere to the movie. There is a brief scene at the beginning of Steven and his family having dinner. The interaction here is very funny, in a natural way, and I’d like to have seen more. There’s comic potential in some supporting characters that is not fully mined. As far as the bonus extras, I wasn’t able to access the Pop-Up Production Notebook and the theatrical trailer. I don’t know if this is an inherent problem with the release or unique to the disc I watched. The movie itself played perfectly.
That William H. Macy just knows how to make us laugh.,
By Jason Whyte “Too Many Films, So Little Time” (Victoria, British Columbia, Canada) -
Much of “Bart Got a Room” is going to feel a bit old hat for some, but you know what? Sometimes it’s a good old hat, the kind that you just want to keep around despite knowing exactly where it has been. There is much familiarity in the setup of Brian Hecker’s debut feature: poor kid can’t get a date to the prom, his parents are divorced, and he has a best friend that thinks it would be funny if they went together. Reading this, at first you would probably think the movie doesn’t have much to offer, and would rather spend your money on seeing whatever Kate Hudson or Renee Zellweger are up to this weekend at the box office.
Slowly but surely, this indie gem has something great up its sleeve: the characters develop into three dimensions, the comic devices take us into new, interesting territory and there’s an ending that cries so far from what we are led to expect. Not only that, the movie has its references to Blake Edwards and (naturally) Woody Allen, but this is a springboard for a series of funny and crazy events.
Plus it’s one of those indie pictures that have some great talent in front of the camera. William H. Macy, Cheryl Hines, Jennifer Tilly and a promising newcomer named Steven J. Kaplan who will no doubt become a star.
The title character is not named Bart (more on that later) but rather Danny (Steven J. Kaplan) who is nice enough, smart enough and — from a heterosexual writer’s perspective, for what it’s worth — good looking enough, but poor Danny just can’t get a date to the prom. His friend Camille (Alia Shawkat) wants to go as friendly company and to have a friend to spend time with, but Danny has his eyes on a few other potentials, including a strawberry blonde who he chauffeurs every now and then.
To make matters worse, Danny’s dealing with the divorce of his parents Ernie (William H. Macy) and Beth (Cheryl Hines) who both try to stay in Danny’s life. It probably also doesn’t help matters that they are living in Hollywood, Florida. If any of you saw Larry Clark’s film “Bully”, also set in the same town, you might remember that in this Hollywood, dreams go to die. Or to get replaced by a plastic flamingo sitting next to your swimming pool full of stray golf balls.
At a scant 78 minutes, “Bart Got a Room” is funnier, has a great sense of place and time and is more honest than most of the comedy films with ten times the budget. It wears its charm on its sleeve and isn’t afraid to make us laugh at moments that are refreshingly honest as well as way out there. In one bizarre sequence that just barely gets away with it, Ernie tests the noise level of his new apartment just in case Danny wants to bring his date “home”. An old lady in the apartment building appears in the corner of the frame as Ernie tests the volume “From one to ten”, but the old lady isn’t the joke. The joke is that Ernie sure loves his son no matter what.
Consider even a later scene with Ernie, who is so bent on getting Danny a date for the prom that he ditches a date (with a character played by the gorgeous Jennifer Tilly…she’s nearing 50, people!), runs halfway across Hollywood and winds up picking an older and slightly oversized prostitute for Danny to take to the big dance. You may not know what you’re doing Ernie, but at least your heart is in the right place.
I mention Ernie so much because, ladies and germs, William H. Macy needs no introduction. You already know him, love him and admire his craft as an actor, and I loved his wacky jew-fro, childlike demeanor in his eyes and yet he has a real soft spot for his ex, despite their separation. Macy is matched well by Steven J. Kaplan, simply terrific as the conflicted son. He was carefully selected by Brian Hecker for his natural talent, of course, but when I met Brian at a screening at the Victoria Film Festival screening, there was a divine visual similarity.
Sure, “Bart Got a Room” is a great comedy, it’s funny with big laughs, but as I wrote about before, things don’t exactly happen in the way we think they’re going to and it is wonderful, just wonderful on how it does things in an honest manner. The film is not about whether Danny and his best friend get together romantically - nor Danny’s parents for that matter — and I really admired how the film side stepped what could have been a romantic cliché and ends on a note of surprising hope for all four of the leads. The end credits roll, and their life continues for the better. And so does ours as we leave the theater.
Note: And that Bart, by the way? He’s an illusion, a character we don’t see through the whole film, and when we finally do, it’s a whammy. And stay for those credits.
[...]
Miami Beach Memoirs,
By James Morris (Jackson Heights, NY United States) -
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What’s this?)
From the moment that Bart Got a Room opens with a teenage Big Band playing Benny Goodman’s Sing Sing Sing for a bunch of post-Alzheimer’s Jewish retirees on a Miami Beach, you get the feeling this is not just another teen comedy. It may have been the nerdy coming-of-age narrative or the Jewish family trappings, but for some reason, I kept thinking of Neal Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs. And I mean that to be taken in a complimentary light.
It’s almost time for the Prom, and high school senior Danny has a problem. His newly divorced parents, engagingly played by William H. Macy and Cheryl Hines, assume he’s taking Camille (Alia Shawkat), his platonic best friend of nine years. But Danny has other plans - he wants to ask Alice, the flirtatious young sophomore he drives to school. But Danny has been reading the signs of her interest all wrong, thanks to the bad advice of his father, and when Alice turns him down for the prom and walks out of his life, well, his time to procure a date is rapidly running out.
Although ostensibly not much more than your standard teen flick, Bart’s Got a Room has some surprisingly adult and well-crafted humor, and despite the ending that I predicted shortly into the second scene, there was a lot of feel-good moments and some genuine laughs. Chief among these was the sub-plot involving Danny’s desire to see his parents get back together, more than a few very adult and funny situations, and a hilarious cameo by Jennifer Tilly, who steals the movie as a sex-hungry dinner-date that Danny’s father meets on the Internet. Newcomer Steve Kaplan is engaging as Danny, and the film is uniformly well acted and cast.
This certainly was not the worst 80 minutes or so I’ve spent on a film recently, and in the end, I found I enjoyed this little comedy more than I expected to. Probably the best thing about it was the fact that it didn’t seem to be written to appeal to teens, and was totally devoid of the puerile adolescent humor one expects to find in films of this sort. And that was a pleasant surprise.
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