Gregory Poirier
17 connections found
Filmography
View:
Connections, in both directions
The homages to popcorn movies "Pretty Woman" and "Mission: Impossible 2" are trite, and O'Connell mimicking Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate" is blasphemous.
Of course, the old T&A show has recently morphed with the gross out comedy popularized by the likes of the Farrelly brothers resulting in pictures such as "American Pie" that combine sex and scatological material for the "viewing pleasure" of their target audience of those hormonally charged viewers.
Could that foreign-exchange chick from American Pie actually act her way through a movie with all of her clothes on?
So he schemes to get Kyle married off to the only girl who seems to have made an impression on him, Natalie (Shannon Elizabeth, from "American Pie" and "Scary Movie").
From among the steady parade of women Kyle has bedded, Michael tracks down Natalie (American Pie's Shannon Elizabeth), a police officer who Kyle says may have been the one true love of his life.
The tags " sexist " and " misogynistic " might prove too slight for Gregory Poirier�s American Pie wanna-be, which boasts, " The three words a woman wants to hear most are . . .
Knowing that the Tomcat fund is up to almost half a million dollars, he decides to reunite Kyle with an ex-girlfriend named Natalie (Shannon Elizabeth, American Pie ), hoping that Kyle will pop the question and lose the prize.
Mel Brooks, Marty Feldman, and Gene Wilder did it in Young Frankenstein, but director Gregory Poirier is not Brooks on his most dull-witted day.
Tomcats Blu-ray – The 2001 comedy comes from the era in which everyone was trying to make the next American Pie, and this one stands near the top of the heap.
An early scene shows a murderer (Pruitt Taylor Vince, "Heavy") being transported under the care of his psychiatrist (Alfred Molina, "Chocolat"), undercutting the presence of a second killer (Jake Busey, "Tomcats") under the jurisdiction of a cop (Ray Liotta, "Narc") at the motel.
Among the group trying to avoid joining the ranks of the living-impaired: Paris (Amanda Peet, The Whole Nine Yards), a call girl who dreams of better days; an 80s TV star named Caroline Suzanne (Rebecca De Mornay, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle), living in denial about the downward trajectory of her fame; a pair of unusually hostile newlyweds named Ginny and Lou (Clea Duvall from Girl, Interrupted and William Lee Scott from Pearl Harbor); Ed (John Cusack, High Fidelity), a limo driver with an ambiguous past; police officer Rhodes (Ray Liotta, Narc) and Robert Maine (Jake Busey, Tomcats), the killer he's transporting; family man George (John C. McGinley, Any Given Sunday), whose trip with his quiet stepson Timothy (Bret Loehr from TV's "Everwood") and wife Alice (Leila Kenzle, White Oleander) has taken a horrific turn; and Larry (John Hawkes, Hard Ball), the slimy desk clerk at the motel.
Tomcats is as a light as the edited-for-TV version of Animal House .
If you�re curious about what happened to the guys from Animal House when they finally got out into the real world, Tomcats is a possible look.
It's sort of like "The Wings of the Dove," if Henry James had had the urge to spice up his story with scenes of sushi-spewing, jokes about transvestites, a sidetrip to the sperm bank and a riveting subplot about the search for an amputated testicle.
The homages to popcorn movies "Pretty Woman" and "Mission: Impossible 2" are trite, and O'Connell mimicking Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate" is blasphemous.
Michael is played by Jerry O'Connell (1999's "Body Shots"), a bright-faced veteran actor best known for playing the chubby, scaredy-cat Vern in 1986's "Stand by Me." O'Connell runs with the part, and goes all out in embarrassing himself in certain scenes, but he can't overcome the fact that Michael isn't a particularly interesting or amiable individual.
In my day, in the Classic Eighties Teen Movie era, we had Fast Times At Ridgemont High and Revenge Of The Nerds, comedies that managed to be good while also being (at least partially) about sex.
Like Porky's before it, it was a film that wasn't that good but massively successful, damning us to a cycle of knockoffs that by-and-large make the original look like Citizen Kane in comparison.
Sharing certain similarities with 2000's despicable "Whipped," "Tomcats" is a step above that picture, but shares the same downfall: none of the characters are likable people.
It's not like you're wallowing in mean-spirited drivel, as in "Bait" (2000) or "Tomcats" (2001).
There's Something About Mary (1998)
Directed by Bobby Farrelly
influenced Tomcats (2001)
Plot Themes
There is a scene in this movie (and I use the term loosely) that makes the infamous zipper and "hair gel" scenes in "There's Something About Mary" seem positively quaint.
Opening with a flashback to the wedding of the first of the pack to wed and then moving forward seven years to the present-day, tacky Las Vegas wedding of Steve (Horatio Sanz) and Tricia (Jaime Pressly), Tomcats clearly is attempting to cash in on the success of such films as American Pie and There’s Something About Mary, but it simply fails miserably.
Until the blooper reel that runs with the closing credits, there's scarcely a sign of wit or talent in the entirety of "Tomcats," another in what seems to be a never-ending sewer-spawn tidal wave of excessively tasteless comedies green-lighted on the coattails of "There's Something About Mary" and "American Pie."
So he schemes to get Kyle married off to the only girl who seems to have made an impression on him, Natalie (Shannon Elizabeth, from "American Pie" and "Scary Movie").
It doesn't help that a complete 20-minute portion of the movie forgets the premise and is solely devoted to the setup and payoff of a joke so gross it makes "Scary Movie" look relatively tame in comparison.
Shannon Elizabeth ("American Pie," "Scary Movie"), the object of the two guys' affection, comes off as a poor man's Elizabeth Berkley.
How could the screenwriter of Rosewood write and direct “an outlandish comedy”?
Tomcats is directed and written by Gregory Poirier, whose resume includes the underrated Rosewood, the more convention Gossip and the recent box-office performer See Spot Run.
It's tempting with something like A Sound of Thunder to play the iconoclast and laud it for its wacky "Land of the Lost" retrograde special effects, its toxic pustule of a screenplay (when you bring in the writers of Sahara (Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer) to fix a script by Gregory Poirier, the guy who wrote Tomcats, you know you're in deep), and its chutzpah in hiring Peter Hyams, possibly the worst all-around director still getting moderate budgets in the United States.
The writing is handled by Thomas Dead Donnelly & Joshua Oppenheimer (who apparently benefitted from good rewrites on Sahara) and Gregory Poirier (who, aside from the porn, is the auteur behind Tomcats), and is utterly predictable when it isn't nonsensical - you know exactly who is going to get picked off by the gorillasaurs and other beasties because they are the current least useful people in the party.