This is one of the most weirdly disjointed and forced movies you'll ever see. It's like writer/director Amie Steir kidnapped the cast and made them perform her script at gun point. I can picture her standing off camera, pointing a .357 Magnum at Janeane Garofolo and screaming over and over "Be more quirky!"
Nadine Barnes (Janeane Garofolo) runs a dating service that's hit hard times. Though Nadine is a natural matchmaker, she's losing all of her clients to internet dating sites. Her mother (Swoosie Kurtz) owns the dating service and is about to shut it down when Nadine comes up with a great idea. Instead of being a matchmaker, she'll be a dating consultant and come up with a dating protocol that can make anyone fall in love with you. Nadine's mom will go for idea, but only if she can prove it will work by getting her old crush from business school to fall in love with her. The good news is that Adam (Brad Rowe) has always had a thing for Nadine, though she never knew it. The bad news is while Nadine is great at helping other people with their love lives, she's almost violently spastic whenever she tries to be romantic. Joined by her cool best friend Star (Tamala Jones) and a teenage computer geek named Keeler (Adam Crosby), Nadine sets out to try and con Adam into loving her. Since this is a romantic comedy, you can probably guess how the story goes from there.
This is the sort of film that as you watch it, you feel more and more embarrassed for the actors in it and the crew who made it. It's that terrible. There is not one single honest or genuine moment of emotion in the entire story. It's like writer/director Steir bought a book on how to write a romantic comedy, ate it, upchucked and then filmed her vomit. Poor Garafolo seems like she's running a race to see how many rom-com clichés she can fit into her role before she keels over from an aneurysm.
Making everything even worse is that the movie just looks awful. It reminds me of another Garofolo picture, Reality Bites. Not the film itself, which is very good, but how the Winona Rider character was making a heartfelt, serious documentary about her friends' lives and then the Ben Stiller character took that footage and made it into a cheap, exploitive piece of crap. Nadine in Date Land looks like that cheap, exploitive piece of crap.
I can't even imagine the process that led to Swoosie Kurtz and Garofolo being cast as mother and daughter. They barely look like they're the same species, let alone the same family. Then you've got Adam Crosby sporting a full-blown Caucasian afro that would have looked good on Dr. J back in 1977. And then there are a couple of snooty characters that seem to have teleported into this movie from a 1987 teen sex comedy.
Nadine in Date Land is astonishingly inept. Have you ever seen one of those stories about the elephant that learned how to paint or the chicken who learned how to play tic-tac-toe? You could take one of the mutant sea bass from the first Austin Powers movie and teach it to be a better filmmaker than Amie Steir. I don't know why they bothered to put this thing out on DVD but keep it as far away from your television as possible.
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