Sadly Over-hyped

Am I Missing Something?

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

LOVERBOY is a deceptive feature. It starts quite cheerfully, introducing us to the free spirit that Emily is as she moves from man to man, trying to have a son, and failing each time. The movie seems to be trying to present Emily as this ultimate feminist -- a woman who has the means to live independent from a man's company, who is unabashedly sexual and maybe a little dangerous. She's even tried artificial insemination -- it's one of the movie's first scenes as a matter of fact -- to no avail. Even her voice-over seems rather upbeat... until she begins to display hints of a less balanced personality. The fact the is aggressively trying to become a mother -- the seed of many fathers is equal to having no actual face, no actual gene to trace her son back to, so she philosophizes -- is but the seed of a greater evil, one that involves the fruit of her loins.The appearance of a kind man (Campbell Scott in a brief scene) is the catalyst for her motherhood to take effect. Of course, predictably, she takes the money and runs as far as she can, purchasing a house in cash, and letting loose her inner demons where she begins to call her son "Loverboy" (hence, the movie's title). It's a subtle but shocking left turn that discloses the real pathos that was always there. Emily wants no man in her life because she is literally saving herself for the one man who will come from within her: it's a symbolic way of securing the ties between two people, and an extreme one. Her boy is tied to her through the placental cord from which she has fed him, now he will be hers in every possible way. What she ignores is that "Loverboy" grows increasingly independent from her. Every tug of her possessiveness garners an equally reactive tug of assertiveness from Paul who almost comes to hate her. The appearance of external elements -- a father figure under the form of Matt Dillon, a school system that is battling her monstrous motherhood, and her own hurt child who was barbarously neglected by her disco-dancing parents (Kevin Bacon and Marisa Tomei) and abandoned by a neighbor who acted as a mother figure (Sandra Bullock) -- drive Emily to the edge of sanity.LOVERBOY is an actress' dream movie: one that can allow her to display her range in a character that has many levels of femininity, some initially rather thrilling, others quite frightening. Emily is a marked woman whose wounds have not healed with time, and Kyra Sedgwick, an actress who has had moderate success, finds a powerful role here. She is in nearly every shot, and where another less subtle actress might have overdone the moment Emily's damaged psyche surfaces, Sedgwick maintains a certain beauty, a certain elegance even when her resolution is horrific. Kevin Bacon has made a haunting movie, one that has depth, a strong visual sense, and doesn't shy away from its dark heart for the sake of satisfying a wider audience.

LOVERBOY (2006) *** Kyra Sedgwick, Dominic Scott Kay, Matt Dillon, Blair Brown, Oliver Platt, Campbell Scott, Kevin Bacon, Marisa Tomei, Sandra Bullock, Sosie Bacon, Travis Bacon, Jessica Stone, Melissa Errico, Nancy Giles, Carolyn McCormick, Spencer Treat Clark, Valyn Hall. (Dir: Kevin Bacon)Sedgwick delivers the goods in this complicated drama.Kyra Sedgwick is an underestimated and estimable actress who has done some exceptional yeoman work in her career (currently kicking ass as a quirky investigator on TNT's smash hit "The Closer") and in her latest foray on screen really gets to stretch her dramatic muscles in no small order through her real-life husband, fellow unsung actor Kevin Bacon, directing her as a single mother with a somewhat scary viewpoint on her life's mission: having and loving a son, all to herself.We first see Emily (Sedgwick) attempting to find the perfect male to impregnate her with mixed results as she narrates her life's goal in obtaining fertilization to have a child to raise solely and exclusively. After several clumsy and unsatisfying experimental one-night stands Emily finally gets her wish after a dalliance with a handsome stranger named Paul (reuniting with her "Singles" co-star Scott) whose sobriquet she bequeaths to her infant. Shortly thereafter she buys a cozy home and raises Paul in a sheltered environment, home schooling the precocious boy (Scott Kay) as well as shunning him from any outside contact including children his age, neighbors and pretty much any and all human beings. Emily's psychological scars are shown in flashbacks from her '70s era parents (Bacon and Tomei, essentially caricatures of the Me Decade in crazy outfits and bad hair) who more or less neglected her needs that she romanticizes with a neighborhood mother as her own prefabricated fantasy (Bullock in a smallish role). Emily attempts to be the perfect parent but fails to see how in fact she is in fact hindering her son (after all you can't spell smother without mother) who wants to be 'normal' by having parties, friends and attending school for real. Based on a novel by Victoria Redel, the screenplay by Hannah Shakespeare depicts Emily as a possible threat to herself (and of course her boy) but there are some plot holes (where does Emily have the money & means to actually pay for a house in cash?!) and more questions than answers for how she was able to fly under the radar for six years in treating her son the way she does. Bacon, making his big-screen directorial debut, showcases his wife's natural talents in making Emily sympathetic to a fault but then pulls the rug out from the viewer by the final act in depicting some cruelty and a questionable end that makes for a case of child abuse even more apparent. And yes that is their daughter and son Sosie and Travis as respectively Emily in the flashbacks and as Emily's neighborhood lawn mowing provider.Again Sedgwick delivers a solid performance of such a frustrating character whose good intentions are curdled from the get go.

Loverboy brilliantly lays parental love out on the table for all of us to observe in two of its twisted, unbalanced forms. The first is that of young Emily's parents, played sublimely by both director Kevin Bacon, and Marisa Tomei, who think that parenting consists of modeling love by bathing together with the door open and constantly cuddling in front of the child, as though she would be nurtured by having a pair of super-sexed hippie babysitters for guardians. The two are a riot, as is Sosie Bacon, playing with her real-life dad, a girl who sings a Bowie song in a school show in order to shock her parents into caring about her. These flashbacks are intricately woven together with the scenes of the adult Emily, played by Bacon's real wife, Kyra Sedgwick, as she raises her six-year-old Paul (Dominic Scott Kay) on her own, calling him Loverboy. Master Kay holds his own as the increasingly suffocated son, trying to escape his mother's web of the other kind of unbalanced love, being kept "safe" and "smart" and unsullied by society. We feel deeply for Paul, hoping that he will be allowed to stay in school as Emily descends heartbreakingly into madness, fearful that the school is poisoning her child. We pray that Matt Dillon, as a friendly fisherman, will be allowed to take Paul for a "boys only" fishing trip, but even then, the desperate Emily stands on the shore screaming at them to be safe while they're trying to have a few bonding moments together. The movie moves and looks like a dream, and like a dream, it has an explosive, cathartic ending that you have to wake up from. The Bacons in every way have put together a searing work of art, beautifully acted, shot and mounted, that should haunt anyone who can identify with its universally tragic themes.

Kevin Bacon is a fine actor, and I was looking forward to this, his debut as a director. He's certainly worked with some of the best in the business, and one would hope that he'd picked up some great lessons in film making.But this film, sadly, doesn't offer us much.I believe the two main reasons it doesn't work are the script, and the casting of Kyra Sedgewick, Mr. Bacons real life wife.The script is pretentious and humorless and forced, and Ms. Sedgewick, a fine actress with a beautiful body (shown off here quite often) is almost fetishized by her husband in this film- to the detriment of the story itself.It's a film chock-a-block with celebrity cameos, everyone from Matt Dillion to Sandra Bullock to Campbell Scott and Marisa Tomei, and no one really survives it.I will say this though- it is a BOLD failure, and I do look forward to what Mr. Bacon can do with a half decent script. He (and we) deserve better.