Review: How to Deal (*)

HOW TO DEAL
A film review by Steve Rhodes

Copyright 2003 Steve Rhodes

RATING (0 TO ****): *


It's pretty bad when you find yourself nostalgic for something as recent as
last summer's movies, but I am. I miss all of those fun popcorn flicks we
had in the summer of '02, including EIGHT-LEGGED FREAKS, REIGN OF FIRE and
XXX. Now, when this sorry sequel summer offers something other than second
or third editions, it usually a mediocre melodrama like HOW TO DEAL,
starring singer Mandy Moore.



Moore almost saved her last picture, A WALK TO REMEMBER, which was nothing
worth remembering, but this time she plays in a movie so lame that it is
unsavable. Perhaps she realized this since she just phones in her
performance this time.



Directed as if it were on autopilot by Clare Kilner, the movie lacks both
energy and pacing. It drifts like a driverless boat on a placid lake.



The slapdash script has a sixteen-year-old named Halley Martin (Moore)
having to deal with the death of her best friend's boyfriend, the marriage
of her sister into a stuck-up family and her father's marriage to another
woman. Her father, played badly by Peter Gallagher, is a freeze-dried
hippie DJ who claims to be the "big dog of soft rock." Halley's mother
(Allison Janney) is still angry at her ex for having run around on her. At
high school, a stoner type boy, but one with a good heart, has set his
sights on Halley. The film is just as awful as it sounds.



There are several questionable parts for a PG-13 movie, whose main
demographics are girl tweens. Besides the casual teen drinking, it features
a long scene involving a dope smoking grandmother. The movie treats her
addiction as casually as a preference for broccoli.



"Things do sometimes change," Halley's mother tells her. Well, the movie
never does. It just limps along until it finally stops at a completely
predictable point. What is the closest the movie comes to being good? In
one brief incident, we see Halley reading "Madame Bovary." At least in that
scene, we see the name of a good story. That's as close as we ever get.



HOW TO DEAL runs 1:41. It is rated PG-13 for "sexual content, drug
material, language and some thematic elements" and would be acceptable for
kids around 12 and up.



My son Jeffrey, age 14, thoroughly hated it, giving it just one *. He
thought that is was like a bad television soap opera with no story but lots
of subplots.



The film is playing in nationwide release now in the United States. In the
Silicon Valley, it is showing at the AMC theaters, the Century theaters and
the Camera Cinemas.



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