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movie review

In the Land of Women

Moviegoers must endure an endless parade of movie clichés

By Eric Alt | Metromix
April 20, 2007

There's only so much eye-rolling the average human head can tolerate. And "In the Land of Women" exhausts that limit. Not so much a film as a science experiment testing an audience's tolerance for clichés, this tedious and ill-conceived project unfolds with all the enthusiasm of a high school drama production.

The film starts badly with a miscast Adam Brody ("The O.C.") as brooding L.A. writer Carter Webb (when he dons sunglasses and sticks a ciggie in the corner of his mouth, it's tough not to wonder "Does he shave yet?") and gets worse from there.

Webb has just been dumped by his world-famous Spanish-actress girlfriend (totally relatable, natch). So he flees to Michigan to help his dying grandmother (Olympia Dukakis, who skulks around the movie looking like Harpo Marx) and maybe, just maybe, find the inspiration to write his long-gestating "great American novel." Once there, he gets tangled up with a pair of particularly photogenic neighbors played by Meg Ryan ("Sleepless in Seattle") and Kristen Stewart ("Zathura").

Ryan comes down with "movie cancer" (the kind where evidence of chemotherapy is represented by purple eye shadow), and she and Stewart (whose twitchy, insecure teen is the only element of the movie that rings remotely true) inexplicably decide to unload all of their innermost secrets to the lanky stranger from L.A. as though he's some 26-year-old emotional sage.

End plot. Commence eye-rolling.

Related topic galleries: Harpo Marx, Adam Brody, Michigan, Olympia Dukakis, Movies, Meg Ryan

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