Gossip (2000)

Pretty People get Pretty Nasty in this Pretty Trashy Bad Movie We LOVE!

It doesn't really matter who sleeps with whom in this sub-MELROSE PLACE college fantasy, GOSSIP is ludicrous trash, but it has style. Beautiful faces, beautiful clothes, deluxe interiors and lots of breaking glass - while its story makes no sense whatsoever. It'd be a perfect movie to watch while sloppy drunk or in between bong hits. Imagine a hysterically overwrought episode of FELICITY crossed with the hit-and-run Gen-X angst thriller BODY SHOTS and you more or less have the measure of this loopy Bad Movie delight about what happens when poisonous rumors take on a life of their own.

It begins in a college journalism class, where a super-hip professor (professional ranteuse Eric Bogosian) is lecturing on the blurring of news and entertainment. Assigned to write a paper on the topic, three super-cool students - Lena Headey, James Marsden and Norman Reedus - decide to go the prof one better. They devise a project: They're going to start a virulent rumor and plot its spread through the student body. Headey comes up with the idea, but Marsden supplies the buzz -- he catches a glimpse of super-snotty, vociferously chaste fellow student Kate Hudson in a drunken swoon in the arms of her boyfriend, (Joshua Jackson). Marsden proposes that they concoct a story that Hudson was seen doing the nasty with Jackson, run it up the flagpole and see who salutes. To the trio's smug delight, everyone does, embellishing and spinning bizarre variations on the original. But within 24 hours the story has mutated into sordid accusations of date rape, Hudson is filing charges and Headey is having second thoughts about their little jaw-wagging joyride.

Art-directed within an inch of its chichi life (does it come as any surprise that executive producer Joel Schumacher originally conceived it as a project for himself?), GOSSIP is so thoroughly preposterous on every level that the only way to enjoy it is to throw logic to the wind and groove on Marsden's cheekbones and the shelter-porn appeal of his super-swanky loft.

Marsden is a rich-kid college student who's apparently paying the freight for his two best pals to room in his enormous duplex loft. We're in an unnamed city somewhere on the Eastern seaboard; a few clues are dropped to suggest it might be Manhattan. (Like almost every American movie in Hollywood's neo-cheapskate era, Gossip was actually filmed in Canada.) If so, one could guess Marsden's dad is the supreme potentate of an oil-exporting nation. Nobody in New York -- at least, nobody below about Marla Maples' level - lives in an apartment like this. (Marsden's inverted-funnel teakettle looks like it cost more than all the furniture in our early-'80s college household put together.)

With his big, angular head and perennial sneer, Marsden is the poor man's Matt Damon while Headey's English-rose complexion, shaggy do and thrift-store queen costumes suggests Helena Bonham Carter (in her FIGHT CLUB trash-bag mode). Headey and Marsden are clearly in the film as design elements, and the camera lingers on them in long, honey-dipped closeups, serving as counterpoint to all the converted industrial interiors, flickering video screens and rain-swept city streets. The only reason to be interested in Marsden and Headey's will-they-or-won't-they dance is a desire to see one or both of them shirtless - but all of this goes down as smoothly as that third cosmopolitan. ( It's not like you give a fig about any of the characters).

One can only guess that Bogosian thought he could sneak a fat paycheck here, as a sanctimonious professor who delivers homilies about the difference between gossip and news, without the hipster fans of his solo-performance incarnation noticing. Joshua Jackson's role as Hudson's accused rapist could have been filled by anyone. Maybe Jackson caught a cab across Toronto from the set of THE SKULLS (another campus thriller that makes GOSSIP look like the second coming of VERTIGO). All we can say about the spectacle of worthy actors like Sharon Lawrence and Edward James Olmos playing tiny roles in this guilty-pleasure tripe is: Yikes.

Maybe one of them got to keep Marden's teakettle.
January 9, 2008

One of my favorites

I don't write many reviews.. only when I really like a product or I really dislike a product. This one I LOVE. I first saw James Marsden in Interstate 60, another of my favorites. When I heard he was in Gossip I borrowed a copy and watched it. Not just once. Three times. Then I went online and bought it. The ending is SO neat. I love the last line.

December 5, 2007

Enjoyable Trash

Gossip is far from a masterpiece, but is good, trashy fun, as long as you don't take it very seriously. The film, about some sleazy and wholly unbelievable goings-on at a college, is shot like an advertisement, and has a lot of gorgeous actors and actresses (Kate Hudson, the lovely Lena Headey -it's a pity she's not more famous) and the ending is unconvincing, but if you accept the whole artificiality of the concept, you will enjoy it as much as I did. March 26, 2007

This movie is great!!!

I loved the cast in this movie, I am huge Kate Hudson fan.What makes the movie great is the moral which is, if the gossip gets too visious, then something like______ could happen 9If i told you what _______ was, then I'd be wrecking the not only the twist, but ironically enough, the moral itself. Worth a glance... August 31, 2006

plot holes

The first half hour of this 90 minute movie is actually quite good. In fact, it is enthralling and has an interesting twist in that we don't know the real fact behind whether a young woman was violated by her boyfriend while unconscious. According to the rumor (the rumor being a school experiment conducted by three roommates) she was, however, but we the audience don't know that. However, the young woman is quick to think she has been raped. Why there is no attempt at a physical exam, is unexplained, especially since the young woman involved has the reputation of being a professional virgin, however it turns out she isn't, so that's why the movie lasts longer than 30 minutes. Fortunately, we're not dealing with unwanted pregnancies, either, so this doesn't turn into a soap opera. However, we do have the dreamboat "hero" who dreams up the rumor about her being raped, and who exhibits unlikeable traits throughout. But that's true of the three leads - the roommates are all unlikeable, being insufferably full of themselves. The last half of the film, 'dreamboat' takes the turn as lead character, and it's his story we're following, whereas his female roommate had the first half of the film, and basically it's her introduction to the audience of all the characters. Turns out 'dreamboat' and the young woman victim have a history together; which means issues they have to work out, and everyone else (in a way, the entire student body and its faculty and local law enforcement) is sucked into their story and mutual thirst for truth, though the characters don't have the same truth in mind - it's about vengeance; not justice. And vengeance when it's not the comic book variety, isn't fun for an audience, it's just distasteful. In other words, the man and woman should have been shut up together in a room so they could have worked it out for themselves, and left the rest of us alone. So from a brilliant first half-hour - and btw how does the roommate penniless art student have the dollars for all that tech equipment? - we degenerate into a constantly weaving pattern of lies and deceptions that seems more pointless than clever. There is merely too much story, so it becomes ridiculous. A basically good premise is ruined. If you are a fan of any of the stars involved, it might be worth viewing, if only once, but the film as a whole will probably leave a vile taste in your mouth. Perhaps that's the ultimate message on a film about the dangers of spreading GOSSIP, or in this case deliberate lies, is that what goes around comes around, and also it will leave you feeling sick to your stomach. I almost recommend you watch the first 30-45 min then quit midway, but anyone will watch all the way thru at least once, just to be sure where this is headed. February 14, 2006

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