Gossip (2000)

Gossip is one of a spate of movies that owe a lot to Cruel Intentions. This time it's rich kids in college, but other than that Gossip stays well within the beautiful-young-people-doing-awful-things-to-each other formula. Lena Heady plays Jones, obviously the Smart Girl because she is briefly seen wearing glasses. Jones hangs out with Arty Guy Travis and Handsome Rich Guy Derrick, who finances their adventures and has a little bit of a lying habit. The three are all in the same journalism class (acidic monologist Eric Bogosian plays the acidic professor) and decide to start and track a rumor for their term papers. They pick rich and beautiful couple Beau and Naomi (Joshua Jackson and Kate Hudson) as the focus of the rumor, and before you know it their juicy story starts spinning out of control into ugly territory and a truly ludicrous climax. There are attempts at making sledgehammer points about the slippery task of finding Truth, but mostly Gossip is about the guilty pleasure of watching pretty young actors be mean to each other. You'll hate yourself in the morning, but watch it anyway. --Ali Davis Amazon.com

WOW!!

The whole movie keeps you on the edge of your seat, and then it hits you!!! a grand ending that you never see coming!! very nice!! 'nough said!

not to mention how gook lena looks too! ;) great actors... November 3, 2008

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

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