Virgin Territory (2007)

Direct to Video for a Reason.

I remember reading about this film almost 3 years ago. It was suppose to be Misha Burton's vehicle to show her acting after leaving "The O.C." after three season. But after about 10 minutes its easy to see why the film skipped theaters and went direct to DVD.

The plot involves a lady's man, who falls in love with the one girl that he cannot have and comedic (yet forced) hilarity insues. I'm not saying that its a bad movie, but the production value is on the low side and the plot is increidbly predictable. November 20, 2008

It started out as a good idea...

I thought this would be a racy love story set in 14th century Florence. While it was, this movie had a porn feel.

Hayden Christensen from JUMPER stars as Lorenzo de Lamberti who beds every woman he encounters. It's not really work on his part as much as women are drawn to him. The one woman he wants is betrothed to one man while another more sinister nobleman is set on having her.

There were just too many tacky parts to rate the movie on a high scale. It wasn't a total stinker as I watched the entire film. I personally don't feel I'm the target audience. Maybe the younger crowd - 18/19/20 - would walk away with more appreciation than I did.
November 11, 2008

I kept my expectations low, and the film lowered them even further.

1 1/2 stars.

While watching this, I found myself asking if I should be viewing this as a reviewer or a voyeur. That this is a comedy is without doubt, but how successful is the comedy? How much seriousness do we expect? Is this to be a Medieval American Pie (or, more accurately, European Pie?) All of the sights we are given of the human body (in the beginning of the film, and with few exceptions - the villain, of course) are very easy on, and no doubt pleasing to the eye. A convent of nuns filled with young, lustful women most curvaceous and desirous, a gardener brought to them (Hayden Christensen's Lorenzo) deliciously sweet and angelically handsome (never mind that he can't hit an English accent any easier than Brad Pitt could), and all of the aforementioned shown to us in delightful glory. Never overdoing it, always maintaining a certain level of taste and decorum. Make no mistake, this isn't a slush film, and it isn't soft core porn, though one step to the left (say, Christianson's naked bum while he was pleasing the nuns) and it might have been. But the subject is, as the title explicitly states, SEX.

That Christensen pretends to be deaf and dumb to lure the nuns into his arms seems despicable, but once he's there, the nuns pray for him to heal, so why it was necessary for him to maintain this pretense is unclear. It didn't seem to be for the benefit of the nuns. Though in the end, well... no spoilers here. There's not much to spoil anyway, so what little there is, I wouldn't want to ruin. I will say this: The nunnery is hypocritical (no, really? - yes, really!), and like much else, doesn't make sense.

Lorenzo has arrived at the nunnery because he was running from a man who wanted to kill him simply because Lorenzo had fairly bested him in fair contest. Always a good reason for murder, eh? *Sigh* This same man has weaseled his way into forcing a marriage between the woman Lorenzo loves and longs for. And this woman - wildly unbelievably - seeks refuge in the same nunnery in which Lorenzo has hidden. Do they meet? Are either aware of a meeting, if it occurs? Is one, perhaps, unaware somehow? I'll let you answer that yourself.

The secondary story, that of Lorenzo's friends travelling to...well...the same place Lorenzo was (why?), at times, more entertaining, if still equally unbelievable, and therefore difficult to laugh at. It's also a lengthy secondary story, hijacking the primary story line for a good twenty minutes at one point, and one wonders if the writers simply couldn't find enough material in the primary story (that of Lorenzo's character) to make an entire film. I didn't think that the secondary story added anything whatsoever to the overall story.
Neither did having a narrator who was a thief turned church painter turned priest, who served one function. The narration was pretty useless in that we didn't learn much more from it than we would have if it hadn't been present, so there could be only one reason for his inclusion. As you read further, take a wild guess.

A comedy isn't an excuse for suspending disbelief past the point of believability. Things still need to make sense. The title, and the DVD cover, make little sense. One doesn't give a medieval story the title of a contemporary story (Virgin Territory), and even though Christiansen was dressed in a period costume, I still had to look once, twice, thrice, and more before I fully realized that this story was taking place in a different time. Perhaps it was the scantily clad women standing behind him, doing their best to look seductive and sultry, including costumes that were difficult to assign to a period, unless that period was the Scantily Clad Age, and they were attempting to duplicate the look of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.

So, we're prancing along to a nice little medieval voyeur story, eh? No. That portion of it stops a bit more than halfway through and a very serious - as in to the death - love-triangle-attempted-marriage-murder nonsense takes over. After the sex kitten bit steps aside, I found myself hungering for a REAL medieval comedy: The Princess Bride. This movie did not so much evoke Rob Reiner's 1989 masterpiece as it looked to it to prove its own worth, and that worth was lacking.

Christiansen's athleticism served him well in this film, as it did in The Revenge of the Sith. (Am I the only person who had a hard time seeing the Kenobi that MacGregor portrayed beating Christiansen's vastly more athletic and skilled Anakin Skywalker? It felt like Michael Jordan losing a game of one on one to Stacy King.)

For the life of me, I can't understand Christensen's attraction to the film. Or anyone else's, for that matter. November 2, 2008

A silly tale with a good soundtrack.

Decidedly euro film.
One compared it to American Pie, which could be said to be true.
Only without all the product placement and 'Americanism' of the American Pie series.

American Pie succeeded based on certain criteria, I'm sure this film will do well as a rental item as well.

Enjoy. October 24, 2008

A Decent Adaptation of the Decameron

They should have made it clear this was a film adaptation of the Decameron. I thought it captured the essence of the 14th century tales: light sexy comedy with some jabs against the catholic church. If you look at the movie expecting a modern film, then it definitely seems a little odd. October 9, 2008

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