Bachelor for Life: O'Donnell Flops Again

Movies are expensive. It's easy to overlook how much you shell out to see one--going to the movies is such a standard activity one barely thinks about how much is being plunked down. If you catch yourself in this trap--ignoring your expenditures because, "hey, I'm just going to see a movie"--then it's probably a good idea to remind yourself exactly what this proposition consists of. You are paying good money for the privilege of spending two hours sitting down. Now this seems obvious enough, probably even condescending, but you'd be surprised what people will spend good money to sit down--and waste their time--in front of.

For instance, if, for any reason, you find yourself about to pay to see The Bachelor, tell yourself that there simply must be a better way to use your time and money.

It's not that the movie is awful. There are a few funny jokes; there are some attractive actors; it has a beginning, middle and end. It's just that to watch it is a complete forfeiture of experience. There's nothing there, just fluff, and you could have thought of better fluff. Certainly not every entertainment experience needs to be brain-bending, and of course, good fluff has its own relaxing virtues. But if that's what you're in the mood for, watch TV. I hear "Friends" is a popular show.

Really, this film should aspire to be like "Friends". Without the ability to luxuriate in fluff that a feature accords, I'm confident the TV writers could have taken the same material and made it succinctly engaging, with more consistent jokes and probably more sincerity to boot. Instead, the movie infuriatingly waters down what might have made a decent sitcom, and we're left only with the remnants of sitcom artifices, without any punch.

Rene Zellweger, whose nose seems to be a bit too upturned for her own good, does a half-hearted Jennifer Aniston in many of her scenes. There are easy emotion intensifiers like whooshing twinkles and saccharine pop-songs. The cast is broken down into good-looking people who are leads and leads' ex-girlfriends, and normal-looking people who are character actors. It's all according to formula, which is not to say that formulas are inherently bad, just that when you can practically see the ready-made framework on which the movie is draped, it gets boring.

It's even more frustrating to think that the diluted sitcom treatment was a conscious choice for how to deal with the material, since the premise isn't original. The storyline, in which Chris O'Donnell inherits a lot of money on condition that he get married within 24 hours, is a remake of a 1925 Buster Keaton silent gem called Seven Chances. The put-upon bachelor first botches things with his steady girlfriend, then must propose to everyone he knows until a newspaper story phoned in by his friend brings a stampede of bridegowned fortune-seekers chasing him through town.

Talk is cheap, nowadays, so cheap you'd be amazed at the level of conversation which the remake thinks is worth your time. Forced to be expressive in a medium in which dialogue could only be written on intermittent frames, Buster Keaton, film pioneer and comedy legend, relied instead on visual complexity and sophistication: carefully wrought facial reactions, exquisitely timed double takes, graceful slapstick and outrageous acrobatics. He was a master of both subtlety and extravagance--he was called "Old Stoneface" for his constant deadpan which could somehowwhere the facade of a house falls over on him but doesn't touch him as he goes through a window-- that's just one example). Seven Chances is bestknown for the sequence in which his flight from the swarm of brides brings him down a rocky hillside and causes an avalanche of boulders which bound after him just as excitedly as the women.

Indeed, a clumsy and hackneyed remake like The Bachelor makes one yearn for the elegant tightness of the silent era. Go out and rent Seven Chances (and The General, while you're at it) and watch a couple of sitcom reruns, and you'll have outdone any sort of entertainment that The Bachelor has to offer.