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'Riding in Cars with Boys' pointless and distracting By
Bryce Casselman Director Penny Marshall has a knack for making fairly good "feel good" movies. Some of her best are Big, Awakenings, A League of Their Own and The Preacher's Wife. This time around, Marshall attempted to make a slightly different kind of movie with Riding in Cars with Boys. I say this not only because it is not really a feel good movie, but also because the movie doesn't feel like or have the same quality that viewers have come to expect from Marshall. Drew Barrymore (Charlie's Angels, Never Been Kissed) plays Beverly D'Onofrio, a woman whose dreams of love and success continually dead end as the men in her life prove to be the largest obstacles in her life. Her son, played by a multitude of actors for the different stages of his life, is the one constant in her life, granting her most of her life's joy and bearing the brunt of most of her emotional baggage. Some of the problems in this movie come in the form of dialogue. Much of the conversation between the characters in this movie feels forced, as if the writer had a few great lines and then spent the rest of the time trying to connect them with filler-dialogue. A lot of the soundtrack in the film was good, but out of place. There is a scene where Barrymore's character is riding in the car with her son that is now in college. It is an awkward scene as she and her son try to connect while playing on the radio in the background are upbeat, '80s tunes by artists like Cyndi Lauper. The music during this sequence of shots made the scene fill out of place, instead of enhancing it like all music should do in movies. Almost every aspect had problems similar to these which made the film feel disjointed, distracting and, frankly, boring. Other characters in the film were played by Sara Gilbert (High Fidelity), Brittany Murphy (Don't Say a Word), James Woods (Any Given Sunday) and Steve Zahn (Saving Silverman). I'm afraid I'm going to give Riding in Cars with Boys a moving violation for traveling to no point without a clue and give it One and a Half Stars.
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