Title: The Movie Hero (2003)Released: March 8, 2003
Genres: Comedy, Drama
Length: 1 hour 38 minutes
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
My Rating:
Blake (Jeremy Sisto) is obsessed with movies, treating his life as one giant film. After his girlfriend breaks up with him, Blake decides to pursue The Suspicious Character (Peter Stormare), drawing the attention of the police. Sentenced to counseling, Blake falls for his therapist, Elizabeth (Dina Meyer), who is engaged to Jonathan (Carlos Jacott). Confident that Elizabeth is destined to be with him based on his knowledge of cinema, Blake sets out to win her over.
There’s probably some term for this, but I don’t know what it’s called. Any time I see a book that sounds at least mildly interesting to me I’ll add it to my “to be read” shelf. Over the years that’s led to thousands of books marked as TBR, and likely never will be. The same goes for IMDB. I’ve got over 3,000 movies and TV shows on my watchlist marked as “to watch” because they sound halfway decent to me. Will I ever be able to watch them all? Obviously not, but I want to watch some of them!
Last night I was in the mood for a movie, so I used a random number generator to pick a number between 1 and whatever number of stuff are on my IMDB watchlist. The number, which I don’t remember, but let’s say 700 for simplicity reasons, was 700. I then went to my IMDB watchlist and looked at the 700th entry: The Movie Hero, a 2003 straight to DVD film by director Brad T. Gottfred and starring Jeremy Sisto, Dina Meyer, and Peter Stormare. It’s worth noting that Gottfred is also the author of three YA novels! Forever for a Year, The Nerdy and the Dirty, and, coming soon, The Handsome Girl & Her Beautiful Boy.
Granted the number of movies I’ve seen is pretty limited, but it’s a unique concept to me. Blake Gardner (played by Jermey Sisto) believes he has an audience watching his every move. Think of it as you sitting in a theatre and Blake is on the projection screen, except instead of a projection of film it’s a live stream of a camera following his every move, with Blake narrating what he’s doing and talking to the audience explaining what’s going on. The film opens with Blake on a date with a girl at the movie theatre for the umpteenth time, so she dumps him. Out on the street he begins to talk to the audience trying to find a guy looking suspicious to be the villain in his movie, or as Stormare is credited as, “The Suspicious Character”. He chases him, and after one too many run ins with the police due to his strange behaviour he’s made to go to therapy. There he meets his therapist, played by Meyer, whom Blake is convinced is the love interest in his “movie”. Blake spends multiple therapy sessions trying to win her over and also trying to hunt down the suspicious character with his sidekick Antoine (played by Brian White) and put a stop to whatever the suspicious character’s suspicious activities are.
While the film is classified as a comedy, it’s not really “ha ha” laugh out loud funny. I chuckled once or twice from the movie, mostly as Antoine. White did a great job at playing Blake’s sidekick.
Overall, I give the movie a 5/10. I didn’t love it and I didn’t hate it, I found it entertaining enough and it was mostly worth the 90 or so minutes spent watching it. Now to check out Gottfred’s novels! It looks like Forever for a Year was already on that giant TBR list of mine, no surprise there. :)
