Harvard Man

Director: James Toback
Year Released: 2001
Rating: 0.5

When you cast Joey Lauren Adams as a philosophy professor at Harvard I realize it has to be some sort of joke, but Toback's approach here is just too much: the awful acting (aside from Eric Stoltz), the use of Bach and rock and roll simultaneously, the excessive jump cuts, the idiot logic, the stereotypical Mafia junk, the philosophical verbiage, the high art posters on the walls (I'm a Paul Klee fan but I don't even anything of his in my bedroom). When do these people study? In the past few years now, college life – especially the Ivy League – has been lambasted by the movies as being dens of corruption beneath the veneer of intellectualism and deep thinking; it's as if everyone's saying, "Being smart and talented doesn't matter any more, and neither do these big time schools." This movie is neither crafty nor original enough to be subversive, and Toback should have realized that. "Black people don't swim?" At least my alma mater's never mentioned (though they wouldn't have had to throw the game against us since we consistently suck at basketball)....