Friday, August 14, 2009

The Goods: Live Hard * Sell Hard (**)

An awkwardly titled comedy with the grating Jeremy Piven as the leader of a guns-for-hire team of sales folks who aim to rescue a family-owned car dealership in a no-holds-barred weekend sale. I have no idea if such folks exist, but I’m pretty sure no one c0nnected with the script knows anything more about selling cars than a couple of Google searches would turn up. No, the main idea is to present a bunch of people acting outrageous. The lone female, for example, lusts after the dealership owner’s son, who is supposedly ten years old but trapped in the body of a thirty-year-old. Heee-larious?

Some of this is fairly funny for a bit, depending on your taste for the tasteless, but when the old salesman makes his fifth or sixth racist/sexist comment it ceases to be daring or outrageous and becomes merely tiresome. Then you start to notice that all of the characters, even Piven’s, are pretty one-dimensional and the plotting is out of a Comedy Movie 101 course.

IMDB link

viewed at screening [Bridge] and reviewed 8/15/09

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