ewww

“Calendar Girl” is less movie and more endurance test. Meant as a star-making role for Beverly Hills 90210 star Jason Priestly, you really just sit back and wonder how anyone could have thought being involved with this dog of a film could be viewed as a positive. For starters it’s a 1960’s nostalgia trip seemingly geared toward teenagers at least 20 to 30 years removed from the 60’s. No wonder it was a huge bomb at the box office. But the movie also has bigger problems, like Priestly. He’s one of three 18 year olds from Nevada who spend way too much time oogling pictures of Marilyn Monroe. They eventually decide to take a road trip to Hollywood, walk up to her front door and ask for a date, thinking she’ll remember that they wrote her a fan letter 6 years ago. As if that’s not delusional enough, they have pick-up lines prepared like “Put out or get out.” It’s hard to think this stalker material could have ever been done with any level of humor or charm, but director John Whitesell quickly shows us that he could give a fuck. There are numerous instances where the boys follow a woman around, who they believe to be Marilyn, only to discover, get this, that it’s not really her (ho, ho). If that doesn’t creep you out, they also give chase while she’s in a car. If the cringiness of the obsession doesn’t totally make you want to turn this off, the fact that none of what these guys do is clever or even half-way rational certainly shouldn’t make you want to root for them. That Priestly is forced to play the most vulgar of these three horndogs also doesn’t avail him to the audience- he comes off as arrogant, rude, and unlikable. The other two are given one-dimensional, predictable characterizations. Jerry O’Connell is the dorky one who needs to learn to be less dorky, and Gabriel Olds is a character so innocuous he’s basically just the narrator. There’s a subplot about the boys being chased by two mobsters,played by “Groundhog Day’s” Stephen Tobolowsky and “Wayne’s World” Kurt Fuller, and Joe Pantaliano plays an Uncle character to one of the boys, all three of which are wasted. Most wasted of all though is Marilyn, who, again, in very brief scenes is only portrayed as a child-like object to be won over. When the boys fail to woo her with their patheticness, after a brutal first hour of the film, one of them even says “maybe we should have gone after Elizabeth Taylor instead.” That Marilyn actually gives one of these creeps a chance in the last third is more disheartening than the win this film seems to think it is. As characters are fond of saying here, “You can’t rub Bengay on heartache”. Yeah, but here misogyny seems to help it go down a little easier.