NEW YORK CITY SERENADE: Ed Burns called, he wants his failed career back.

NEW YORK CITY SERENADE
Starring Freddie Prinze Jr., Chris Klein, Jamie-Lynn Sigler
Directed by Frank Whaley
Anchor Bay Home Entertainment
Review by Louis Fowler

A lot of people—especially lazy critics—when they talk about the worst films ever made, always seem to attack genre films first. I think that's unfair. It's a way too easy target: most horror and sci-fi films are so dependent on special effects and preposterous-enough plots, that it's incredibly easy to screw those types of movies up and, you know, nine times out of ten, the filmmakers probably will. It's really no mean feat to make a “bad” genre picture.

Now serious, thought-provoking, insightful dramas—those are the films that people should scrutinize. Those are the films that shouldn't get the easy pass. Think about it: all dramatic filmmakers have to do is write a convincing problem, some convincing dialog and half-way decent actors who can emote. Set up the camera, press record and the movies done. Yep, when you fail at drama, you fail big time. You fail royally. You fail as a filmmaker and, even better, you fail at life because you can't even convincingly put it on the screen.

Frank Whaley just may be the biggest failure of them all, because his latest “effort”, NEW YORK CITY SERENADE should go on record as—sorry TROLL 2—the real worst movie ever made. SERENADE is that type of overwrought, thirty-something “guys who can't grow up” type of Ed Burns-wannabe indie flick that sucked in, say, 1995 and, to make one now is, well, just plain embarrassing. (For Frank, not us. No, for us, it's a laff-a-minute guffaw-fest.)

As if to add insult to injury, Whaley, a 90s has-been himself, casts, as the movie's leading men, 90s teen-dream has-beens Freddie Prinze Jr. and Chris Klein as a pair of New York cads you love to hate. Watching them on-screen is like watching the Budd Dwyer suicide tape on a constant loop, but with a view of the New York skyline in the background. This is the type of movie designed to make you hate actors and, well, the entire art of acting. Hell, it made me hate the entire art of filmmaking too.

The wonderfully bland Prinze is a supposed filmmaker—I think he's supposed to make independent art-flicks, LOL—who cheats on his “Joisey”-trash girlfriend (the quickly fading into obscurity Jamie-Lynn Sigler) at a party. She finds out, breaks up with him and he's depressed. Like, REALLY depressed, bro. He almost doesn't finish his Heineken.

On the other hand, the halfway-to-autistic Chris Klein desperately tries to shake his “aw shucks” persona by playing an absolute dick of a drummer who has a womanizing “problem”, a neglected daughter problem and, best of all, a wispy little mustache problem that, no matter hard he tries, just won't grow in all the way. (You almost wonder if Chris's acting teacher told him that “mustache = drama”. His 'stash has more on-screen presence than Klein ever could.)

Together, they go to a film festival where Klein impersonates lilliputian Wallace Shawn's son, gets them kicked out of a hotel, complains about the price of refreshments at a film screening and comes to terms with their moronic arrested development. It should be a real moving, dramatic, tension-filled moment, but coming out of this duo's monosyllabic drool-crusted lips...well, you almost expect Bela Lugosi to show up and scream “PULL THE STRINGS!”

For example:

Freddie: “Yo, I love my girl, dogg, and yo, you gots ta take care of yur liddle girl! Doan't be a alcoholic like your father, bro!”

Chris: “Awww...fuggedboutit, homey! You juzz don't get me! Let's go check out a Yankees game! Ayyyyyye!!!”

The whole film seems to bank on the fact that the public has been dying to hear Prinze and Klein recite melodramatic, junior high drama class dialog in utterly cheesy, almost slapsticky, New York accents for 103 minutes. I know I have been.

And that's the best part: watching the utter sincerity in Freddie and Chris's performance. You can really tell that they BELIEVE in these roles and deliver them with every bit of acting know-how they can muster, which, sadly, is very little as they were never very good to begin with. You feel as if maybe, just maybe, they think this film would be their big dramatic comeback, finally, after all the SHE'S ALL THATs and SAY IT ISN'T SOs. It's like they just don't know better. You want to lovingly pat them on the heads, give them a bowl of soup and tuck them in their beds, all snug as a bug in a rug.

And, lucky for us, Frank Whaley is just the homunculus to accomplish this. As the years ravage his once-boyish face and as he gets more and more, well, “sex offendery”, he seems to only find roles as, well, sex offenders in movies like VACANCY. He's a highly irritating chigger of an actor who I grew to wholly dislike in high school when every hyper-sensitive drama clubber told me that I just “gotta see” SWIMMING WITH SHARKS, because, as the drunkard drama teacher told them, it's such “an accurate portrayal of the business!” OK, sweetie, whatever you say, just make sure that fifth-tier rip-off of GREASE comes in under budget or the whole department gets cut.

So, as bad as Whaley is as an actor, he is even worse as a screenwriter. The tired plot and boring post-9/11 New York “God, I love the majestic playfulness of this city!” BS aside, he has no concept of how real people talk, instead mixing sitcom-like “I could tell ya, but I'd have to kill ya!”-esque zingers in with faux-emo-fied “dude” situations that would make Zach Braff say “Hey, you guys are pussies.” These “coming of middle age” movies failed and went straight-to-video in the 90s, when that now-mercifully-dead indie drama boom seemed to spit out one of these a week, and, almost unknowingly, Whaley seems pathetically stuck in this era, flailing about miserably, refusing to change, adhering to what he considers, sadly, his “vision”. Sorry, Frank, but your vision is stupid.

But, on the bright side, I honestly hope that NEW YORK CITY SERENADE gains a massive cult following. I would love to see midnight showing of this, with the attention-craving throngs dressing up as Prinze and Klein, reciting the half-baked dialog, reenacting the scenes in the aisles, throwing raisins at the screen when Klein's dog “Raisin” shows up...no? Anyone?

Oh well. Just go rent SWIMMING WITH SHARKS instead. I hear it's an accurate portrayal of the business.