Friday, June 12, 2009

Just Forget It

Remember the Daze (2007)
directed by Jess Manafort
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on Netflix On Demand

I haven’t been able to muster the appropriate sense of perplexity for director Jess Manafort's remake of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. Set ten years in the future with a new cast of less memorable teen-ish twenty-somethings, Remember the Daze is too harmless to be offensive. The kids do more drugs, to the pattern of the same inconsequential storms in teacups, wending through pretty North Carolina pines. The obvious question is “why,” but if I don’t have a problem with the same Judd Apatow plots recycled over and over again (and I don’t), I guess I can’t complain about a superficial retread of one of my favorite films – at least one done as obviously and sweetly as this. Some of the actors are Cosmo-cover famous now, as actors from ensemble pictures are wont to be, with time. But Jess Manafort won’t be, which, in the end, makes all the difference.