The Battle of Shaker Heights

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source: The Battle of Shaker Heights

Like many folks who watched Project Greenlight, I was hoping that the HBO show was just being dramatic and playful about the filmmaking events... but at the end of the day, everything would be okay. Unfortunately for the BATTLE OF SHAKER HEIGHTS, everything is not okay. With a million budget, this team had the tools to make a decent movie. All one has to do is look at CLERKS, CHASING AMY, the original HALLOWEEN, and BETTER LUCK TOMORROW to see what can be done for a few hundred grand or less. Instead, SHAKER HEIGHTS looks like it was made by a group that concluded a million dollars was no money and they'd put on a good show (more for the HBO audience than the theatre audience, apparently). Once the project was picked, this group had the luxury of making a feature film without using their own money, going in debt to finish it up, feverishly look for investors, or the chore of finding a distributor (that may explain the mediocre result). This movie had NINE PRODUCERS, TWO DIRECTORS, and THE WRITER ON SET to answer questions. Sadly, it looks like little got done. The directors adding a custom "Hot Lips" license plate to the army Jeep served no grand purpose. That use of thought and power could have been better served elsewhere. As a whole, the movie looked like it was hacked to pieces in the editing bay. One minute the lead character Kelly (played quite nicely by Shia LeBeouf) gets to drive the Jeep... then he's huffing it on a bike... then he has the Jeep again... then is back huffing it on the bike. It looks like info was missing as to why the character would alternate. As far as locations, they didn't have many: 3 houses, a school, a hospital, some woods, and a grocery store. Funny thing was, there were never many customers in the store. Heck, the Quick Stop in CLERKS had more customers (a.k.a. production value). Even more strange, the filmmakers appeared to recycle establishing shots. I could swear I saw the same establishing shots of Kelly's house and the grocery store recycled as if they didn't shoot different angles... and used the same shot more than once. Then, there is 'the kiss.' We've waited most of the movie for Kelly's big kiss with 'Tabby' (Amy Smart's character)... and it's a Jr. High kiss. All in all, THE BATTLE OF SHAKER HEIGHTS plays like a cheap TV movie that lacked a clear leader. In the future, I hope Miramax and Project Greenlight takes a good look at their system. Maybe a million dollars is too much... maybe nine producers are too many... maybe the crews are too big... maybe having too many trucks doesn't allow the filmmakers to be mobile and do better work. But one thing is certain: With all the resources given, the movies of Project Greenlight need to get better than the first two.

Shia can act. William Sadler can act. Kathleen Quinlan can act. Amy smart can act. Actors do what directors tell them to do, they must trust the vision of the director(s). That is where this picture went terribly wrong. I saw the 7:45 show at Denver's Chez Artist Theater. This was the last day of the run and the second to last show. There were three other people in the audience. At $8.50 a ticket that's a whopping $34 for that screening. (hardly the $20K Rick Schwartz wanted). I had read the original script and the changes made to the script. Frankly I wasn't incredibly inpressed. I watched Project Greenlight and made 2 noteworthy observations. The directors wer very petty and unprofessional. Project Greenlight seemed to be more concerned with creating drama for their reality show than they were in creating a quality film. In comparison I did watch the first season of Project Greenlight and Stolen Summer. Stolen Summer, as a finished product, was a much better movie than I expected. Shaker Heights wasn't. In the battle of Shaker Heights the character of Kelly wasn't likeable. He was a disrespectful smart ass in school. He treated his dad like a leper. The attractive girl in the supermarket that liked him he threw canned goods at. Why did she like him? Most reactions looked over acted. Characters didn't act in believeable ways. I was never pulled into the story. The opinions of the final film expressed by the producers in the final make me wonder if they have made a career of winging confidently talking out of their butts.

Oh, how I tried to love this movie. I was so emotionally invested in Project Greenlight, and although the directors seemed like idiots, they weren't evil idiots. It turned out to be an okay movie, which is almost worse than being awful. There were a few laughs, but for the most part I didn't care about the characters in the movie nearly as much as the "characters" in Project Greenlight, and that is the problem that I have with it. If someone has to see Project Greenlight in order to care about the movie, then the movie failed.

I don't know if it was the script...or the directing...or the behind the scenes things that the Hollywood Producers did that we don't know about...but I didn't like this film...mainly because I didn't believe it...I didn't believe one minute of this film...everything seemed fake. Project Greenlight has now used 2 scripts that people don't want to see...There wasn't one scene in Shaker heights that rang true to me...

"The Battle of Shaker Heights" focuses on a pedantic high school dweeb (LaBeouf) and his involvements with WWII reenactments, a payback prank on a bully, and, most of all, his affections for two girls. An unfortunate little coming-of-ageish flick, "Battle" is lacking in depth, homogeneity, continuity, and the breadth of things we like to see in stories, characters, and screenplays. Unoriginal, unimaginative, off target, and with too much invested in a rather annoying central character, "Battle" isn't all bad and does manage some warmth, personality, and charm though it's largely overshadowed by its many deficits. Passable stuff which will likely play best with teens. (C)

THE BATTLE OF SHAKER HEIGHTS (2003) ** Shia LaBeouf, Amy Smart, Elden Henson, Kathleen Quinlan, William Sadler, Shiri Appleby, Ray Wise, Dana Wheeler-Nicholson. Sophomoric entry (in more ways than one) of the Project Greenlight experiment continues its ill-advised decision to make another predictable coming-of-age dramedy this time with LaBeouf (a combination of Dustin 'Screech' Diamond and Mark Linn-Baker) as a twerpy, sarcastic Ohio teen whose only outlet of creativity inexplicably is as a WWII recreation participant who faces his daily battles in high school by his wits while harboring resentment towards his well-meaning, yet flaky and damaged (i.e. mom's a latent hippie; dad a recovering druggie * charity worker) folks. When he is befriended by a preppie (a seemingly miscast Henson who eerily resemble a cross between an adolescent JFK and Alan Hale) he meets his sister (the sadly underused hottie Smart) whose impending nuptials further adds insult to injury. The film suffers in many plot holes, a too-cutesy-Aren't-I-Witty main character, strange choices (Wise as the father of Smart and Henson is a collector of odd-ball items to the point he includes a nicknamed nick knack on their answering machine???!!!) and a shockingly short running time that begs to question where is the meat of the so-called 'incredible' script by Erica Beeney that scored the win in the contest and the lugubrious directorial debut by the not-so-dynamic duo of Efram Potelle and Kyle Rankin (where is the drama?!) LaBeouf manages (barely) to make the rather annoying faux intellectualistic Salingeresque protagonist a few moments of humor and his puberty blues underlie some of his bankrupt rebellion. What's lost in translation is clearly a lack of communication by all involved. A real shame for something that apparently had a slim change of being worthwhile (if you can go by the HBO series).

You would think that Project Greenlight would bring in talent that at the very least is different than the crap we already see. This movie represents the lack of imagination and ability to tell the same old coming of age story in a different way. The goofy kid comes of age without really experiencing a dam thing. It wasn't funny; it wasn't inspiring, it wasn't worth seeing.

Having missed Project Greenlight ONE, and it's movie Stolen Summer, I happened to get addicted to part 2, and religiously, obsessively watched it. so in this HOT SUMMER day, I headed to the Loews Cineplex in Lincoln Center to see it. What Miramax feeds us, is just one of the most horrendous teenage films, I have ever seen. It doesn't have a personality. It seems to want to please everyone. But in the process manages to please no one. it's like a sequel to Mandy Moore's How to Deal, only without the heart that Mandy Moore brought to it. Mandy Moore's How to Deal, understood, that it was a drama with light moments, and gave in to it's dramatic moments. Shaker Heights ran away from it's dramatic moments, moments, that I think would have served the movie well. And so many of the slower scenes reminded me of a wonderful television show called "Once and Again" except that the writing in "Once and Again" was top notch. The comedy includes all the cliches: The teenage rebel (been there, done that), who has a bully after him (ooohhh the originality), and who goes off on teachers who are dumber than him (well, I haven't seen that before. NOT.) The rich friend, he falls in love with rich friends sister, he has his heart broken, he grows up a little bit, and then it all comes to it's oooohhh so bland conclusion. two things I really find fascinating: Chris Moore states that, The Hollywood system probably does work, keeping the talented in, and the non-talented out. One has to wonder, why Chris Moore is IN. American Pie is not exactly something to build an artistic career on. The last one, Ben Affleck on the phone gives advice and talks about what it takes to make a good film. At the very same time this took place, I can only imagine that Gigli was in post-production. Project Greenlight is a failure only because of the people leading it. Not because of the people who enter it.