Loverboy

Loverboy **

The Kevin Bacon directed "Loverboy" is his chance to glorify his wife Kyra Sedgwick, but showcasing her in a bikini, leather pants, and even nothing at all at some point, while at the same time, getting lazy in the director's chair, and making a silly, Lifetime-esque, drama about a mother who is waaay too overprotective about her son.

Sedgwick plays Emily Stowe, whose main goal in life is to have a child, so that she could share life's immense wonders with. She doesn't want a husband, or a house, or a place to live, or even a father. So, she decides to go around the United States, sleeping with as many men as she possibly can, unprotected, so that she'll end up having a baby, and she'll never have to worry about who the father is at all. When that doesn't work, she ends up having a night with a man she meets in a hotel, and then ends up pregnant. The only shred of having a memory of him is naming her son after him, Paul, aka Loverboy, a nickname that young Paul tires of by the time he's six. Emily loves her child, and doesn't want to let him out of her sight. . . ever. She doesn't even take him to school. She homeschools him, and ends up thinking that she is the most exceptional child that anyone could have. However, he starts to grow to the age where he wants to experience life. He wants to go fishing with a friendly man he meets on vacation. He wants to take the school bus with all of the other children on the block.

All of this is intercutted with flashbacks to Emily's childhood, with her odd, self-absorbed, hippie parents, played by Bacon and Marisa Tomei. These flashbacks are shot strangely, with the camera always at a tilt, capturing exactly how strange it must've been to live in this house at the time. Emily spends alot of time with Mrs. Harker, who has two children that she spends alot of time with. The grown up Emily ends up taking on the qualities of both her father, and the real mother figure in her life, Mrs. Harker. Her real mother seems to have been discarded completely.

"Loverboy" has an interesting plot, but a horrible execution. The script has some of the most shoddy disalouge that I ever heard, that it sounds like something Shakespherian. The writers name is actually Hannah Shakespeare. I don't know if there is any relation, but if there is, she should stop trying to write as her famous relative would. Sedgewick is good here, and I wish she would have had something better to work with, and the ending, which could have been dark and disturbing and perfect, had an added three minutes which just make it cheesy, and silly. I guess it does make something clear, which I can't add her, but it wasn't exactly needed. It could've been much more grim, and it would've worked more, at least thats what I think. As for Kevin Bacon's feature director debut, he needs some work. He should talk to Tommy Lee Jones, whose directorial debut last year with "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" was something special. "Loverboy" is solely made for television material.