THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID
Phase 4 Films
Rated R, 1 star
A word of advice to all those women out there bent on creating the definitive, raunchier than thou female Hangover movie. Knock it off, enough already. And that includes the latest seemingly self-hating sexpots in their own mind, garish girls gone wild spree, That’s What She Said.
Not that the cast depicting chatty when not catty sluts on screen is lacking in talent. Anne Heche, Alia Shawkat and Marcia DeBonis as a horny threesome, collectively combine enough charisma and negative sassy charm to set a script on fire, if only they were given something to say. Which brings up the title of this movie, That’s What She Said. As, well, basically very little that the audience is likely to want to hear.
Statically staged primarily as a series of screeching coffee shop gripe sessions, the mostly all talk and no action downtown Manhattan slacker setting plods along with all the momentum and zip of a sedentary filmed play. The plot, such as it is, features DeDonis as Bebe. A bawling bubblehead behaving like a fortysomething female going on fourteen, Bebe gushes nervously to terminally cynical chain smoking best friend, Dee Dee (Anne Heche) about a prospective date with an elusive guy not likely to materialize. Meanwhile, stray sex addict Clementine (Shawkat) turns up out of nowhere to attach herself to the terrible twosome, uninvited. And tending to barf uncontrollably, but mostly whining about her spontaneous sex drive, stimulated even by the subway.
That’s What She Said is somewhat of a cross between a bickering small screen reality show and chick flick revenge touching on men, bad hair days and yeast infections. But clearly setting out to be the opposite of feminist in the extreme, while likely to please neither gender in the audience. And if you think the coffee shop customers perpetually frowning in the background of this movie were placed there by the filmmakers to signal an annoyance alert to viewers, wait till you get an earful.
All of which tends to add up to suspicions that the movies mocking women as laughable losers lately, and made by women, may be the work of assorted mean girls all grown up now. And into sublimating their sour spite up on the screen, supplanting former extra-curricular high school campus hostilities.
On a possibly related side note in that regard, That’s What She Said is masterminded by two glamorous actresses more recently venturing into moviemaking, and including first time screenwriter Kellie Overbey. Along with director Carrie Preston, whose mother happens to be, of all things, a therapist.
