| Home | Movies A-M | Movies N-Z | News |
Poster (c) Warner Bros.
When it was on the air, I wasn’t an avid watcher of “Seinfeld”, but I enjoyed it. The co-creator of it, Larry David, went on to make the hit HBO show “Curb Your Enthusiasm”. But, before that, he wrote and directed the dud Sour Grapes, which makes you wonder how those two TV shows became so popular and funny. Sour Grapes is basically a short that could have been amusing at five minutes, but stretches out to an overlong and extremely boring 90 minutes of stupid plot devices, stupid and reused “humor”, and stupidity in general.
What makes Sour Grapes so horrible is that there may have been about one or two jokes that made me do a little snort or something. That’s about four seconds that I enjoyed, and out of a film that’s 5400 seconds long, that’s pretty bad. What am I saying “pretty bad”? It’s atrocious! At least in some other bad movies, a few jokes caught on, and others are hit-and-miss, but almost every joke in Sour Grapes missed. Also, many running jokes flopped, such as Richie’s “ability”. It wasn’t funny the first time, and it wasn’t funny the fourth time.
When your largest star is Steven Weber, that’s a bad sign. He can be a good actor, except he never seems to pick good projects. He’s Evan Maxwell, a successful doctor who goes with his friend/cousin Richie (Craig Bierko) to Atlantic City to gamble. Evan lends Richie two quarters for a slot machine, and he wins the jackpot. Since Evan lent him money, he expects to get about half of Richie’s earnings. Wouldn’t you do that in real life? And THEN things become quirky.
Well, there isn’t really much to say, not only because it is a wholly unremarkable film, but I don’t want it to take any more of my time than the 90 minutes it had already robbed me of. If you’re looking for a completely unfunny comedy, where you will surely not laugh, then pick Sour Grapes. I’m sure there’ll be lots of copies at your local Blockbusters, because most people will be smart enough to stay away from it.
Rated R for language and sex-related humor.
Review Date: July 22, 2003