Loverboy (1989) – DVD

*/**** Image C- Sound B+
starring Patrick Dempsey, Kate Jackson, Carrie Fisher, Robert Ginty
screenplay by Robin Schiff and Tom Ropelewski & Leslie Dixon
directed by Joan Micklin Silver

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Loverboy is a brightly-lit sex comedy from the '80s; for those who lived through those dark times, this statement is criticism enough. But I know that there are vast numbers of young people who have never had the distinct displeasure of watching rich people with enamel-white houses and shoulder-pad dresses have their way with Patrick Dempsey, thus it behoves me to warn this lost generation of the perils of this film and all of its ignoble brethren. If you are watching something out of the corner of your eye late at night while channel-surfing, and you notice a lack of cuts, no discernable attempts at style, and a whole lot of ugly pastels, you are in serious danger of seeing Loverboy. Change the channel immediately, for the discomfort and nausea will be acute and irreversible. The fact that a DVD exists is mind-boggling.

Dempsey plays Randy Bodek, a flunking college student with bad grades who's hiding the fact that he shares a dorm room with his girlfriend, Jenny (Nancy Valen). When his father (Robert Ginty), chagrined at his flagging studies, cuts off his tuition money, Randy is left with no choice but to don a fake moustache and become a delivery boy for Señor Pizza. But as he despairs of earning enough to return to academic glory, he encounters Alex Barnett (Barbara Carrera), an older woman motivated to take him to bed. Soon, she's got another line of work in mind for him: signalled by orders for extra anchovies, he services the rich and lonely wives of Beverly Hills. Before long, he's amassed a small fortune–but some husbands are getting suspicious; and what is he going to tell Jenny?

Aesthetically, the film is as gauche and graceless as its conspicuously-consumptive matrons. Director Joan Micklin Silver has no eye for imagery and no sense of comic timing–in the centuries-old tradition of throw-away comedies, she simply makes sure that you can see everything within the shot and lets the camera run. She hasn't invested in the story and, letting you know that you're not supposed to, either, makes no attempt to either bring out the script's qualities (such as they are) or subvert them with visual craft. I realize we're not talking Noel Coward here, but a director with her wits about her could easily have read something into this saga of a man devoting himself to pleasuring women. Surely Silver could have drawn some subtextual heat from this potentially loaded situation, yet she's completely oblivious to the possibilities, instead phoning in her shot list as if she were residing on another planet.

But could we expect anything else from an Eighties sex comedy? Probably not. Silver is simply following the rules dictating that comedy is a lesser species than any other genre–that it's all negligible as long as it's supposed to be funny. Humour with teeth and impact, style and grace, or at least some vulgar vitality that gives it a tang is not really Hollywood's domain anymore now that Groucho Marx is dead and Ernst Lubitsch isn't even remembered by movie lovers anymore. And so comedies like Loverboy become all the more pervasive, pictures thrown together in minutes because you're not supposed to care about them one way or another. Anyone who thinks they deserve better is advised to steer clear.

THE DVD
Again I must express incredulity at the fact that a market might exist for this DVD. Columbia Tri-Star's Loverboy disc is just this side of shoddy: the 1.85:1 anamorphic image suffers from soft definition at the best of times, and its colours are strangely desaturated. Dark objects are beset by the jaggies. The Dolby 2.0 stereo soundmix is surprisingly robust when placed next to the video, though channel separation is nothing to get excited about. Rounding out the package: trailers for Jerry Maguire, My Best Friend's Wedding, and Maid in Manhattan.

99 minutes; PG-13; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 2.0 (Stereo); CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-5; Region One; Columbia TriStar