½*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Kate Hudson, John Corbett, Joan Cusack, Hayden Panettiere
screenplay by Jack Amiel & Michael Begler
directed by Garry Marshall

by Walter Chaw I made a promise to myself after The Other Sister to never watch another Garry Marshall film, but I guess I don't have enough self-respect. Raising Helen is repellent in the way of roadside carrion: it just sort of lies there stinking, making it hard to find the energy to attack it. (Something about beating dead horses and all that.) To endure Raising Helen is to surrender to the quintessence of that which is wrong with our culture, to the definition of a term like "disposable culture," and to the self-knowledge that what you really want from your entertainment is the comfortable affirmation of schmaltzy emotions provoked countless times before by countless identical romantic comedies. Going to this movie is the equivalent of giving up on an intellectual and emotional life. Raising Helen will only appeal to and attract people with pathologically little patience for films that challenge them in any way, that elicit genuine reactions and are thus threatening for their potential to penetrate the carefully constructed layers of numb denial that make unexamined lives liveable–films that provide anything like insight into any level of existential verity. It is the lowest rung on the escapist ladder, representative of some wholly self-contained fantasy world where the racial make-up of Queens is 99% WASP and 1% quirky East Indian, and where Kate Hudson's incandescent choppers are Leading Lady material.

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Emile Hirsch, Elisha Cuthbert, Timothy Olyphant, James Remar
screenplay by Stuart Blumberg and David T. Wagner & Brent Goldberg
directed by Luke Greenfield

by Walter Chaw Though it reminds a great deal of Paul Brickman's Risky Business, The Girl Next Door reminds all the more that there's really only one Paul Brickman, and while this picture sustains the sleazy wish-fulfillment of Risky Business for a good long run, it can't replicate the same kind of insouciant rebellion. The exercise feels forced in a way that Risky Business doesn't, the earlier film's ease owing mostly to Brickman but also to another of Tangerine Dream's definitive Eighties scores and, perhaps, the bestial liquid chemistry between Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay–a chemistry that's never quite replicated by a very fine Emile Hirsch and the very fine Elisha Cuthbert. Without the reckless air of youth on the verge, The Girl Next Door starts to feel like calculated imitation, becoming affected and, eventually, what a teenage sex comedy can't be: restrained. Its bark is worse than its bite, and in the end, only its premise is subversive.