Director: Randal Kleiser
Cast: Amada Bynes, Chris Carmack, Johnathan Bennett, Jaime-Lynn Sigler

When I daydream, for a number of obvious reasons my main focus is on happy fantasies - winning the lottery and nobody else learning about it (you've surely heard of surprise friends and family that pop up during lottery wins), having a job like George Jetson where the only activity I'd have to do is press one solitary button in an entire day, or having a relaxing time at my local movie theater watching a movie that is a real movie (in other words, no Canadian movies.) But even when considering the pleasure I get from such fantasies, I do make it a point to occasionally daydream about negative fantasies - getting one of those irritating phone calls where you hear nothing when you pick up the phone and hear nothing, always getting stuck in a long line of people when in a hurry, or being stuck in a movie theater playing an unreal (Canadian) movie. Why do I do this? It's because I know the world can be both unpredictable and harsh. If I think about those negative experiences I wrote a few sentences ago, I may think of possible solutions and escapes should the problem happen for real in my life. For example, to avoid Canadian films, I have learned that the Canadian government's film funding agency (Telefilm Canada) almost always seems to fund just Canadian film projects where the director is also the screenwriter. - a useful clue on a movie poster. One such negative fantasy that sometimes gets into my mind is being shipwrecked on an island with nobody on it, and no way to call for help to the outside world. While it's unlikely it could happen to me... there is still a chance. You can probably instantly think of the obstacles you or I would instantly be facing: A search for an adequate amount of fresh water, finding or making shelter, finding edible food either on the island or in the surrounding ocean, going to the trouble to build piles of wood for signal fires or writing S.O.S. in big letters on the beach... these and other factors make the list of obstacles seems almost endless.

I think the biggest obstacle for me being stranded alone on a deserted island would be that soon I would be sporting a big beard I couldn't shave off - and I know from personal experience that beards itch a lot. But whatever potential problems you personally can think of from being stuck alone on a desert island, I think you would agree that it would be very far from being a tropical paradise. Knowing me, there's a great chance I might expire fairly quickly because even after all my pondering of the subject, I wouldn't have the opportunity to have someone with me as a backup. Actually, I have also thought about the prospect of being stranded on a desert island with one other person, but I'm afraid I have to confess that it doesn't seem that much more enticing than being stuck on an island alone. In fact, sharing the island with another person would pose some problems you wouldn't get by just being stuck alone. For one thing, you and the other person would be doing double duty on the island's resources, whether they may be food or water - what if one particular resource dries up from overuse? Next, there is the fact that you couldn't really get away from the other person - if you had a major disagreement with the other party, you couldn't just storm away and drive to the nearest watering hole and drown your sorrows in alcohol for a few hours in solitude. And there is also the fact that whether you are a man or a woman, shaving your beard or legs so you can look decent to the other person would be an impossibility - you'd have to look like a slob to the other person 24/7.

But hang on - when I think further about the idea of someone being stuck on a desert island with someone else, I think of something else - a story ripe for PORN! Uh, forget I just said that - what I really meant to say is that two people being stuck together on a desert island has a lot of potential for COMEDY. Remember those three potential problems I discussed in the previous paragraph concerning two people being stuck together alone on an island? If you think about it, finding the funny side of those situations actually isn't that hard. For example, someone might go to desperate needs in order to shave, using anything s/he could find on the island to try and shave - and get unexpected (and funny) results. Other funny situations I am sure you could think of with a little thought, just as I have had while typing this review. When a very loyal reader of mind recently suggested that I review the movie Lovewrecked, which advertised itself to be a comic look at a kind of desert island situation with two people, you may understand why I felt it could be promising. What I mean by "kind of desert island situation" I will explain by the following plot synopsis: In Lovewrecked, there is a young woman named Jennifer (Amanda Bynes, She's The Man). While she is good friends with a young man her age named Ryan (Johnathan Bennett, The Last Sharknado), she is ga-ga over a guy named Jason Masters (Chris Carmack, The O.C.), who is a world-wide famous rock and roll musician. Jennifer gets lucky in that she manages to get a summer lifeguard job on the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean, working at the Sun Village Beach Resort that Jason likes to go to on his down time. Not long after she starts working, Jason arrives on a layover, and Jennifer gets the opportunity to work on a boat Jason is partying on, but before she can do much, Jason accidentally falls into the ocean. Seeing this, Jennifer jumps in after him, and the two eventually wash up on what seems to be a deserted island. Jennifer is initially thrilled to have some real alone time with Jason, but eventually she discovers that the island is not deserted - they are just a few steps away from the resort! However, Jennifer decides to hide this fact from Jason so she can romance him. It's not going to be easy despite the subsequent help of Ryan, who is also working at the resort, since Jennifer's long time arch rival Alexis (Jaime-Lynn Sigler, The Sopranos) has also traveled to the resort in pursuit of Jason - she soon discovers what Jennifer has been doing, and promptly acts the part of a new shipwrecked person who washes up on Jennifer and Jason's beach!

Lovewrecked was intended to have a theatrical release in North America, but after two unsuccessful years of trying to convince a distributor in North America to do this, the movie was subsequently dumped on cable and DVD. That wasn't surprising to me at all, because the movie is sorely lacking anything that would entice moviegoers to pay as much as a movie theater ticket to see it. If I were to be asked where much (if not most) of the blame for the movie's failure lies, it would be with the movie's director, Randall Kleiser (who directed Grease... plus another movie I will shortly mention.) He throws in some elaborate wipe transitions to give a spark to the narrative, and he does manage to make most of the movie boast vibrant colors despite its low budget... but much of the movie boasts that low budget. Often the feel of the movie is between that of a television movie and a theatrical movie, an odd feeling to be sure. Other obvious penny-pinching techniques include underwater ocean scenes obviously filmed in a tank, and some really obvious green screen usage, such as in the opening rock concert sequence. (If not green screen, then photographed in a way that looks like green screen was used.) The biggest problem, however, is the pacing of the movie. Much of the movie chugs along a bit too slow for its own good, and it certainly doesn't help that there are unnecessary scenes in the middle of the narrative to pad out the running time, such as when Ryan is shanghaied into joining a band of native dancers during a stage performance at the resort. On the other hand, there are some scenes that go by really quickly, like how Jennifer and Jason get on the boat and are subsequently made castaways... all in not more than a minute of running time. Later, when Jennifer finds out she and Jason are still on St. Lucia, the movie gives her no time to process this development in her mind - the movie basically cuts to her returning to Jason without dealing with things in her feeble brain.

In fairness to Kleiser, he didn't write the script for Lovewrecked, so maybe the issues of the narrative were out of his control. For that matter, apparently so were the attempts at humor. Before I go into how bad the humor is, I want to reveal the other movie Kleiser directed that I alluded to earlier - that movie being the unbelievably awful 1980 Brooke Shields movie The Blue Lagoon, which might be considered by some to be the quintessential stranded on a desert island movie, despite its utter awfulness. Ah, you might be thinking, you are sure Kleiser would in this newer movie poke fun at his older movie, or at the least add some sly references to it. But guess what - he doesn't poke fun at or make any references to The Blue Lagoon at all! And since Kleiser didn't have the ambition to make references (comic or otherwise), you can guess that his handling of the humor in the script is pretty feeble. Now, I will give that even Keaton or Chaplin couldn't milk a lot of the attempts at humor here, ranging from a kid pretending he'd drowning so he'd get CPR from Jennifer, to people with their clothes on falling in pools. But even when the movie dabs with humor that is not so cliched, there aren't any laughs to be found. Jason thinks the word "marooned" means a color, Jennifer upon seeing intruding windsailers makes loud noises so that the unbelievaly dim-witted Jason will focus on her and not the ocean, and rival Alexis putting ants in Jennifer's hair while she's sweet-talking to Jason... well, that's about as funny as Lovewrecked ever gets. Oh wait - there is one laugh in the movie. At one point in the movie, a newspaper page is displayed, and I paused the screen so I could fully read the text, and discovered to my amusement how lazy the prop department was regarding writing text on that newspaper page. (The fact that I took the time to pause the movie when this newspaper page came up should tell you how unengaged I was with the movie's narrative by this point.)

Actually, there is a legitimate delivery of humor in Lovewrecked, and that is a short sequence in Jennifer's home where Jennifer's father is played by Fred Willard (Cracking Up). Willard in this short scene manages to deliver the comic energy the rest of the movie sorely needs, and he's greatly missed once his one scene has ended. As for the rest of the cast, they don't manage to make their characters funny or likable. Actually, the problem doesn't lie with them and their acting - it lies with how their characters are scripted. I want to bring up an issue in the movie that I've found in many other romantic comedies. If you were a guy who loved a woman, yet she was in deep love with an utter dimwit who didn't appreciate her for a very long time, what would you do when suddenly she realizes that the man is not right for her and she immediately (or almost immediately) afterwards tries to whip up some romantic relationship with you, what would you think and feel? I don't know about you, but I would tell her, "$#/+, woman, forget it! I don't want to be thought of as an emergency backup lover!" Well, as you probably guessed, the woman in this case is Jennifer, and her original lover is Jason, a guy whose dialogue seldom gets better than spouting, "You rock me, baby!" Ryan is, of course, the guy who secretly loves Jennifer, but he's portrayed to be such a feeble and soft-spoken wimp that it's really hard that at the end, Jennifer sinks her love claws into him, or was even best friends with him in the first place. I simply could not relate to these characters (I can't call them human beings) at all, because they seem very far from having the brain power of the people that would be in your inner circle. And because I couldn't see anything of myself (or anyone in my inner circle) in them, I didn't laugh once at or related to anything they said or did. Instead, I was just greatly frustrated with them throughout Lovewrecked. This may be the main reason why no American theatrical distributor threw this movie a lifeline, and instead the movie was doomed to drift away and wash up and be stuck in some forgotten corner of this world.

(Posted April 29, 2023)