"Leaving a Bad Taste"
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What You Need To Know:
Larry David, the co-creator of TV's SEINFELD, brings his wickedly ironic Jewish humor to the big screen with the new movie titled SOUR GRAPES. Steven Weber of TV's WINGS plays a brain surgeon named Evan who goes on a weekend trip to Atlantic City with his cousin Richie and their respective girlfriends, Joan and Roberta. After losing $1,000, Evan gives Richie his last two quarters, and Richie wins $436,214.50. Richie forgets, however, that Evan loaned him the two quarters and only offers a check to Evan for the money he lost. Insulted, Evan gets mad and tears up the check. What ensues is a madcap affair of practical jokes and minor acts of revenge that get out of hand. Evan and Richie lose their girlfriends, Richie loses his mother and the money, and a TV actor loses his manhood and his career.
SOUR GRAPES is a black comedy that illustrates the biblical adage, "the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil." Surrounding that good message, however, is a tale ripe with some sexually immoral situations and crude references to sexual acts and body parts. Thus, SOUR GRAPES will leave a bad taste in the mouth of any moral moviegoers who see it.
Content:
(ABAB, B, LLL, V, SS, N, A, M) Anti-biblical worldview mixed with a biblical message at the end but filled with crude sexual references; 10 obscenities, four profanities & several vulgarities; one fight scene & woman's death played for laughs; implied premarital sex, one scene of nude couple starting to make love under covers & several crude references to sexual acts & body parts; upper male nudity & upper female nudity from behind; and, greed, revenge, murder, trashing private property, & ethnic stereotypes.
More Detail:
Larry David, the co-creator of TV’s SEINFELD, brings his wickedly ironic Jewish humor to the big screen with the new movie titled SOUR GRAPES. Starring Robert Weber, the co-star of TV’s WINGS, the movie is a black comedy that illustrates the biblical adage, “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” Surrounding that good message, however, is a tale ripe with some sexually immoral situations and crude references to sexual acts and body parts.
Weber plays a brain surgeon named Evan who goes on a weekend trip to Atlantic City with his cousin Richie, played by Craig Bierko, and their respective girlfriends Joan and Roberta, played by Karen Sillas and Robyn Peterman. Evan and Richie have been very close ever since they were children, but Richie is an extremely self-centered man. After losing about $2,300 between them in the East Coast gambling capitol, Evan and Richie are reduced to playing their last quarters at the slot machines. When Richie is about to drop his last quarter in the machine, Evan advises him that he needs to play three quarters to qualify for the big payoff. Evan gives Richie his last two quarters, and of course Richie hits the big payoff for $436,214.50. Richie forgets, however, that Evan loaned him the two quarters and only offers a check to Evan for the money he lost, $1,000. Insulted, Evan gets mad and tears up the check. Evan feels Richie owes him at least half of the winnings. To restore family unity, Richie offers Evan a measly 3 percent. Evan is willing to let it go until he finds out that Richie has given away a birthday present Evan gave him to a homeless person on the street.
What ensues is a madcap affair of practical jokes and minor acts of revenge that get out of hand. Evan and Richie lose their girlfriends, Richie loses his mother and the money, and a TV actor loses his manhood and his career.
Like all of the scripts for director Larry David’s TV sitcom SEINFELD, SOUR GRAPES takes one incident and uses it as a springboard for a funny progression of events where things get out of control. A main subplot of the movie is Richie’s relationship with his aggravating, doting Jewish mother, played by Viola Harris. This stereotype of the Jewish parent is echoed in the SEINFELD character George’s parents.
Unlike SEINFELD, however, the acting in SOUR GRAPES has a typical sitcom feel to it. Weber and the other players can’t seem to match the level of acting from Julia Louise-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander on SEINFELD, or the physical comedy of Michael Richards. Their characters run around trapped in a frantic plot, with mainly frantic emotions to perform. There seems to be no personal depth to the expressions in their faces, especially their eyes.
Finally, although the opening scenes of SOUR GRAPES contain little in the way of morally objectionable material (other than the plot to take a vacation in Atlantic City for a weekend of gambling and premarital “hotel sex”), the movie takes a turn for the worse when Evan and Richie return from their trip. A litany of the movie’s moral offenses is unnecessary. Suffice it to say that, despite the movie’s final warning that money can’t buy health and happiness, it offers few biblical standards beyond that. Indeed, it seems to reject biblical standards regarding sexual immorality and gets too much of its humor from crude references to sexual acts and body parts.
Thus, SOUR GRAPES will leave a bad taste in the mouth of any moral moviegoers who see it.