The Anniversary Party

Director: Alan Cumming and Jennifer Jason Leigh
Year Released: 2000
Rating: 0.0

Here's a film that is so trying and so self-absorbed that it can only manage to instill a feeling of intense hatred in you: Cumming and Leigh drag over their friends, and, over the period of a long two hours, they argue, say the wrong things, lose their stupid dog, and several people either almost die or do die. Its attempts at "hipness" and naturalism are ill advised, and that they needed two editors to string together scenes with no shape and no point is quite funny. I felt like I was watching the outtakes of a much better, better-scripted movie (maybe the one John C. Reilly is screening in the film) and would rather sit through. The third act decision to have the characters use Ecstacy to "mellow-out" is faux-liberal hipness, and watching Cumming and Leigh scream at each other while overlooking scenic Beverly Hills is even phonier. This picture is a pointless, humorless mess.