Sleepover
Picture: B-
Sound: B- Extras: C Film: C
Four young teenaged girls promise to go nowhere while they
are having a Sleepover (2004) while the host girl’s (Alexa Vega) mother
(Jane Lynch) is out for the night.
However, the girls intend to go to a dance party, though they are going
to have to go through a gauntlet of cover-ups to make certain they are not
caught. Add a goofy, insecure cop on
their tale and you have a lite teen comedy.
Unfortunately, director Joe Nussbaum’s directing makes it
sillier and lighter than even Elisa Bell’s screenplay would have had it
be. This is rated PG in a time where PG
means too silly for its own good and the producers are not certain how far they
should go, but with PG-13 around, you know age 12 is the absolute limit. Ultimately, this feels like a cable film for
The Disney Channel with maybe one racy sexual suggestion. This is very average.
The anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image is not great
for a new film, though some of it is colorful, as would be the case for a
candied girl’s film. The Dolby Digital
5.1 mix is not too strong and is loaded with unnecessarily bad remakes of good
songs too good to note in a review of such a flat film, while the Deborah Lurie
incidental music is very incidental. Extras include the director and four female leads on one of the
weakest audio commentaries I have heard in a while, trailers for this and other
MGM DVDs, a photo gallery, five featurettes, and a gag reel. With a different approach, this could have
been funny, but substance is skipped for the juvenile. Too bad.
- Nicholas Sheffo
