200 Cigarettes

Directed by Risa Bramon Garcia
A Paramount Pictures release

It might be hard to imagine two more different movies than The Other Sister, a feel-good foray into wealthy, dysfunctional Southern California family dynamics, and 200 Cigarettes, an indie flick portentously set in NYC on New Year's Eve 1981 and populated by an ultra-trendy cast. As different as they are, however, these movies are alike in a couple of crucial ways: Both are mired in clichés and both are pretty much relentlessly bad.

In Risa Bramon Garcia's 200 Cigarettes, exploration of character and social context is not an issue. Rather, the film makes vague gestures toward coolness, mainly by putting an achingly trendy cast through the motions of a plot. At the very end, one of the characters, semi-geek Kevin (Paul Rudd), in a burst of postcoital poetry, articulates what would seem to be the film's thematic thrust, something about the similarity between looking for love and smoking too many cigarettes.

At once rudimentary and cryptic, this observation unfortunately sums up the movie, which tracks several apparently unrelated characters through the Village on New Year's Eve. They're all looking for the same party, hosted by Monica (Martha Plimpton). She waits in her apartment throughout the film, arranging the chips-and-dips table, pacing and fretting. Her ex-boyfriend Eric (Brian McArdie) arrives, whereupon they discuss why she dumped him: He's the worst lover she ever had, she's a neurotic-girl stereotype. As much fun as this scene could have been, the film cuts it up in order to show what everyone else is doing.

This "everyone else" is a handful of quirks pretending to be characters. Bridget (Nicole Parker) and her pal Caitlyn (Angela Featherstone) are cruising bars, and zero in on a hottie bartender (Ben Affleck); Kevin fights with his best friend Lucy (Courtney Love) while trying to get back with his ex (Janeane Garafolo). Val (Christina Ricci, affecting a terrible and unoriginal noo-yawk accent) and Stephie (Gaby Hoffmann) pick up some punky boys (one of whom is Casey Affleck). A scuzzball self-styled lothario (Jay Mohr) is mesmerized by his otherwise dreadfully uncool and pink-frocked date (Kate Hudson, who has a young Goldie-Hawnish look and klutziness) when he learns that their previous night's sex was her First Time.

I suppose that the film might be commenting on the state of dating, but its intended audience is as unclear as its reason for being. Setting it in 1981 allows for a pre-fab soundtrack (though it's intrusive as hell in the film, as when "Tainted Love" plays while someone observes that a relationship is—uh-oh—"tainted"). But sight gags like Flock of Seagulls haircuts and jokes about macrobiotic diets and Joni Mitchell are already old (post-Adam Sandler). The cast would seem to be appealing to a younger audience, but their roles and performances are so sketchy that you don't care who gets laid or who doesn't.

In the climactic scene everyone gathers at the party, and it's here that the movie finally gets a clue, cutting itself to some clever bare bones. The predictable flirtatious encounters appear as a series of Polaroid-looking stills, under some mildly funny commentary by Dave Chappelle to suggest all the fun that should be going on, given how long the characters and we have been waiting for the big payoff.

There's no such payoff, though. Only banalities. And relief because it's over.