Well-intentioned `Olive Juice' shows a big heart isn't enough
Source: http://www.orlandosentinal.com/features/orl-calolive16021601feb16.story
Nobody wants to boo the home team -- especially when the team is unpretentious and has its big heart in the right place.
But after watching the new, locally produced Olive Juice, I simply have no choice.
The sad truth is that for every Blair Witch sensation, there are dozens of Central Florida-connected movies that can most charitably be described as labors of love.
Olive Juice is that sort of labor -- and I do mean labor.
Nominally a romantic comedy, the film tells the story of Keeler (James Berlau) and Michelle (Leighanne Littrell), a couple of New Jersey transplants, currently ensconced in Central Florida.
Keeler owns a doggie bakery (don't ask) in Mount Dora while Michelle is a commercial artist who is about to be married to someone else. She wanders into his shop one day, and nature starts to take its course.
Michelle's fiance, the not entirely faithful Matt (Michael Harston), keeps flying off on business trips. ("I put the lay in layover," he brags to one conquest.)
Between planning the wedding and tending to her ailing mother, Michelle also has time to form a friendship with Keeler -- a friendship that includes a ride in a hansom carriage and some seemingly innocent after-hours slow dancing.
Before Wednesday night's world premiere at United Artist's Florida Mall theater, writer-director Ken Hastings called Olive Juice "a little sweet film that was made with a lot of heart," and that description is, I suppose, accurate as far as it goes.
The whole affair is infused with that combination of earnestness, flat-foot humor and amateurishness that I associate with After School Specials or kids putting on skits. If it were a food, it would be the mush that you feed to people who are recovering from the stomach flu.
Berlau -- a sandy blond with a cowlick -- is likable in an Ozzie and Harriet sort of way. He's about as bland and nonthreatening as a romantic lead can be without actually disappearing.
A Cheryl Tiegs type, but with an assertive nose and some other sharp edges, Littrell has a tendency to go rather blank when the mood turns grim. I've seen people more upset when a vending machine steals their change than how she looks when her character suffers a tragic loss.
The only person onscreen who is actually fun to watch is DJ Dan, a jivey friend of Keeler's played by Jay Love.
The script makes rather too much of Dan's obsession with passing a kidney stone. But the frenetic Love runs with the concept and just about makes it work.
Currently showing at United Artist's Florida Mall theater, Olive Juice makes use of a number of Central Florida locations, including some in Mount Dora and Orlando's Lake Eola Park.
To be fair, I should mention that filmmaker Hastings (who has mounted shows for Disney at Pleasure Island and elsewhere) does display a small gift for writing youthful, contemporary dialogue. But his staging is often clunky, the sound is tinny, and he doesn't so much develop his ideas as repeat them with minor variations.
Getting back to Leighanne Littrell, if her last name rings a bell, that's probably because she is married to Backstreeter Brian Littrell, who appears briefly in the film as a driver-trainee of that hansom carriage. Brian's Backstreet buddy, A.J. McLean, also has a cameo; he's a celebrity record-spinner called DJ Naughty.
The Littrells produced the film's soundtrack, which features a Backstreet Boys number called "The Perfect Fan," that expresses a child's love for a parent. It would, I suspect, be the perfect song for one of the more sentimental long-distance telephone commercials.
If you're wondering about the movie's title, it refers to the fact that when you say the words "olive juice," the muscles of your mouth form pretty much the same shapes as they do when you say "I love you." You can mouth the former when you're too shy to say the latter.
Which reminds me: Anyone know an equivalent for "Boo, home team! Boo!"?
You can reach Jay Boyar at [email protected] or 407-420-5492.
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