Alright, Sally Skellington chimes in here with the other side of GOSSIP. So far, as she states, we've seen two positive reviews, and now... Well... Ol Sally wants punitive damages recompensed for the wasting of gas in driving to the theater to see this free movie. THAT'S PRETTY DARN ROUGH FOLKS. Who's right? Well both point of views.... And.. so is yours. Just take this as another point of view on a film that you have yet to reached a decision of your own about...
I saw this film about a month ago, and after reading two positive reviews of it on the site, I wanted to weigh in with one that's not so complimentary.
This movie makes no sense.
The plot goes like this (semi-spoilers follow): There are three terribly self-absorbed roommates, Lena Headey, Jason Marsden, and Norman Reedus(?), and for a class project, they decide to spread a rumor and track its growth, to prove the power of gossip. So one night they're all at this club, and Jason Marsden sees Kate Hudson and Joshua Jackson making out in some back room. Kate is known on campus for not wanting to have sex with anyone, so Marsden gets the bright idea to spread the rumor that Kate and Jackson had sex. The rumor spreads and when it reaches Kate, who only remembers passing out at the club, one particularly pushy friend suggests that maybe Jackson went ahead and had sex with her after she passed out. Kate thinks about this and decides, "Hmm, yes, I was raped." Which gets Jackson into all sorts of trouble, and it just goes downhill from there.
The completely implausible part of this movie is not even the horrible, stupid, completely unsatisfying ending, but the fact that Hudson didn't "realize" she had supposedly been raped three days ago or whatever after it was supposed to have occurred. It's not the sort of thing you would need someone else to suggest before you started to consider it; there would have been physical symptoms. Even if the implication is that it wasn't Jackson who raped her, but someone did, there would *still* have been physical symptoms that she wouldn't have been able to not notice. Plus, Jackson gets arrested and such because Hudson claims he raped her. Have the police never heard of giving her a gynecological exam to prove that a. she had been raped or b. it was by Jackson? It's an idiotic plot, and it's obvious the writers didn't think about plausibility issues too much before they typed it out. Roger Kumble, who co-wrote it, wrote a decent first half of Cruel Intentions, but here, without any reliable source material to draw from, he fails miserably.
I'm willing to suspend my disbelief in certain movies where the rest of the film is clever enough, or amusing enough, to let it slide, but the problem is, Gossip is simply a terrible movie, with terrible acting from all three leads, and moronic dialogue. The worst parts, though, aside from the plot and the acting and the dialogue, are the direction, the art direction, and the set design (particularly of the roommates' apartment), which are all equally pretentious. This is a bad popcorn movie with art-film aspirations, and it doesn't succeed as being a good example of either. I saw it for free, and I felt cheated out of the money for the gas it took to get to the theater.
