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02/09/06
Harvard Man (2002)
33
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:36
Fresh:12
Rotten:24
Average Rating:4.6/10
Consensus: Harvard Man is a pretentious, incoherent mess.
Runtime: 1 hr 40 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis: This innovative drama from writer and director James Toback (BUGSY, BLACK AND WHITE) follows the travails of Alan Jensen (Adrian Grenier), a Harvard student determined to live life to the fullest... [More]
Starring: Adrian Grenier, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Eric Stoltz, Rebecca Gayheart
Director: James Toback
Reviews for Harvard Man
Top CriticGambling and throwing a basketball game for money isn't a new plot -- in fact Toback himself used it in Black and White. But Toback's deranged immediacy makes it seem fresh again.
04/12/02
Characteristic of Toback in that there's no telling whether he doesn't care to wrestle his totems into any kind of meaningful order or if he simply doesn't know how.
06/25/02
A cautionary tale about the grandiosity of a college student who sees himself as impervious to a fall.
06/28/02
I think it was Plato who said, 'I think, therefore I know better than to rush to the theatre for this one.'
09/06/02
What makes the movie work is that the premise, which sounds like a comedy, is treated with the seriousness of life and death.
07/13/02
Top CriticIf it's seldom boring, well, it's also rarely coherent.
07/15/02
Fans of so-bad-they're-good cinema may find some fun in this jumbled mess.
06/04/02
Toback offers a complex, borderline campy, and oddly entertaining study of modern moral dilemmas.
07/11/02
Harvard Man is a semi-throwback, a reminiscence without nostalgia or sentimentality.
07/03/02
Has everything you could ever want from a Toback movie: lurid sex, shocking excess and an out-of- nowhere thoughtfulness that's not put on.
04/12/02
A semi-autobiographical film that's so sloppily written and cast that you cannot believe anyone more central to the creation of Bugsy than the caterer had anything to do with it.
08/30/02
For those who accept the offbeat premise, the film ultimately delivers a satisfying dramatic exploration of the ways we create ourselves.
07/14/02
[Toback's] fondness for fancy split-screen, stuttering editing and pompous references to Wittgenstein and Kirkegaard ... blends uneasily with the titillating material.
06/27/02
There's a certain niche audience that will eat up Harvard Man -- but whether that's the mob-movie set, the college-movie set, or the sex-movie set, I really have no idea.
07/30/02
Unintelligible, poorly acted, brain-slappingly bad, Harvard Man is ludicrous enough that it could become a cult classic.
06/28/02
Putting it all out there and shaping it into some kind of contained whole is something else again. Although that never quite happens here, there's plenty to appreciate.
07/02/02
Top CriticThis movie is so bad, that it's almost worth seeing because it's so bad.
07/01/02
A characteristically engorged and sloppy coming-of-age movie.
07/02/02
It has a caffeinated, sloppy brilliance, sparkling with ideas you wish had been developed with more care, but animated by an energy that puts the dutiful efforts of more disciplined grade-grubbers to shame.
06/27/02
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