Harvard Man

Next time hire an editor who isn't on 15,000 micrograms of LSD.

Harvard Man is an overstylized, overedited, and overly "smart" movie about a kid who gets into trouble with a knockoff mafia, the FBI, and way more LSD than anyone could survive. Despite this, it's not fun. It's not funny. It's not thrilling. It's surprisingly bland. The sound mixing is terrible, it's too try-hard when it comes to the editing and cinematography, and it often amounts to very little, all while everything gets solved too easily. Harvard Man is not worth your time.

Harvard Man is one man's journey into madness. If you've ever felt like you want to go to the edge or just beyond then you know how Alan, the protagonist, feels about life. He is always looking within, trying to figure out what the meaning to life is. He has everything; he goes to Harvard, plays basketball, and has two intimate friends. Alan finally takes a ton of acid and embarks on a journey that he may never come back from. A good movie with good depictions of acid trips.

This movie really goes nowhere. Theres a sequence near the end that takes up what feels like half the film and it just has nothing to do with anything.

Top badass moment? Most under-the-influence-of-drugs scenes in films don’t last long, but this one goes on and on… and on. It's strangely entertaining. The sound mix is horrible, with JS Bach taking on all comers without regard to what’s happening on-screen. Buffy plays a watered-down version of herself as Kathryn Merteuil, Joey Lauren Adams sounds like a chipmunk and there’s too much boring basketball. Despite all that it's actually a decent watch. No cats, chainsaws or decapitations.

So painfully awful, so awfully painful.

The first half of this is actually almost inexplicably great, like the mainstream teen comedy Raoul Ruiz never made, or even a better-realized Southland Tales (the presence of Gellar in both makes me wonder if she isn't secretly far more subversive than she gets credit for). With it's bizarre disjointedness and smart/stilted dialogue it already feels enough like a teen comedy on acid that when the actual "acid trip" scenes start it's completely unnecessary and it sort of loses its footing.

Joey. Lauren. Adams.