Hugo Pool

This is a little babe of a movie, the kind that comes on at 1 am and you can't turn it off. Very inventive casting. McDowell and Penn are delightful as are Moriority and Milano. Then, you also have Downey, Jr, Dempsey, and Lewis (AND Chuck Barris). A zany cast of "characters"! I was impressed with how handily Milano carried herself and led this cast.

This movie is worth seeing for two very funny scenes- Malcolm McDowell fighting with his alter-ego puppet and Sean Penn in his blue shoes. The story is very light-hearted and Patrick Dempsey as the young man with lou gehrig's disease imparts a real sensuality to the role. As usual Downey and Lewis add a weird element- but is a fun day with the pool girl, her mom and various inhabitants of the not so rich people of California.

I didn't know much about "Hugo Pool" when I rented it last night. It seemed to be about an interesting collection of quirky characters. What I found out is that it's a collection of quirky characters, all right, but interesting, they're not.

Here's the plot, such as it is. Alyssa Milano plays a pool cleaner. We follow her around for a day as she cleans a few pools and encounters quirky characters, some of whom are family members, others customers.

Ms. Milano is awful in the lead role. This is the caliber of acting you'd expect from the girl playing Laurie in the high school production of "Oklahoma". It's pretty much a one-note performance, as if she were told, "act impatient," so she responded by setting her jaw and stomping through the movie. Drive truck, pour chemicals, act impatient, encounter next customer, scold Mom, act impatient. No higher gear, no lower gear, just the one setting.

Sean Penn and Robert Downey Jr. are terrific actors. Something went wrong here, though. Mr. Downey does some sort of burned-out-Inspector-Clouseau routine, while Mr. Penn does some sort of grown-up-Jeff-Spicoli thing.

Whatever. At no time did I see any of these quirky characters as anything other than actors trying to act quirky.

And I kept thinking about the 44 pools Ms. Milano was supposed to clean in one day. Say 10 minutes per pool, and 10 minutes' drive between pools, and that's nearly a 15-hour day. And she kept saying she was running late. Would you want to have, say, pool #40, and have some bickering pool cleaners in your backyard at 10:00-11:00 at night?

And I got to thinking about the money. Mr. Downey's character was behind on payments, the numbers averaging out to $200 per month. Let's say there are only 44 customers, pools being cleaned once a day. So the pool cleaning company is grossing $105,600 per year. If there are 88 customers, pools being cleaned every other day, the company is grossing $211,200 per year. If pools are cleaned once a week, and the pool company works 5 days per week, the company is grossing over half a million a year.

I don't have a pool and have no idea how often pools are cleaned. But the point is, it was more interesting to sit and do the revenue calculations in my head than to watch the parade of actors acting quirky. Or badly acting.

There are a number of memorable acting turns, some more than obvious self-reflective references to addictions (of all types), and a too-pat hand of predictability to move this film beyond a 6 for me. The performances almost rise above the plot restrictions (or lack of restrictions)....an interesting contrast is Robert Altman's "Cookie's Fortune" which I saw two days later which used the characters' idiosyncrasies to move a plot.

I have to admit, as I watched the movie, my expectations haven't been met. Most of all, I expected a plot. Since most movies have one, at least to some degree, the `average' watcher tends to expect one here, too. But, it didn't take me long, until I realized that this movie wasn't the `average' movie, and I don't mean that in a bad way.

In the first scene where Hugo's father was introduced, I began to realize what the character of this movie is like. This perception strengthened as more and more people showed up and exhibited their unorthodox, quirky features. Alone the weird things like `a stranger is sleeping in somebody else's truck, then the owner shows up, asks no questions and they both hit the road without even wasting a thought about what this is all about' made me laugh. The dialogs between the characters and the spontaneous and almost unreasonable turns of the plot make the movie special. It is hard to explain to someone who hasn't watched it.

Read the other comments and you'll find the opinions range from real bad to gorgeous. My advice is, be open-minded. This is not the average movie - in many aspects. Don't have too high expectations and you won't be disappointed, this movie is no blockbuster but it sure can be very entertaining if you give it a chance.

All in all, I liked the movie and if you ask me if I'll watch it again, I'd say: no - no doubt. (6/10)