Trig Your Own Hole

Comments (0) By Dennis Lim Tuesday, Mar 5 2002

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40 Days and 40 Nights
Directed by Michael Lehmann
Written by Robert Perez
Miramax

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If only the filmmakers of 40 Days and 40 Nightshad been more literally formulaic and arrived at their title via mathematical equations, the resulting scenario might have smelled a little fresher, e.g.: Six Weeks - 48 Hrs. = 40 Days and 40 Nights (sick-kid weepie morphs into odd-couple policier in reverse?). Or A Month (in the Country) + 2 Days(in the Valley) + The Day(the Earth Stood Still) + Weekend(at Bernie's) + (The Lost) Weekend+ Week-end= 40 Days and 40 Nights(chaste romantic reverie ends in spiraling nightmare of hitmen, aliens, dead fratboys, cheap Scotch, and snarled traffic?). Or Nine Months/28 Days + Seven Years (in Tibet)/(Gone in) 60 Seconds+ A Year(of 13 Moons)/Two Weeks (in Another Town) = 40 Days and 40 Nights(madcap caper with pregnant 12-stepper, car-boosting monks, and cutthroat transsexual filmmakers?). As it is, this squeamishly risqué teen sexcom, in which vapid horndog Josh Hartnett determines to give up shtupping-and-spanking for Lent (the legendary Seinfeldepisode - wit + weird Christian overtones, set in a San Francisco - gays + antiquated dotcom color), roughly splits the difference between Six Days, Seven Nightsand 9 1/2 Weeks. Which is something like the nth-order derivative of an infinite regression.