Dave Foley Goes Lower than Celebrity Poker for The Strip

Comments (0) By Nick Pinkerton Tuesday, Dec 1 2009

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The Strip
Directed by Jameel Khan
Truly Indie
Opens December 4

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Could Dave Foley prostitute his talent to amuse any further without actually becoming a prostitute? In a plunging step down from emceeing celebrity poker, Foley provides a recognizable face to Jameel Khan's picked-over Goodwill bin of workplace comedy, The Strip. Foley's Glenn is manager of a downmarket Radio Shack–type store in a Chicago strip mall. Many of the comic episodes are of the "OK, um, awkward, who's this guy?" avoiding-eye-contact reaction-shot variety, prevalent in awful NBC sitcoms and television commercials geared to 18- to 35-year-old white-collar workers, as Glenn impresses weird teamwork exercises on his archetype employees, Horny Loudmouth ("She's got a bangability Level 9"), Foreign Guy, Stubbly Slacker, and Wasted Potential. Indifferently compiled Indie Hitz—the Blow, MGMT, Peter Bjorn and John, Band of Horses—periodically fill the laughless silence that will prevail in any theater where this screens. The latter band accompany the one funny scene, where the stereotyped emotions reach bathetic boiling point as Wasted Potential and his hideously twee girlfriend run to the beach and throw their shoes in a lake, intended to signify either transcendent liberation or extreme impracticality.