New York Minute: Movie, DVD Review

Directed by Dennie Gordon, written by Emily Fox, Adam Cooper and Bill Collage, 85 minutes, rated PG.

(Originally published 2004)

The Dennie Gordon movie, “New York Minute,” stars those billion dollar Barbies Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, whose previous forays into film include the straight-to-video favorites “So Little Time—Boy Crazy,” “Billboard Dad,” “Double, Double, Toil & Trouble” and “So Little Time—The Wheelchair.”

I’d love to tell you what all of them are about—especially that last one (does an Olsen get hurt?)--but when it comes to the Olsens, I’m as clueless about their body of work as they are about what it takes to make a film that deserves a theatrical release.

No doubt, there’s something about these 17-year-old starlets that has struck a chord with tweens and teens around the world. And really, you have to hand it to them. They started in the business the moment they sprung from the delivery room, and they’ve somehow kept it going in spite of the odds stacked against them.

Good for them.

What’s not so good for us is this movie of theirs, in which the twins find themselves in so many pratfalls and jams—most of which are ripped from famous scenes in other movies, particularly “There’s Something About Mary” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”—that the film is merely a compendium of other movies, with the Olsens trying to tart up their wholesome images in the process.

In the movie, Mary-Kate and Ashley are twins Roxy and Jane, respectively, who have grown so far apart, they’ve pointedly become opposites. Roxy is the wild one who plays drums in the bogus-looking band with the weak beat and bad vibe. She attracts trouble like a Jackson.

Jane is the prim, humorless geek trying to get a scholarship to Oxford while overcompensating for their mother’s death. She’s annoyingly rigid, a flavorless lollipop with no center, which of course means she’s going to get one here.

When the girls inadvertently miss school because Roxy wants to be an extra in a music video, truant officer Max Lomax (Eugene Levy) gets on the case in an effort to give them detention. How’s that for an element to drive the plot? Also humiliating himself is Andy Richter as Bennie Bang, a Caucasian who thinks he’s Asian and thus speaks with the sort of accent some will consider borderline racist. He’s here because of a music piracy angle that involves a hairless dog that swallows a valuable and illegal computer chip. The girls have the dog in their possession, but we’ll leave it at that.

Currently, the Olsens have such a clutch of ongoing projects and side ventures—their cosmetic line, their clothing collection at Wal-Mart, their music career at Columbia Records, and their creepy action figure line, which makes them look like Gollum from “The Lord of the Rings,” only with better clothes and hair--this movie feels too much like another pit stop along the way to another project.

It’s product for the sake of product, another way to feed this curious cash cow. To say it’s slight and dispensable is to be kind, but why start now?

Grade: D