Word: lelaina
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...Lelaina, by day a production assistant on a fatuous morning TV show, by inclination a documentary filmmaker, trying to use her pals' lives and thoughts to make a statement about their generation. She's an up-and-doing spirit in a down-and-out milieu...
...also knows how to shape it into dialogue that is pointed and full of unforced observations. Director Ben Stiller keeps things crisp, no small matter in a movie that features a fair amount of aimless activity and just plain lying around. The latter takes place in the "maxipad" Lelaina shares with Vickie (Janeane Garofalo), who sometimes imagines her own funeral as a scene from Melrose Place ("chokers and halter tops"), Sammy (Steve Zahn), who is gently receding into the wallpaper, and Troy (Ethan Hawke), who is a philosopher-couch potato, fired from his job as a newsstand clerk for eating...
Troy is just the kind of broody lout a young woman like Lelaina goes for, despite the fact that junior TV-exec Michael (played by Stiller) is wooing her. Their triangle provides what passes for narrative structure, and its resolution is perhaps just a little too Brady Bunch -- that is, too nice and neat. But that's a small price to pay for a movie in which Vickie, confronting a small, unexpected example of decency, finds it "screws up all my old ideas of good and evil." And in which a despondent Lelaina, seeking solace from an 800-number therapist...
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