Word: piven
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This HBO sitcom, which starts its second season on June 5, follows newly minted Hollywood heartthrob Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier), the support staff that works for (and sometimes against) him, and his three hanger-on buddies. Come for the good-natured insider humor. Stay for Jeremy Piven as Vince's quotably bad-natured agent...
Andrew Jackson? A pistol mouth, a boxing-glove nose and bullets as eyes. Theodore Roosevelt? Gears for eyes, a light-bulb nose and a coiled-wire mustache. Piven's highly inventive collage portraits are matched with amusingly quirky tidbits about the Presidents (the pugnacious Jackson's penchant for dueling, the busy Roosevelt's bustling energy). Most of the jokes are benign--George W. Bush, a former baseball-team owner, has a hot-dog nose and buns for eyebrows--but Piven also meets darker facts head on: Richard Nixon's face is formed with a tape recorder, and his prominent nose...
...Hanoch Piven...
...Cusack is an actor of real charm. There's something watchful and soulful about him, a reluctance to go for easy, farcical frenzy that is most attractive. And Beckinsale, having survived the Pearl Harbor disaster, is all better now, both perky and mysterious. They have agreeable best pals (Jeremy Piven and Molly Shannon). Eugene Levy does a nice turn as a fussy store clerk, and one doesn't feel particularly sorry for the drippy fiances (Bridget Moynahan and John Corbett), who exist mainly to be dumped and whose roles define the word thankless. Peter Chelsom's direction is conventionally pretty...
...which should be pretty obvious if you’ve ever seen a movie with a guy and a girl, each are aided by a Funny Best Friend. Beckinsale drags along Eve (Molly Shannon, late of “Saturday Night Live”) and Cusack enlists Dean (Jeremy Piven, who struck a nice chemistry with Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank). Both provide solid support, though I wish that they existed as more than just sounding boards/agents to further the plot, given that they are the only other characters with substantial screen time in this sparsely-populated film...