Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

There is nothing at all to like about this movie. Joey Lauren Adams shows that it is not just her voice that is like nails on a chalkboard. While Adrian Grenier shows off the horrible acting that became so famous on Entourage. All the while the director was confusing annoying with interesting. I can't imagine too many people sat through the acid trip without getting fed up and walking out. It was annoying for the sake of being annoying. All with no payoff to redeem it. I just can't imagine what anyone was thinking making a movie with such a prolonged act that was literally painful to listen to. Which would have been bad enough if the ENTIRE movie wasn't also painful to listen to. IT was as if the audio was recorded in a toy microphone with harsh audio levels. I would literally prefer to sit through 2 hours of nails on a chalkboard that this movie.

Chop Suey. A lot of chopped up, mixed up diverse morsels just adding up to a mess. The male lead is supposed to be a college basketball player. He is neither particularly tall nor very muscular. He looks about as athletic as a Kleenex tissue. Joey Lauren Adams has a GREAT voice-for playing a stripper or some such type, not a college professor-of philosophy of all things! Further, she is an item with male lead. I guess she is enchanted with his crooked behavior or his getting stoned out of his head with LSD. Maybe she thinks he looks like Kant. Then there is a gangster, henchmen, FBI agents, all running around for no particular purpose. There is cutting back and forth in time so there is no linear time line. This adds confusion to a film which is already terminally confusing. Sarah Michelle Geller is the one consistent character in the film. She plays it well because she has a part to play. She is a stereotype with no interesting lines, but her part is the closest this film comes to a real character. This was shot around Harvard in Cambridge Mass. I didn't see any scenes inside Harvard itself. Even Harvard could not have been stupid enough to cooperate with the making of this stinker.

James Toback has a wild spirit as a filmmaker and it lets itself out in Harvard Man in both the good and the bad that one finds in self-indulgent artists (I mean that as a compliment, sort of, since art has to be indulgent to a great degree). He takes a story of a basketball player at Harvard, Allan (Adrian Grenier), and transforms his conflicts with his multiple love interests (mob-daughter girlfriend played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, philosophy professor Joey Lauren Adams), his big gamble that he has to take a dive at a game to get his parents money for their house, the FBI after this backfires, and, mostly, his adventure into fifteen thousand milligrams of pure LSD, into a delirious little epic. Yes, epic.Toback's style is all over the place from start to finish. His camera reaches up high and is usually moving, even when there is absolutely no real reason to. The excess in the camera movement is also complimented (or not) by an over-written script, which is something that doesn't happen usually unless a writer, like Toback, doesn't know when to stop with his characters. He compensates by having them talk fast (that or his editor takes out the little catch-my-breath beats in a conversation), and while not as annoying as the camera movements in most scenes in the first half of the film, it's noticeable. It's a filmmaker reaching far, maybe too far, into a realm of personal expression and putting the story into a modern setting - check the Bach mixed with rap and rock for more of that.And yet it's hard to totally begrudge what Toback does get right here. When we're meant to take a lot of this seriously in the first half (the deep philosophical talk in Chesney's class about Kierkegard and Lichtenstein or that mob 'family' of caricatures), it's interesting but it never really works dramatically. But when Toback suddenly shifts the tone in the second half, when Allan takes the three cubes of LSD, it suddenly becomes a full-on comedy of errors and surprises. To be sure, some of the visual jokes and whacked-out faces that Allan sees could be attributed to the same style as Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, it still works. Especially funny is how Allan just seems to slip out of the FBI's hands (watch the one really strong scene of cinematography, sound, and acting all combined in the FBI interrogation room), and a masterpiece of a cameo appearance from Al Franken (like Toback also former Harvard alum).It also helps with the comedy in the second half of the film that the acting, more or less, is pretty strong. Sarah Michelle Gellar actually gives one of her most convincing, well-rounded performances as a B-word whose intentions are not very well hidden but puffed up with rich-girl sass and sex appeal. Grenier also goes for broke as a guy with a good sense of himself, until he bugs out from the acid and runs all over town. Adams might be a little more of the one-note performance, the stable voice but not as intriguing as Gellar and Grenier in their roles. They're all put in a movie that is mixed up and has a lot to say about sex, drugs, life, living, betting, sports, and lots more. I respect Harvard Man, and if those trip-out scenes come on TV I'll be sure to watch again. But recommend? No. 5.5/10

Meh, this is an okay time filler that won't stick in your mind for too long. It's the typical American comedy that uses black humor to criticize some aspects of America's politics and culture/society.On the positive side, it's not a typical teen comedy with "toilet humor" or campy situations; it has some decent dialogs and interesting ideas towards drug addiction and mafias.The plot surrounds a sports guy who is obviously the most popular thing in college. He has a sexy hot and kinky girlfriend who happens to be the daughter of a powerful Italian mob man. You know the rest... drugs, basketball, mafia, FBI, a sexy and smart teacher, etc.This movie is not a mess but not a masterpiece. I still recommend it for those who are into teen movies with an edge.