On Demand Weekly

On Demand Weekly provides new movie reviews of hot movies on demand from the POV of watching from the comfort of your home. Today’s review: AMERICAN COWSLIP.
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AMERICAN COWSLIP is subtitled “A Redneck Comedy” but not in the Jeff Foxworthy sense. Sure, you’ll get the ubiquitous car parked on the front lawn, but this is not a formulaic we’re-poor-and-unsophisticated-but-still-happy kind of movie.

Instead, AMERICAN COWSLIP attempts to answer the question, What would happen if Eric Stoltz and the dude who played Waingro in HEAT had a baby and that baby grew up to be a heroin addict, doted on by three grannies and shamelessly pursued by a 17-year old hottie? And what would happen if we put our heroin hero between two speeding meteors on a collision course: being evicted from his home into an agoraphobic nightmare or winning the “Garden of the Year” contest, thus saving his house, sanity and baggie of horse? Yes, what would happen indeed.

ENLIGHTENED - Starring Laura Dern

By Jean Tait

Miguel Arteta and Mike White are the pair who brought us CHUCK AND BUCK (which didn’t thrill me) and THE GOOD GIRL (which brought out the best in Jennifer Anniston). Here, they are working with Laura Dern (who, aside from getting involved with Billy Bob Thornton, can do no wrong), so I was cautiously optimistic about “Enlightened.”

Then Entertainment Weekly listed it as one of the least-favored new fall shows.

Now I’ll admit, it is a little slow. This is a leisurely character study, not a rip-roaring soap or a police procedural that ties up a plot in a half-hour. It’s an exploration of human relationships, and that it does extremely well.

Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern) crashed and burned in a very public way at her job, leading her to a Hawaiian rehab facility that teaches her new methods of dealing with her anxieties. When she comes back to the real world, however, the people who witnessed her breakdown don’t adapt to shiny, new Amy the way she expected them to. She has to learn that spiritual awakening is not so easy when not on a lovely beach in Hawaii with an all-supportive group. A couple of “om’s” doesn’t make problems go away.