‘Riding in Cars with Boys’ Drew Barrymore’s finest trip

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In theaters

RIDING IN CARS WITH BOYS, directed by Penny Marshall, written by Morgan Upton Ward, based on the memoir by Beverly Donofrio, 132 minutes, rated PG-13.

In the new Penny Marshall film, “Riding in Cars with Boys,” Drew Barrymore is Beverly Donofrio, a bright, hormonal 15-year-old girl who gets pregnant after a wild night of fun in the front seat of a boy’s car.

Based on Beverly Donofrio’s acclaimed 1990 memoir, the film, from a screenplay by Morgan Upton Ward, spans 24 years, from 1961 to 1985. It follows the derailment of Beverly’s life, the postponement of her dreams and the gradual realization that it’s she – not anyone else – who’s responsible for many of her problems.

Coming to terms with that is Beverly’s biggest challenge. With her dreams of attending college and becoming a successful writer now on hold, she finds herself facing motherhood, a disappointed family who nearly ostracizes her, and a shotgun wedding to Ray (Steve Zahn) that falls apart when he turns to a life of drugs and booze.

All of this is just a mild precursor of what’s to come. As Beverly struggles to accept that her life will never be as she planned it, the resentment and bitterness of her situation overcomes her, turning her once-likable character into an ill-tempered, brooding shrew.

That she can’t seem to get a break doesn’t help matters for her son, Jason (Adam Garcia), who’s fate in life obviously is to put up with a mother who sees in him not the boy she should love, but the grave mistake she made in her youth.

With James Woods, Lorraine Bracco and Brittany Murphy in supporting roles, “Riding in Cars with Boys” is too long at 132 minutes and it’s about as subtle as a cannon when delivering its preachy messages about single motherhood. But Barrymore nevertheless manages to make a great deal of it work.

She carries the movie, leaning hard on her comedic gifts in the film’s funny first half before trying her best to ground the melodramatic final hour with maturity and poise. It’s a strong, complex performance that stands as the best work the 26-year-old actress has delivered to date.

Grade: B-

On video and DVD

FREDDY GOT FINGERED, directed by Tom Green, written by Green and Derek Harvie, 93 minutes, rated R.

At the start of Tom Green’s morbidly self-conscious “Freddy Got Fingered,” 28-year-old Gord Brody (Green) has moved out of his parents’ basement and is on the road to Los Angeles, where he hopes to hit it big as an animator of pointless, grotesque cartoons based on his pointless, grotesque life.

Within minutes, the film cuts to Gord pulling alongside a farm, jumping over a fence and rushing toward an aroused stallion, which he stimulates for no explicable reason other than to allow Green his mark on the raunch genre. On talk shows and in interviews, Green bragged that the horse and its equipment were real, which they certainly appear to be, but what’s also real is the desperation that runs throughout his movie as he struggles to maintain just these sorts of cultural lows.

In scenes that have nothing to do with the film’s alleged plot – Gord making a living on his own – audiences are treated to a whole host of offenses, from Gord delivering a stillborn baby, biting off its umbilical cord and then twirling the infant above his head while its mother screams in fear for herself and her child, to Gord beating a woman’s paralyzed legs with a cane in an effort to “make them tingle.”

None of this is funny, but all of it is inept, an embarrassing display of one man’s miscalculation of his audience – and, more importantly, his gross miscalculation of himself.

To succeed in the raunch genre, it’s true one needs to up the ante, but Green doesn’t understand that upping the ante means making the scene funny – and not just making it crude for the sake of being crude. When people weren’t walking out at my screening last April, some did laugh during the film’s more absurd moments, but the laughter was never light. Instead, it was uncomfortable.

About the film’s title – it’s derived from the humor Green finds in child molestation, which is featured in a throwaway story line that deserves no further mention here.

Grade: BOMB

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, Tuesdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5” and Thursdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5:30” on WLBZ-2 and WCSH-6. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.

THE VIDEO-DVD CORNER

Renting a video or a DVD? NEWS film critic Christopher Smith can help. Below are his grades of recent releases in video stores.

Dr. Dolittle 2 ? C-

Dumbo (DVD debut) ? A

Final Fantasy: The Spirits

Within ? C+

Freddy Got Fingered ? BOMB

Monty Python

and the Holy Grail ? B+

Angel Eyes ? C+

Cats & Dogs ? B+

Star Wars: The Phantom

Menace (DVD debut) ? B

Town & Country ? C+

Bridget Jones’s Diary ? A-

One Night at McCool’s ? C-

Snow White and the

Seven Dwarfs

(DVD debut) ? A+

Heartbreakers ? B+

The Mummy Returns ? D

Along Came a Spider ? C-

Citizen Kane

(DVD debut) ? A+

A Knight’s Tale ? C

Amores Perros ? A

Crocodile Dundee in Los

Angeles ? C-

Driven ? D

The Luzhin Defense ? B+

Startup.com ? A-

The Widow of St. Pierre ? A-

Spy Kids ? A-

Blow ? D+

Someone Like You ? D

The Dish ? A-

Exit Wounds ? D

Memento ? A-

The Tailor of Panama ? A-

Joe Dirt ? D+

See Spot Run ? F

Willy Wonka and the

Chocolate Factory

(DVD debut) ? A-

Hannibal ? C+

Say it Isn’t So ? D

15 Minutes ? D+

Blow Dry ? C+

Enemy at the Gates ? C

An Everlasting Piece ? B+

Get Over It ? B-

Josie and the Pussycats ? F

Say It Isn’t So ? D+

Tomcats ? F

Chocolat ? A-

The Mexican ? C-

3000 Miles to Graceland ? D

The Brothers ? B

Head Over Heels ? D

The Trumpet of the Swan ? C+

Pollock ? A-

Sweet November ? D-

Valentine ? F

The Gift ? B+

Family Man ? D-

Saving Silverman ? F

Down to Earth ? D

Monkeybone ? D

Thirteen Days ? A-

Unbreakable ? C+

The Wedding Planner ? D+