Gossip

From director Davis Guggenheim (ER, Party of Five, NYPD Blue) comes a thriller that begs the question: if a rumor about date rape is started on a nameless campus in a generic Northeast metropolis by shiftless students bucking for an A in Journalism 101, does anyone care? Well, I didn't either, until I read it as a titillating alternate history for one Alex Kelly, the real-life fugitive who spent eight years skiing in Switzerland while dodging rape charges in Darien, Connecticut. What if Kelly never left but instead attended the same college as one of his victims? What if he were, uh, reinvented as a sociopathic trust-fund brat from, oh, Danbury, named Derrick (Disturbing Behavior's James Marsden) who lives with two arty roommates (Lena Heady and 8mm's Norman Reedus) in an enormous loft stocked with top-shelf booze? Derrick sees a prissy deb getting pawed by her drunken jock boyfriend one night at a rave in the meat-packing district (implausible, but it looks really cool) and the gossip mongering begins. Hey, all in the name of academic underachievement.

This glossy morsel of Nouveau Brat Pack treacle boasts dreamy art direction and a tingly score by Graeme Revell (The Craft, The Crow) to go with its predictable, heavy-handed screenplay. Marsden is impressive as Derrick: slippery, charming and way too rich for his own good. He even resembles Kelly in an eerie, doppelgänger-kinda way . . . but don't take my word for it. At the Hoyts 16 and Showcase cinemas.
-- Peg Aloi