Here On Earth (or, "Sociopathic sluttery redeemed by cancer")

For a brief moment at the turn of the century, three up-and-coming actors seemed poised to become the new generation of Hollywood elite. Chris Klein impressed frat boys with American Pie and hipsters with Election, Leelee Sobieski starred in the blockbuster Deep Impact, and Josh Hartnett appeared in the underrated The Faculty and The Virgin Suicides. The logical next step was to throw them in the same movie with a love triangle and some cancer, showcasing their dramatic chops, not to mention breaking teen hearts everywhere.

Here On Earth must have seemed like such a sure bet, in fact, that the filmmakers grossly underestimated the minimum level of effort required to make this movie successful. It's not so much that we blame director Mark Piznarski for being talentless, so much as we can't believe a director was on set at all. The plot, the tone, and the performances meander through the hoops of a tragic love story like no one was around to announce, "This is not working. Let's do it better."

A glassy-eyed Klein plays Kelley Morse, a spoiled rich kid attending boarding school near a small country town. One night, Kelly decides to cause some trouble and ends up drag racing with one of the locals, Jasper (Hartnett), and blowing up a diner. As punishment, Kelley is sentenced to move in with Jasper's family and help rebuild the diner. Practically before he finds a place to set down his toothbrush, Kelley moves in on Jasper's extremely receptive girlfriend, Samantha (Sobieski).

Rich kid destroys country diner, is sentenced to live with family of nemesis? Doesn't that sound a lot like that episode of Seinfeld where they pitch the show about the guy sentenced to be the other guy's butler? This is the kind of premise that belongs in a comedy and/or on television, not on a movie screen. But Here On Earth is a drama because Samantha has cancer or something.

Certainly, from the first frame of its opening credits, Here On Earth most resembles a TV show that would have aired on the WB network in its early days, and gotten canceled really, really quickly. This isn't so surprising, since Piznarski is a TV veteran; perhaps proving that he learned his lesson after Here On Earth, Piznarski has largely stuck to TV ever since, and in our eyes, totally redeemed himself by directing the pilot for Gossip Girl.

The rest of the crew doesn't get off so easy. The screenplay is so atrocious it inspired columnist Sarah Bunting to pen an open letter to the screenwriter, Michael Seitzman, in which she informed him, "Your writing is, in a word, wretched" and begged him to "stop perpetrating it upon the innocent" . A glance at Seitzman's resumé reveals that he took this excellent advice to heart . (No, we don't believe he actually wrote North Country, so don't bring it up.)

As for Klein, Sobieski, and Hartnett, well, we just can't believe they managed to get themselves cast in a film as prestigious as Here On Earth. Hartnett is relatively harmless as the lovesick village idiot (though his flipped-out bowl cut seems a bit excessive), but Klein is truly a marvel as his performance redefines the boundaries of unconvincing acting. Jessica Alba in Honey does a better job of convincing us she's from the ghetto than Klein does convincing us he's made of flesh and blood. Which is strange, considering he appears to have at least 10 years on his co-stars, during which he might have invested in an acting class or two.

Dramatically, however, Sobieski may be the worst offender of all, playing a heroine whose actions are so opportunistically selfish, it's outrageous that she's not intended to be the villain of the story: after dating Jasper for years, Samantha falls for this brat with a six-pack who blows up her mother's restaurant. With shocking boldness, she rubs her new fling in the faces of her friends, family, and BOYFRIEND, before declaring illness and dying a TV-movie death with a halo over her head.

Many people look back fondly upon this movie. Perhaps it came out when you were a teenager in love, or easily sucked in by pretty faces and an opportunity to shed some cheap tears that felt pretty good at the time. There's certainly nothing wrong with that. But unlike most artifacts from our teenage years, Here On Earth is embarrassing in a way that warrants hilarious revisiting again and again.

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