Harvard Man (2001)

Harvard Man (2001) is a comedy-drama-crime flick about a basketball player who strikes a deal with the mob to fix a basketball game. That sounds like a flimsy, cliched premise, but coming from the writer/director James Toback we know to expect more. First, the plot line is more crooked and convoluted than the above summary would suggest. It’s not believable, but who looks at lights flashed on a screen for reality? Is it realistic that Joey Lauren Adams is a professor of philosophy at Harvard? Who knows. We never went to Ivy League schools, but if our teachers looked more like her we would have paid a lot more attention. The movie also features the vampire-hunting fierceness of Sarah Michelle Gellar, but it’s Polly Shannon who gives up the skin with a darkly lit and distant boob.