OxfordPress.com

Grade: C-

Verdict: A would-be comedy about an emotionally immature stalker.

Details: Starring Mike White, Chris Weitz and Lupe Ontiveros. Rated R for sexuality and profanity. 1 hour, 35 minutes.

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Review: "Chuck & Buck" goes from whimsical to wince-inducing early on and never recovers. Written by and starring Mike White as an emotionally arrested 27-year-old, the movie starts off as an off-kilter character study. With its wry tone and candy-pop soundtrack, it's like something by Todd Solondz ("Happiness"). Then it becomes insufferable.

In this would-be comedy of discomfort, White plays Buck, still living at home with his mother, his bedroom cluttered with toys. When mom dies, Buck's best childhood pal Chuck flies in from the West Coast for the funeral. Only, now he goes by Charlie (played by the handsome but wooden Chris Weitz), he works as a music industry executive, and he's engaged to Carlyn (Beth Colt).

Buck barely seems to notice these changes, or chooses to ignore them. He invites the couple to spend the night. When they decline, he withdraws some of his inheritance from the bank, packs his toys into the Mercedes station wagon, and moves to Los Angeles to become his old pal's stalker.

He stakes out Charlie's office building hoping for a glimpse of him. He calls at all hours. He swings by unannounced at the home Charlie and Carlyn share.

As Buck becomes more intrusive, CarlinCarlyn offers to give him her therapist's number. You can't help thinking she'd be wiser dialing the police and getting a restraining order. It's a little hard to understand writer-actor White's fascination with this character. He's the childishly creepy kind of guy whose cellar you instinctively don't want to visit, more serial-killer-in-training than unlikely romantic hero.

The movie's voice of reason belongs to Beverly (the scene-stealing Lupe Ontiveros), a community theater manager who takes Buck under her wing, agreeing to direct the naive play he's written about his friendship with Chuck. Reading the script, Beverly says, "I think you have something weird about women. I think you have something weird about men." Yep.

If you haven't figured out the cause of Buck's attraction to Charlie and don't want to know, stop reading here. Watching the movie, it becomes obvious pretty early that Buck's motivation is sexual; he's fixated on the experimental sex games he and Chuck played together as kids. In its blithely oblivious way, the movie winds up equating homosexuality with emotional immaturity. Here's a movie Dr. Laura would like.

As Beverly puts it, describing Buck's play, "It's like a homoerotic misogynist love story." That sums up the movie pretty well, too. But it winds up with an implausible ending that simultaneously feels both too pat and unresolved.

One of the buzzed-about movies at this year's Sundance Film Festival, "Chuck & Buck" has its fans and defenders. But to me, a stalker just isn't funny, even if he acts harmless and sucks on Tootsie Pops all the time. Actually, that makes him even scarier.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service