Smart People

Denis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, Ellen Page, Thomas Haiden Church, and Ashton Holmes all star in the movie Smart People which is about a family of well... smart people who are having a few bland problems in life involving love lives, ACTs, and an adopted brother/uncle that no one seems to like.

When Professor Lawrence Weatherhold (Denis Quaid) finds out that not only is he a bad professor that no one likes him and he's in fact a bad teacher with impossible goals, he starts to go through some sort of a mid-life crisis after his mid-life. When he has a nasty fall that lands him in the hospital, he meets one of his old students, Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker), one he doesn't remember, and becomes quite smitten with her.

Janet is a doctor who used to love literature until taking Professor Weatherhold's class and got a C- on an essay that she worked very hard on. Ever since she's had a bitter reminder of her harsh professor, but this time around she's looking at giving him another chance, one that's falling short with a bad relationship.

Vanessa Weatherhold (Ellan Page) is your average brain who is currently studying for the ACT which she really wants to pass and is a very well behaved human being. When her uncle Chuck (Thomas Haiden Church) comes to be her father's escort (the fall he took disabled him from driving for a while) she starts to take risks such as doing pot, drinking, and even taking a kiss off of her uncle.

James Weatherhold (Ashton Holmes) is a college student living both on campus and at home with his father and sister. He's a poet kind of looked down on by his family until he sells one of his masterpieces to the New York Times and has it published.

The story line is just that, all four characters meshing awkwardly together, no one really fitting in, no one really getting left behind. The commercials for this movie are very misleading, showing happy fun clips of somewhat comical parts of the movie when really it's just bleak and bland and just... boring. It's almost as if you took Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and put it on depressants, took out Steven Carell and all of the funny quirks, and put in one joke every twenty minutes and you'd get Smart People.

In my opinion I'd give this movie a 2/5. Two being that it has Ellan Page in it, and the rest because of Denis Quaid and the fact that it was a horrible movie.

My recommendation is for anyone that has a very bland sense of humor or someone who just wants to be incredibly bored for roughly two and a half hours. All in all, it's a terrible movie.