The Last Supper

Self-Indulgence

If I think about any five random grad students sitting around a dinner table, I expect a certain kind of intellectual snootiness. By the time people go to graduate school, they must be intellectually assertive, even if they'll have it beaten out of them by slave-driving faculty. The Last Supper puts five grad students around a dinner table and dangles a big carrot in front of them. They are challenged to move beyond gedanken experiments and take some action. They do start making the world a better place, by condemning people with politics violently opposed to theirs.

This is a dark comedy with no significant laughs but an amusing premise. I think the movie might've played better with more time devoted to establishing these self-indulgent pricks realizing that they would never make a difference any other way. The tastiest irony is the conversion of the primaries into that which they hope to eliminate. It's doubly wacky when the stereotypes spewed by the first guest come true at the end. For that reason, I was bothered by a knee-jerk feeling that someone else might have a knee-jerk reaction to the choice of the black character as the most violent and temperamental of the bunch. Was it really necessary to single out the one racial minority to be the one to lose control?

Recognition

I spent the entire movie trying to identify Ron Eldard. He went on to play the blinded astronaut in Deep Impact, one of my least favorite characters in one of my least favorite movies. Courtney B. Vance was the sonar jockey on the Dallas in Hunt for Red October. I don't recognize Annabeth Gish or Jonathan Penner at all, but I'm now one movie closer to having seen the Cameron Diaz canon. Among the victims, there are people who need no introduction, like Jason Alexander, Charles Durning, and Nora Dunn. Bill Paxton was the unctuous car salesman (is there another kind?) in True Lies and the male lead in Twister, but his part here projects better acting skill than either of those. Mark Harmon looks very familiar, but not in a way I've managed to place, and his filmography isn't helping.