A Year of Bad Movies # 11 — “Eight Days a Week”
Eight Days a Week (1997)
IMDB Score: 6 out of 10
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 22 out of 100
I really wanted to like “Eight Days a Week,” a teen sex comedy written and directed by Michael Davis, the guy who made one of my favorite bad movies, “Shoot ‘Em Up.”
What's with that hat? Apparently Peter's best friend is a sex toy obsessed rastafarian.
It’s a real surprise to me, then, that I thought the film was complete trash.
I’m a big fan of teen romantic comedies. As a former lovelorn teenager myself, I can sympathize with stories of young men who attempt to win the hearts of their playground love. During high school, I ate these movies up — using them as vicarious nourishment for my own romantic longings.
It’s a good thing I didn’t see “Eight Days a Week” as a teenager because a younger me would have thought the film’s plot was a great idea.
In the movie, Joshua Schaefer plays Peter, a glass-wearing, scrawny teenager with a crush on Erica (played by the gorgeous Keri Russell). While Peter has lusted over Erica his entire life, she has never paid him much heed. Desperate to put an end to being ignored, Peter sets off on a summer-long quest to sit on Erica’s lawn day and night until he can prove his devotion to her.
As a kid who constantly made mix tapes for his high school crush, wrote four page love letters and once considered kidnapping the high school band and forcing them to play Mr. Big’s “To Be With You” under his own crush’s window, I would have ate this movie up like so much cake when I was in high school.
Today, being a little wiser and perhaps a little more cynical, I couldn’t stand the fantasy wish fulfillment this move propagated.
Maybe it’s because I didn’t want future generations to continue on the same fruitless path of puppy-love devotion that sucker punched me as a kid, but I felt that “Eight Days a Week,” with its shallow plot, even shallower characters and an amazingly unsubtle deux ex machina, is a dangerous film.
Using a gratuitous amount of voice-over narration as if it wanted to be the “A Christmas Story” of sex comedies, “Eight Days a Week”’s narrator proves to be a shallow sex-obsessed teenage boy. While this is hardly an oddity, the movie’s admittedly clever premise is tainted by the main characters superficial motivation.
Peter does not begin his yard-sitting quest out of any real love or affection for Erica as a person, he does it because he’s obsessed with her perfect breast — which he constantly waxes poetic on as the film offers substantial close-ups of Keri Russell’s chest.
While I can’t argue with facts (Keri Russell is, after all, one of the most beautiful women working in Hollywood today), I also can’t help but feel that the movie’s main character seems more like a sexual deviant in training then any classic romantic hero.
Seriously, if I tried this shit in real life, I’d be arrested and the laughing stock of the entire community. In the film, Peter is celebrated like some kind of saint — expressing a devotion of love that us mere mortals will never know.
As a young adult quickly approaching having lived a quarter-century on this planet, I can’t help but feel that my sense of reality has been slightly skewed by a childhood spent watching too many movies like “Eight Days a Week,” where everlasting love can be won in the final five minutes of the film and earned on the flimsiest of reasons. Besides, everybody knows the only way to win a woman’s heart is to play Peter Gabriel on a boombox outside of her window. If Peter had tried that, his summer sitting on Keri Russell’s yard would have been a lot shorter.
