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Jon Heder and Billy Bob Thornton square off in School for Scoundrels, a comedy movie short on laughs and long on yawns. Writer/director Todd Phillips (Old School) loosely based his film on a British romp from the 1960s and as is the case with most remakes – even of the ‘loose’ variety – the original should have been left alone.

The Story
Heder stars as Roger, one of the wimpiest parking enforcement officers to ever patrol the city streets. No one respects the guy – not the violators he tickets, his co-workers, or even the kid who’s been assigned as Roger’s little bro in the Big Brothers program. Basically, he’s Rodney Dangerfield in a meter maid outfit. He’s so hopeless that he can’t even manage a conversation with his pretty neighbor, Amanda (a perky but forgettable Jacinda Barrett), without passing out from fright.

After letting Roger know his services in the Big Brother program are no longer needed (make that wanted), Ian (David Cross) passes on the phone number of a self-help guru who can make even the biggest loser into a real man. Roger’s desperate enough to try anything so he forks over the big bucks and becomes a pupil of the sadistic Dr P (Thornton). Dr P has a twisted approach to buffing up girlie men which involves a series of flashcards with instructions on how to lie to and manipulate women, as well as other bizarre techniques meant to boost the self-esteem of his students.
For some reason Roger takes to Dr P’s teaching methods like a duck to water. Roger masters the art of confrontation and even works up the nerve to start dating Amanda. Things are going just fine until he discovers there’s a huge target painted on his back. When Ian handed over Dr P’s number he withheld one crucial bit of information: the self-help guru always picks one person from each class to torpedo. By excelling in class, Roger earned the unfortunate distinction of being Dr P’s latest victim.

Michael Tolkin, who has been working in Hollywood for almost 20 years, believes movies are dead — at the least the kind of grand American movies that delivered satisfying spectacle to viewers. Character has fled to television. The audience is distracted. Novels are the only form left that he thinks will never go out of style. And so he has revived his best-known literary creation, Hollywood dark prince Griffin Mill.

The new novel, a sequel to 1988's "The Player," is titled, fittingly, "The Return of the Player." It showcases one man's escape from the entertainment-industrial complex. Tolkin himself is a dying breed: among the last of those in Hollywood who move comfortably from big picture to small project, from screenwriting to directing to novel-writing. Coming back to Griffin after 18 years, only to have him leave Hollywood for what he thinks is bigger quarry, reveals that Tolkin is trying to carve out a paradoxical position for himself as someone in Hollywood but not entirely of it.