In the 1980s and early 1990s, there were a few women in radio who called themselves “Janet From Another Planet.” One of them was the traffic reporter during my brief stint doing mornings on WTEM/Washington. I kinda liked the name, but the station’s General Manager had no sense of humor and demanded she either use her real name or choose another one. She called me and we batted around several ideas.
We were both fans of the characters created by John Candy and Eugene Levy on “SCTV,” Yosh and Stan Shmenge — two brothers from Leutonia (a fictional country) who led a polka band. When Janet suggested using that as her last name, I laughed, knowing that our idiot GM wouldn’t get the reference. So, the next morning, I introduced her as Janet Shmenge, which she continued to use until I parted ways with the station a couple of months later.
The memory of all that came to me when I heard there was a new movie called “Janet Planet.” I knew it wasn’t about a radio traffic reporter, but I was curious because it stars an actress I like, Julianne Nicholson, who remains the most-freckled performer on any screen. It’s her first lead performance, after years of supporting roles in movies and TV series like “Mare of Easttown,” “I, Tonya,” “Masters of Sex,” “Boardwalk Empire,” and the first thing I noticed her in, “Tully.”
Here’s the summary of “Janet Planet” on IMDb: In rural Western Massachusetts, 11-year-old Lacy spends the summer of 1991 at home, enthralled by her own imagination and the attention of her mother, Janet. As the months pass, three visitors enter their orbit, all captivated by Janet.
I have no idea what could have captivated them, because Janet and every other human in this movie is utterly boring. You could actually nod off for 20-25 minutes at any point in “Janet Planet,” and when you woke up, you would not have missed anything worthwhile.
The movie co-stars Zoe Ziegler as 11-year-old Lacy, who has no friends because she feels awkward around kids her own age. That’s why she quits summer camp after just a few days and fakes being sick on the first day of school. Instead, she spends her time around her acupuncturist mother, Janet, and the weird people in her orbit: boyfriend Wayne; friend Regina; and Avi, who is the leader of either a hippie theater group or a cult.
Every word that comes out of the adults’ mouth is tedious and yawn-inducing, including some phony spiritualism. Each time one of them spoke in Lacy’s presence, I hoped she would turn to them and ask, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Janet Planet” is the first movie from writer/director Annie Baker, who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for her play, “The Flick,” and an Obie Award for another, “Circle Mirror Transformation.” I saw productions of both shows and have no idea why she was rewarded for either of them. Her choices of camera angles consist almost entirely of wide shots and extreme closeups, and she doesn’t follow the action when characters move, so they’re often only half in the frame.
At one point, I thought this must have been a student film, a thesis on living a lonely life. More likely, it’s made up of the scenes that had been cut out of that student film because they were so uninteresting. It contains lots of scenes where barely anything happens yet the camera stays on the scene for at least thirty seconds.
Want some examples? Two people walk very slowly to and from a mailbox. Someone licks an ice cream cone. A tick gets removed from a girl’s hair, then flushed down the toilet complete with watching the full swirl all the way. Two blintzes defrost in a microwave.
This movie was less captivating than watching food warm up through the door of a microwave — there isn’t even a revolving plate inside!
If I was forced to be in a room with these people, it would only be about nine minutes before I started figuring out a way to kill myself — or them. Instead, I endured all 110 minutes of this pablum and concluded it’s a contender for Worst Movie Of The Year — and a complete waste of some perfectly good freckles!
I give it a 1.5 out of 10. Opens in theaters Friday.