Jack and Jill vs. the World | |
---|---|
![]() Movie Poster | |
Directed by | Vanessa Parise |
Written by | Vanessa Parise Peter Stebbings |
Produced by | Robin Dunne Vanessa Parise |
Starring | Freddie Prinze Jr. Taryn Manning Robert Forster Vanessa Parise Kelly Rowan Peter Stebbings |
Cinematography | Manfred Guthie |
Edited by | Matthew Boothe Gareth C. Scales |
Music by | Jeremy Parise |
Release date |
|
Running time | 89 minutes |
Countries | United States Canada |
Language | English |
Jack and Jill vs. the World is an American-Canadian film by Vanessa Parise. It was released on April 4, 2008 and stars Freddie Prinze Jr. and Taryn Manning as Jack and Jill.
Jack is a thirty-something NYC advertising executive, living a life of routine. He is successful and stylish... and extremely bored.
Jack meets Jill by chance on a rooftop. She is looking for an apartment and asks him for directions. Jack suggests Jill's name for an ad shoot.
Later, when he drives Jill to her apartment he realizes the neighborhood doesn't look safe. So he helps her move out of her place and into his spare bedroom.
Meanwhile, Jack's best friend and business partner George continually tries to set him up with available women he knows, all of whom similarly show a keen interest in settling down and having children.
As time goes on, Jill opens Jack's eyes in many ways, including fair trade coffee. She gets a job at a pet shelter and is taught to screen potential adopters. Over lunch with her new coworker Lucy, after being asked how she can eat so much yet not gain weight, Jill confesses she has cystic fibrosis so her body doesn't absorb nutrients well.
After Jack and Jill sleep together, initially in the morning he insists it was a one-off thing so they can remain roommates. However, her affectionate nature soon wins him over, and they resume being intimate.
Jill's free-spirited nature causes some friction, however. She spends an evening away without forewarning, which worries him. It goes unexplained, but after the pair climb a tree they piece together a playful manifesto of "rules to live by."
Rule 1 Be honest
Rule 2 Believe in fairy tales
Rule 3 Accept time as our friend
Rule 4 Make sure the nookie is good
Rule 5 Promote beauty. Wage a sustained campaign against ugliness
Rule 6 Abandon the pursuit of happiness and its false promise
Rule 7 Show compassion, except to pirates
Rule 8 Less TV
Rule 9 Always be willing to admit when you're wrong
George, noticing a more playful side to Jack's usual cynicism, wants to meet Jill, the cause.
Jack periodically brings lunch to have with his dad Norm at his bookshop. So, he brings Lucy there so they can meet.
When her long absences go unexplained, Jack forces her to confess that her disappearances are a result of the treatment she needs for cystic fibrosis, an ultimately terminal illness. Jack is furious with Jill for violating their pact of honesty, they break up and she moves in with Lucy.
A talk with his father Norman incites Jack to find Jill. He first goes to the clinic where she gets her treatments, then tracks down her wacky friend Lucy at the animal shelter and pleads his case. Convinced that he truly loves Jill, Lucy reveals that she is catching a Greyhound bus cross-country to Hollywood. Jack hurries to Port Authority, but doesn't catch her.
Jack reevaluates his life, and just after he asks to be fired from his job, a bomb threat is called in at his work. He goes outside and George tells him that the threat was called in by someone who wants to fight ugliness. Jack realizes that the culprit has to be Jill.
Jack finds Jill nearby, they make up as he includes the last point of the manifesto, and with their new dog Lucy got him to adopt in tow, they hit the highway... with no destination in sight except for a life together.
The film garnered a mixed reception from critics. According to Reel Film reviews it "ultimately establishes itself as an affable endeavor that benefits substantially from the charismatic work of its two leads." [1] But Robert Abele of the Los Angeles Times concluded that it is "Blind to the fact that it should be rising up against its own formulaic kind." [2]
The soundtrack features music by Canadian indie rock band Stars.
The film was released on DVD on June 14, 2008.
Frederick James Prinze was an American stand-up comedian and actor, and the star of the NBC-TV sitcom Chico and the Man from 1974 until his death in 1977. He was described in a Vulture magazine article as "having blown up like no other comedian in history. Prinze is the father of actor Freddie Prinze Jr.
Chico and the Man is an American sitcom television series that aired on NBC for four seasons from September 13, 1974, to July 21, 1978. It stars Jack Albertson as Ed Brown, the cantankerous owner of a run-down garage in an East Los Angeles barrio, and Freddie Prinze as Chico Rodriguez, an upbeat, optimistic young Mexican who comes in looking for a job. It was the first U.S. television series set in a Mexican-American neighborhood.
Freddie James Prinze Jr. is an American actor. He has starred in films such as I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and its sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998), She's All That (1999), Summer Catch (2001), Scooby-Doo (2002), and its sequel Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (2004). Prinze has also had recurring and starring roles in television shows, including Friends (2002), Boston Legal (2004), Freddie (2005–2006) and 24 (2010). He voiced Kanan Jarrus in the Disney XD series Star Wars Rebels. He is the only child of comedian and actor Freddie Prinze.
She's All That is a 1999 American teen romantic comedy film directed by Robert Iscove. It stars Freddie Prinze Jr., Rachael Leigh Cook, Matthew Lillard, and Paul Walker. After being dumped by his girlfriend, Zack Siler boasts he could make any girl at his high school popular. It is a modern adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion and George Cukor's 1964 film My Fair Lady.
A Stolen Life is a 1946 American drama film starring Bette Davis, who also produced it. The film, based on the 1935 novel A Stolen Life by Karel Josef Benes, was directed by Curtis Bernhardt. Among the supporting cast are Glenn Ford, Dane Clark, Peggy Knudsen, Charlie Ruggles, and Bruce Bennett. It is a remake of the 1939 British film Stolen Life starring Elisabeth Bergner and Michael Redgrave.
Happily N'Ever After is a 2006 animated fantasy adventure comedy film directed by Paul J. Bolger, produced by John H. Williams, and written by Rob Moreland. It is inspired by fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen and is loosely based on the 1999 animated German television series Simsala Grimm. The title is the opposite of a stock phrase, happily ever after; the name is contracted with an apostrophe between the N and the E. The film stars the voices of Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze, Jr., Andy Dick, Wallace Shawn, Patrick Warburton, George Carlin, and Sigourney Weaver. This film was one of Carlin's final works before he died.
Kate Morton is a fictional character from the BBC soap opera EastEnders, played by Jill Halfpenny.
Jack Osborne is a fictional character from the British Channel 4 soap opera Hollyoaks, played by Jimmy McKenna. He first appeared on 18 November 1996 and is the second longest serving character in the serial. He was introduced as part of the Osborne family along with son Darren and wife Celia who joined daughter Ruth to live in Hollyoaks village. His storylines have included an affair with Dawn Cunningham, four marriages and an insurance scam which saw him fake his own death. In his later years, Jack was more commonly known as the landlord of the show's pub, The Dog in the Pond.
Boys and Girls is a 2000 American comedy film directed by Robert Iscove. The two main characters, Ryan and Jennifer, meet each other initially as adolescents, and later realize that their lives are intertwined through fate.
Summer Catch is a 2001 American romantic comedy film directed by Michael Tollin and starring Freddie Prinze Jr., Jessica Biel and Matthew Lillard. The film marked Tollin's feature film directorial debut. The setting is the Cape Cod Baseball League, but the majority of the film was shot in Southport, North Carolina.
Head over Heels is a 2001 American romantic comedy-thriller film directed by Mark Waters. Starring Monica Potter, Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah O'Hare, Shalom Harlow, Ivana Miličević, Tomiko Fraser, China Chow and Timothy Olyphant. The film was panned by critics and failed to recover its modest $14 million budget.
Michael Zane Gordon is an American screenwriter, producer, musician and composer.
So Evil, So Young is a 1961 British Technicolor reform school prison film produced by the Danzigers, directed by Godfrey Grayson, and starring Jill Ireland and Ellen Pollock.
Home for the Holidays is a 1972 American made-for-television Christmas horror film directed by John Llewellyn Moxey, produced by Aaron Spelling and starring Sally Field, Eleanor Parker, Julie Harris, Jessica Walter, and Walter Brennan which premiered on ABC on November 28, 1972. The plot focuses on a wealthy father on his deathbed who invites his four daughters home for Christmas and tells them he suspects his second wife of poisoning him. Shortly after, the girls learn that their stepmother was accused of killing her first husband, and they begin to fall prey to a killer dressed in a yellow rain slicker.
Chain of Events is a 1958 British crime film directed by Gerald Thomas based on a radio play by Leo McKern. It features Susan Shaw, Dermot Walsh, Jack Watling, Freddie Mills and Joan Hickson.
Pretty Ugly People is a 2008 American black comedy-drama film written and directed by Tate Taylor, in his feature film directorial debut. It was filmed in Montana.
The Florodora Girl is a 1930 American pre-Code drama film directed by Harry Beaumont and written by Ralph Spence, Al Boasberg and Robert E. Hopkins. The film stars Marion Davies, Lawrence Gray, Walter Catlett, and Ilka Chase. The film was released on May 31, 1930, by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Vanessa Parise is an American film director, writer, producer, and actress based in New York City. Her first feature film Kiss the Bride won the Golden Starfish Award at the Hamptons Film Festival in 2002. Her television movies, Perfect High and Drink Slay Love have been named by the Lifetime’s Broad Focus initiative. Parise has been nominated for Leo Awards for Best Direction for Lighthouse in 2015, for Perfect High in 2016, for Beyond in 2018, and for The Simone Biles Story in 2019. Her television movie The Simone Biles Story was nominated for Best Television Movie and Best Lead Actress by the NAACP Awards in 2019.
Five Feet Apart is a 2019 American romantic drama film directed by Justin Baldoni and written by Rachael Lippincott with Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis. The film was inspired by Claire Wineland, who suffered from cystic fibrosis. Haley Lu Richardson and Cole Sprouse play two young patients with cystic fibrosis who try to have a relationship despite being forced to stay six feet apart from each other. The film was released in the United States on March 15, 2019 by CBS Films via Lionsgate. It received mixed reviews from critics and grossed $92 million worldwide.
Christmas with You is a 2022 American Christmas romantic comedy film written by Paco Farias, Jennifer C. Stetson and Michael Varrati, directed by Gabriela Tagliavini and starring Aimee Garcia and Freddie Prinze Jr.