SWINGERS (63)

Directed by: Doug Liman

Starring: Jon Favreau, Vince Vaughn, Ron Livingston

The Pitch: Struggling actors in LA spend their days waiting for that elusive break, and their nights trying to pick up "beautiful babies" at clubs and parties.

Theo Sez: Slick and ebullient, a fizzy party movie even if the prevailing mood is closer to self-pity : Favreau's compulsively insecure phone calls to the woman he's just met, capped by her icy "Don't ever call me again", have the maudlin fascination of a "confession" at a group-therapy meeting, both daringly naked and (given that he also wrote the script) cringe-makingly self-indulgent. The problem really is that arrested adolescence can be poignant in films (like METROPOLITAN) where you feel the characters are wasting their potential - but there's no suggestion that these aspiring actors, for all their problems and insecurities, are throwing away their lives : if they're successful they'll become movie stars, if not they'll be bartenders or used-car salesmen, but either way they're in their element amid the film's brash, exhibitionistic world, happy as pigs in swill - the whole thing is basically harmless, the stakes too low for anyone to get hurt. That it still manages to be full of pleasures and - almost despite itself - a wryly accurate look at the terminally confused 90s male is a testament mostly to its stylish, confident direction and the nothing-to-lose feeling behind it, the happy energy of actors playing what they know. Like the catchy but rather limited argot it devises for its characters, it goes a surprisingly long way on what's actually very little.