Authors Anonymous

Authors Anonymous

Fans of film were understandably mournful at the passing of the great character actor Dennis Farina last year. Fans of film should be royally pissed off that the great character actor Dennis Farina was apparently spending the twilight of his career appearing in dreck like “Authors Anonymous,” which according to various Internet sources, was his second to last movie.

As this remarkably limp and obvious ensemble comedy’s title suggests, “Author’s Anonymous” is about a writers’ group. That is to say, a group of wannabe scribes who meet up and workshop/critique each other’s works, each member nursing if not outright milking dry the hope of finding representation, publication, best sellerdom.

First-time-credited screenwriter David Congalton peoples this group (set in literary hotbed Los Angeles) with extraordinarily predictable types while ignoring the rule about how if one wants to make fun of the aspirations of other writers one ought to check oneself or at least one’s talent pretty mercilessly before setting down word one.

Farina plays a tough guy Tom Clancy wannabe; Chris Klein’s a Fitzgerald devotee who also happens to be a pizza delivery boy; Teri Polo’s a flighty Danielle Steel wannabe I think; Dylan Walsh is her optometrist husband who’s Polo’s top enabler; Jonathan Bennetts Bukowski-esque sample dialogue, or rather monologue, because “Authors Anonymous” indifferently adopts the conceit of being a “documentary” about its characters: “I am here because of Bukowski. Charles Bukowski. Greatest writer ever. Period. L.A. is his town, man. If I’m gonna be a writer, you know, I’ve gotta walk in Bukowski’s shoes, man.”

(So see? Setting it in Los Angeles really DOES make sense.) And Kaley Cuoco of “The Big Bang Theory” fame and Internet-shut-in lust plays an airhead who’s never heard of Jane Austen. So guess which member of the group gets an agent and a book deal and a six-figure movie deal? If you guessed, you really don’t need to see this movie. If you didn’t, you really don’t need to see this movie.

Seriously. The scene depicting a book signing at a hardware store seemed to me like this movie’s peak bottom, but by that point the picture still had 45 minutes left to go. Farina’s talent is thrown away here; Cuoco is funnier on her sitcom; Klein and Polo you just kind of feel bad for. Hence, there’s only one reason to watch this thing, and it’s for the novelty value of feeling bad for Chris Klein and/or Teri Polo. To each his own, but my recommendation is pass.

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