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List Price: $7.99 | | Label: Velocity / Thinkfilm
Salesrank: 118989
Released: November 15, 2005 |
| Our Price: $0.25 |
| Used Price: $0.01 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Elliot Kelman (JOE PANTOLIANO) is a failed publishing executive who can’t get back into business. He supports himself selling suits at the local mall and relies on hand-outs from his mother, ex-wife, and son. He also self-publishes a weekly newsletter on the perils of self-delusion. Afraid his writings will be rejected, he hires a high school kid to post them on supermarket bulletin boards and stuff them under windshields in his New Jersey hometown.
After he meets the sexy Carole (JENNIFER TILLY) and his newsletter begins to find an audience, things start looking up for Elliot. However, the return home of his oldest friend Richard (BOYD GAINES), a prominent movie producer, and the only one of his friends to have found success, brings Elliot’s feeling of inadequacy and squandered potential back to the surface. With Richard in town, the competitive tensions rise, and once Carole takes an interest in his friend, Elliot must confront his envy of Richard’s success and his disenchantment with his own failure.
Second Best is a dark comedy that offers insight into men’s expectations of success, financially, sexually and otherwise, and provides a glimpse into what men actually talk about when women aren’t around. This is a film that explores how a generation of men who were expected to achieve their dreams can ultimately overcome the reality of falling short of them.
Second Best Reviews:
Great movie about the reality of a man's professional success 
2009-04-08 - This fabulous out take in time is shot through with ripe language and the visual images they leave behind. Men are men and we all know that but this film shows the visceral vulnerability that the latter stages of life, bring to the table, when careers go bad and health fails.
A perfect encapsulation of life and especially men and their attitudes towards themselves, their buddies - and what remains of their worlds. It is a keeper of a film and never got the notice it definitely deserves.
It might be lost on you.
2008-12-08 - Second Best is a five star - just trust me. It is painfully, but touchingly poignant and in a rarely seen way. If you don't like any of the above adjectives then move along. If you do - just trust me, it's well worth your time.
Too Many Liberties With Unwarranted Vulgarity 
2007-11-28 - I did something with this movie I've never done before - I threw it in the trash. Yes, really. Bad language can't carry a mediocre story and depressing characters.
Low, low reseller prices should tell you something (several available for 1 cent). They just wanna make a little on the shipping.
Not bad, not great tale of a sort-of loser 
2007-05-23 - Joe Pantoliano carries this film, playing the main character--a middle-aged, divorced, cynical guy whose failed marriage and boot from his high profile job as a tony NY City publishing house editor lands him in the middle of, from his point of view, Loserville.
While JP's acting is very strong, the thing going on here with the story is just a little too cringe-producing, just a little too trying-too-hard. It's as if the screenwriter really, really wants you to feel sorry for this guy--as well as his cronies, one of whom is played by the amazingly reappearing Bronson Pinchot (remember him?)--and this "really, really" element of it makes the movie not exactly difficult to watch, but a little bit too much to settle into the movie with.
The cronies include a doctor (Pinchot), a real estate guy, and another guy. Adding to the "loserness" is the appearance of Richard, a very wealthy Hollywood producer who's also one of the group, but obviously in a different class (even the doctor is not a rich guy). Richard shows up and stays at JP's place; JP has established a newsletter for losers, and among other things, this newsletter also serves to accentuate the somewhat cringe-producing element of the story.
On one hand, it's not hard to see why it would be easy to identify with people who don't get what they want, which is really the crux of the story. But on the other hand, the constant reminding of this inability to achieve one's dreams gets kind of tiring, as if somebody is nagging you hour after hour. Sure, we don't necessarily want to see a great Hollywood ending all the time--all the "losers" get what they really want, as if by magic--but realism like this needs higher stakes than is presented here in order to make this truly compelling.
The stakes presented here are not as high as they should be. One guy wants to get laid--OK, fair enough, but not really as compelling as it should be. Another guy (JP) wants an emotional connection, now missing after the failure of his marriage, and when he initially connects with a sexy housewife--Jennifer Tilly, doing a great job--he thinks maybe he has that, but then it's obvious, later, that he really doesn't at all.
In a way, this is a hard movie to review because all these middle-aged men ARE getting older; they are losing the energy and virility they had; they ARE, in one way or another, worse off than they were before. So there is an element of sympathy that definitely comes through. But the problem is that we don't really FEEL that from them. The way the parts are written, these guys kvetch, yes, but the vast majority of the time, they don't really SHOW us that these things are hitting them as hard as we think they REALLY are hitting them.
So this lack of expression of feeling definitely hampers the movie and that's what keeps it from being more than a 3-star film. If there had been more real genuine expression of how these guys actually FEEL--how much this middle age really hit them--this would have been a much better piece of work. Only very rarely do we get that--much too rarely, in fact.
Not bad...but definitely not what it could and should have been.
Amazed I hadn't heard of it 
2006-03-12 - I really enjoyed the movie. Here is this dysfunctional loser that reminds me a little of me, of my firends, there are very real feelings wrapped into this movie, he screws up, tests of friendship. I enjoyed the journey.
