All I Want (review)

Poor Elijah Wood. Not only must he suffer the indignity of a direct-to-video release so soon after his Lord of the Rings triumph, but it's at the hands of writer Charles Kephart, whose pallid teen comedy tries so hard to be cutesy and precious and adorably wacky, and director Jeffrey Porter, who took Kephart's script and didn't let a cutesy, precious, or adorably wacky moment go unaccented. Wood's 17-year-old college dropout, the oh-so charmingly named Jones Dillon, gets his own apartment and learns how to decork wine bottles and finds himself wooed by his cheerily eccentric neighbors, the offbeat actress Lisa (Mandy Moore: How to Deal) and the slightly demented photographer Jane (Franke Potente: The Bourne Identity). Everyone's cute and precious and their insignificant problems vanish in magic poofs of adorableness while Jones learns how to be a man, I guess. Elijah fanatics will find much big-blue-eyed wonderment -- everyone else can give it a pass.