14 DAY TRIAL // Jennifer Lopez’s most recent film, the thriller “The Boy Next Door,” detailing an ill-fated affair between a divorced high school teacher and a very young (but of age) next-door neighbor who turns psycho stalker, is a moderate commercial hit, considering it was shot on a minimal budget over the course of a few days on set.
Critically, though, it’s been labeled anything from “trash” to a “mess,” an awkward and occasional hilarious trainwreck, and a complete waste of time and money.
Embedded below is just one scene in which the film went from awkward to downright hilariously bad, when the script showed that no one in the entire production had an idea of how old Homer’s “Iliad” was.
Here’s the deal: Lopez plays a classics high school teacher. Ryan Guzman, the “Boy,” is trying to impress her, so he goes out and buys a classic book to present her with; apparently, he loves classic literature just as much, so he knows what to look for. It just so happens that the book is “The Iliad,” aka an epic poem believed to have been written about 3,000 years ago.
The printing press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg around 1439 A.D., so you do the math on the possibility that this handsome fellow picked up the “first edition” of “The Iliad” at a garage sale for “a buck.”
As the video below says, it’s amazing that of all the people who were involved in the making of this film, no one picked up on this huge inconsistency.