Sunday Review: Scream 4

Posted on April 18, 2011 by | 1 Comment

Editor’s Note:  Hey, guess what?  There are spoilers in this!  It is all Susan’s fault.  But if you don’t wanna know who the killer is, turn back now!

Geoff:
So, we’re now to the fourth of the Scream films, if you can believe it. Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox), and Deputy (now Sheriff) Dewey (David Arquette) are all still alive and well and once again being haunted by a new round of dual killers dressed as the now-iconic Ghostface. The entire franchise of fourth-wall-breaking (and perhaps fifth and sixth walls … I wish I had more time to think about this and put it together in my head) films had gotten steadily more conventional and hammy and less clever in the first through third movies, and while this one has some pretty enjoyable moments, I feel like it was pulled from the oven before it was completely cooked. (But that might be because I’m asking too much of the film.)

In this one, Sidney returns to Woodsboro on the tenth anniversary of the original murders she survived to promote her new book about being a survivor (again and again). Unfortunately, someone decides yet once more to start picking off teens, this time concentrating on Sidney’s younger cousin (Emma Roberts) and her cohort while Sidney, Gale, and Dewey attempt to keep as many people alive as possible and solve the whodunit.

I’ve always enjoyed Wes Craven horror films more than others because they’re at least about thrills and hiding and running and jumps rather than straightforward gross-out gore, and the guy’s done this so long that he knows how to move a camera during a chase scene and how to block a shot to induce jumps and etc. If you’ve seen the first three movies, though, you might find yourself yearning for a set-piece as good as the original’s final house-party scene or the sequel’s silent, incredibly tense attack-and-chase scene in a college sound studio. They’re just so skillfully done, and in this film there are some jumps, but the chases and tension are brief, fleeting. There’s rarely even a moment that you think whoever’s in the crosshairs in a given scene might have even a chance of making it out alive.

Still, there are some fun, clever jokes, both at the beginning and the end, and it was interesting to watch the incredibly self-conscious series try to think about the horror film landscape of today as compared to a decade ago. I just wish it had gone further with it, played with it a little bit more, I guess, both in the execution of its scenes and the discourse it was trying to have with itself.

Susan:
Well, Geoff, you can blame this on either my terrible taste in movies or the fact that I haven’t seen the first three Scream films, but I really, really liked this thing.

I especially liked that even when I thought I knew what was going on, the movie’s insistence on laying out all the rules for me and then breaking some of them but following some of them kept me overthinking it and underthinking it at the same time!  Maybe that happens in all of them?  But luckily, I had a mother who discouraged our watching of scary things, which means this reboot feels fresh to me.  It made me want to go back and watch the first three, and I can’t remember ever having a desire to watch them before.  GOOD WORK, HOLLYWOOD.

Also David Arquette and Courtney Cox are back together!!!  And Neve Campbell is there!!  And people are using land lines!!  I mean, HEY THE 90s REMEMBER THEM??  Watching this movie was like putting on a flannel shirt and a pair of Doc Marten boots and a baby-doll tee and being impressed by Yahoo! Mail.  You get to jump at the scary things and squirm in your seat because of anticipation and tension, instead of gross-out discomfort.  You say it felt unbaked to you, but I thought it was near perfect.  Simple, easy, predictable enough, and fun.

Also:  LADY VILLAN!!  Right??  I mean, did that happen in one of the earlier ones too?  Because that was a pretty bomb-ass twist, I thought.  I never, ever suspected her.  In fact, except for the dude with the camera, the two killers would have been my last picks.  And that’s the fun, right?  It’s supposed to be the people you least suspect, but not the people you’re aware that you least suspect, but just the people that you legitimately don’t suspect.  UGH SO COOL.

I dunno, Geoff, I think sometimes it’s hard to review horror flicks with you because I’m just so late getting to the genre and I still think all the things about them are super neat, whereas you are a jaded old man.  But whatever, I think this flick’s totally good enough.

The novice/pro divide deepens after the cut…

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Wednesday Review: Sucker Punch

Posted on April 6, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Geoff:
Have studios just given up on telling a good story? Do screenwriters see all the CGI and whiz-bang going across the screen and just no longer care? I wish I could be there for the conversations studio execs and filmmakers had about Sucker Punch and other effects-driven films like it because for the life of me I can’t conceive what sort of narrative merit they might attribute to them. It creates films that are neither distinctive in story nor even distinctive in the way they tell a familiar story, which I could also have fun with and enjoy.

Sucker Punch itself is structured less with a plot and more with a bulleted list, but here’s the rundown: The film starts out with a confusingly shot/edited/acted scene in which (apparently) the female lead (Emily Browning) shoots her younger sister while trying to take out her abusive stepfather (I think? None of this is confirmed through dialogue because the whole scene’s cut to music–in fact, probably nine-tenths of the film are cut to music) who was waiting for the mother of the main character and her sister to die so that he could inherit her money. Enraged over the attempted murder and after being left out of the mother’s will, the stepfather sends the main character to an all-female mental asylum, where the guy who at first seems to be the caretaker (Oscar Isaac) finally at least gives the main character a moniker: Baby Doll (an appropriately and creepily infantile name because bleached, pig-tailed Emily Browning really pretty much does look and sound like a borderline minor made of porcelain). Just as she’s about to be lobotomized, Baby Doll lapses into some kind of fantasy version of the asylum in which it’s actually a gentleman’s club where the confined women are now confined dancers (as if this would somehow be preferable to anyone but someone looking to be titillated by the situation), and here we meet the other women: sisters Rocket (Jena Malone) and Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), the ironically brown-haired Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), and Amber (Jamie Chung), who for some reason gets a regular name. Within this fantasy, the seeming caretaker is the vicious club manager, and the asylum’s psychologist (Carla Gugino, whom I normally love, but who here gets shit to do) is a kindly but obedient trainer for the dancers, so the girl’s scheme to make an escape, which plan they come to thanks to Babydoll’s steampunk battle fantasies that she goes into while dancing some sort of amazing trance-dance (that we never see, probably because it would only look lame by comparison to the reactions from other characters). In these fantasies within the main fantasy, some guy who’s supposed to seem wise tells Babydoll she’ll need a map, fire, a knife, a key, and … wait for it … a mystery item to escape. The wise man actually just says, “It’s a mystery.” The writers don’t even try to be coy or offer any intrigue by having him say something like, “You’ll know it when you see it.” The dancers thus set about getting these items one by one while defeating monsters and defusing bombs in the steampunk fantasy scenes that really have pretty much no dramatic tension except ever so slightly for the procurement of the knife.

Do you know some of the dancers will die? Yes. Does it feel perfunctory when they do? Yes. Will the mystery item be found? Yes. Will it feel perfunctory and lame when it is? Dear God, yes. I know we’re trying to not give away the endings here so much these days, but it, too, feels perfunctory despite a surprise cameo by Jon Hamm. The film is just an autopilot protostory with neat effects and lots of scantily clad women. It’s clearly catering to a specific audience but I feel like even the 14-to-34-year-old male crowd might lose interest with this one.

Susan:
THIS IS FASCINATING.  I actually found myself leaving the theater COMPLETELY AMBIVALENT.  I assumed you would love the thing, since you suggested we watch it, and I could talk about how terrible it was.  BUT YOU THOUGHT IT WAS TERRIBLE!!  Now I don’t know what to do, because I’m way too ambivalent to argue that is was unequivocally good.

In the spirit of the film, let’s do some moral algebra via bulleted lists.

Pros:
–The action sequences were pretty good, except for when the CGI was bad.
–The layered plot was actually more interesting than the plot I expected going into it.  True, none of the layers really made sense, and the reasons for there being layers were never really explained, but the movie also didn’t seem to want me to care.  I feel like the movie intended to be a live-action video game, and so I can’t really fault it for being just that.
–Jon Hamm.  I mean, not to abuse the sandwich-eating thing, but seriously, give the man a sandwich and I will buy my ticket.

Cons:
–It is exhausting as a real live woman living in the world to watch any film where the female characters are under the constant threat of sexual violence.  The movie kept doing this thing where the club boss dude would say threatening things, and you would think maybe they were about murder, but then you would realize they were about rape or sexual assault or something.  And then at the end you find out that duder’s been raping the girls at the nuthouse the whole time or something.  And also at the beginning Baby Doll gets almost raped and then her sister gets almost raped (or maybe raped? It’s unclear), and at some point you just think, Jesus.  This is walking a fine line between sad story about oppressed girls and rape-porn. I mean, if there is even a line between those two things.
–The movie said that BabyDoll was 20 but she’s wearing little girl pajamas and her sister is like 6 so…what?  Let’s stop blurring the line between women and girls, what say.
–ALL THE GIRLS WERE CRYING ALL THE FUCKING TIME.  It was like Country Strong, where we are asked to believe that we are looking at really powerful, strong female characters, but they are just crying every time anything happens.  Sometimes when it’s appropriate, but sometimes just like…because.  I don’t know.  Yes, strong women can cry, as can men, but I didn’t like the oscillation between kicking everyone’s ass all over the place in dream world and crying their eyes out backstage in the OTHER dream world.  Also Vanessa Hudgens: Go away.

So I mean, I thought it was a fun movie to watch, but I also couldn’t decide whether I should hate it or not.  I think overall I probably should have.  But it’s a movie, and I want to give it a little extra space anyway.

The hemming and hawing continues after the cut…

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Wednesday Review: Paul

Posted on March 23, 2011 by | 4 Comments

Susan:
When I first saw the trailer for Paul, I thought to myself, “Well, this could really go either way couldn’t it?”  I mean, in its favor was the fact that it was a Simon Pegg movie (Shaun of the Dead, Spaced, but also that bad one about cops).  But it also seems to star a CGI alien stoner dude with a beer belly and hippie pants who is voiced by Seth Rogan.  One had to wonder if the thing would be more Howard the Duck or more…well come to think of it, I can’t think of a movie that has a CGI/animated/animatronic lead that wasn’t kind of dumb.  I’m sure Geoff will have one he can think of due to his bibliographic knowledge of like everything.

But anyway here is what happens in the thing:  Two Brits named Graeme and Clive (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost) come to America to go to Comic Con and drive along the Extraterrestrial Highway (or something) to look at alien landing sites.  Along the way, they see an accident and find that the driver of the car was actually a small alien named Paul who apparently landed on earth in the “Roswell” crash that didn’t actually happen in Roswell, but rather happened in Wyoming somewhere.  Apparently Paul has been helping the U.S. (both the government and film industry) for years, but now that he’s exhausted his wealth of knowledge they want to harvest his brain for stem cells so they can gain his powers.  The “they” to which I refer here is of course that same ominous “they” that hid the alien contact in the first place.  FBI or CIA or something.  The men in black.  But I digress.  Point is, Paul has escaped, and the two Brits help him continue his journey to where his alien friends will pick him up.  They are chased by three “agents” of whatever agency (Jason Bateman, Bill Hader, and Joe Lo Truglio) and encounter adventures along the way, including picking up a näive evangelical Christian woman (Kristen Wiig) with whom Graeme falls instantly in love.  Of course they narrowly escape all the bad stuff and eventually make it to the rendezvous point, only to be caught by “The Big Guy” (Sigourney Weaver) who is in charge of, you know, the shadow agency thing.  In a break with tradtion, I am not going to spoil the ending for you, readers, even though you can probably guess what happens.

The thing had its cheesy moments and a lot of the funniest jokes were in the trailer, which ruined them.  But there were also a lot of unexpectedly funny moments, especially those that made fun of the gun-toting, Bible-beating culture of the American West (or maybe just America if we’re honest with ourselves).  And there was also a lot of heart without sap.  I don’t know that I’d recommend someone pay to see this in a theater, but I also don’t really want to diss it too heartily.  It’s sort of like that really nice guy you know whom you don’t really *like* but whom you also can’t bring yourself to say anything to mean about.  It was just a pleasant film.  I had a fine time.

Geoff:
Hmm … E.T., maybe? Wait, no. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? That was a good animated-main-character movie. You’re right that they’re few and far between, though.

I feel like, if our feelings about this movie existed on a scale, Susan, you would be at maybe a 6 or 7, and I would be at a 4 or 5. You’re right that there are occasional little jokes that worked. I was amused by Paul’s arguments with a devout Christian, and I liked the remarks from the Brits on the small things they find odd in America (we leave the tea bags in the mug), and I had a good time with the references and allusions in the film, which you’ll usually get several of with a Pegg/Frost-written flick. Here, the film is largely an homage to various alien films, including Aliens (that they got Blythe Danner to say “get away from her, you bitch!” before hitting Sigourney Weaver was particularly fun), Star Wars, Star Trek, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and E.T.—and as usual with Pegg and Frost, the references are at least a small treat if nothing else.

I think what I didn’t enjoy so much about the film is that it seemed to rely more on references and homage than on its own good humor, which might be due to a combination of Edgar Wright’s absence as director and Pegg and Frost maybe phoning it in a bit this time and Seth Rogen being himself. I’d say wait to see it for real cheap on Netflix Instant if you feel you absolutely must.

The meh more-or-less agreement continues after the cut…

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Sunday Review: Battle: LA

Posted on March 14, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Geoff:
Battle: LA is less a movie than a video game without a controller, less a story than a total hard-on for the American military.

I’m not sure the names of the characters matter at all, but I’ll list off the stereotypes included: there’s the soon-to-retire veteran marine with a dark past (Aaron Eckhart), the young cocksure commanding marine who learns the hard way that he’s not as savvy a leader as he thought and whom Eckhart has to keep in line as the veteran marine, a marine who’s getting married, a marine who’s been taken from active duty until his military psychiatrist tells him he can get back out there, a marine who’s brother was killed in Aaron Eckhart’s dark past in Fallujah and who therefore says nothing but bitter things like, “We’re all expendable to you, aren’t we?” and, finally, a tough-as-nails female Air Force pilot with recon knowledge who proves she can handle a gun.

These characters aren’t filled in much more than I’ve just described them here, and basically one day they wake up to hear orders from their COs that aliens have landed in the coastal waters off L.A. and other major cities, so they’re stuffed in helicopters and sent to the front lines, where they battle ground troops, computer-piloted spaceships, and eventually a giant alien command center where all extra-terrestrial attacks are being coordinated from (read: the boss at the end of the video game).

There are indeed some spectacular set pieces in the film, including Eckhart’s guerrilla-like grenade-killing of an alien spaceship and an evacuation from the Los Angeles freeway that goes horribly wrong before the young cocksure marine sacrifices himself in a final moment of glory so that everyone else can live. And it was a nice touch that the entire film was shot in an in-the-trenches style through the P.O.V. of footsoldiers, whom one marine in the movie refers to as “grunts like us.” You could see the gritty realism the director wanted to convey.

However, my problems are with the film’s script and heavy-handed message about military might. If the dialogue had been a little better, the characters just a little more fleshed out, the patriotic music not so totally bombastic, then I probably wouldn’t have been playing with my ticket stub by the end. But, as it stood, there just wasn’t enough to hold my interest.

Go ahead and yell at me, Susan.

Susan:
Yell I will, good sir.  If this movie is so flat and heartless, THEN WHY WAS I CRYING WHEN AARON ECKHART CALLED THAT BOY HIS “LITTLE MARINE”????

Yes, this movie is so hawkish it is gross.  Yes, this movie is basically a live-action video game.  Yes, the story is thin and the characters are caricatures.  But so what? THIS THING WAS SOOOO AWESOME.

Seriously, guys, the point of the movies is to distract us from reality.  I got completely and totally lost in this delicious delirious piece of militaristic/nationalist emotion porn.  There were no questions raised by this movie:  I knew who was good (humans) and I knew who was bad (aliens).  I didn’t have to question the motives of the military or worry about human rights violations.  There was no love story to gross me out.  And the POV action was so well-paced and intense that my arms kept falling asleep from my tense posture.

I also had a lump in my throat for like 90% of this movie because the filmmakers knew exactly how to emotionally manipulate me in a way that was transparent (and therefore less offensive to me) and pointed.  When Aaron Eckhart decides to go it alone to find the alien command center and jumps off the helicopter that will take them all to safety, I was like, Okay yeah, sure.  BUT THEN ALL THE OTHER MARINES FOLLOW HIM!!  Oh my god the tears.  Look at how the Marines stick together!  I mean, I hate the military, and this movie made me LOVE THE MILITARY.  I’m not proud of that.  But I’ll be damned if it’s not true.

This movie just makes everything EASY.  The world of the film is simple and plain and uncomplicated, which is just absolutely the thing I needed walking into the theater yesterday.  This movie does what movies are supposed to do–provide an escape from the difficult act of living in the world.

The hearty disagreement continues after the cut…

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Sunday Review: The Adjustment Bureau

Posted on March 7, 2011 by | 2 Comments

Editor’s Note: Two things.  First, meet Bobby, our guest blogger this week!  Geoff was in Columbia, MO at the True/False Film Fest this weekend seeing only non-mediocre movies, so Bobby graciously agreed to step in and fill his shoes.  Bobby is our friend from the University of Iowa and he now lives, works, and writes in Chicago, IL.  Be nicer to him than I was! Second, as always, there are massive spoilers in this.  This whole blog needs a spoiler alert.

Susan:
Let’s all just say the thing no one wants to say:  No one thought The Adjustment Bureau was going to be any good.  The previews were out for what, like, six months or something?  We were all getting the impression that they were trying to make a crap movie as low-crap as possible before they let it out into the world.  And after the Damon debacle that was Hereafter, I went into this thing sort of hesitantly.  I actually wanted to see Beastly more than this thing.  I am not even joking.

But I was actually totally pleasantly surprised by how thoughtful (no, really) and GOOD this movie was.  It walked a VERY fine line between cheesy crap and thought-provoking old-school sci-fi, and somehow miraculously ended up (mostly) on the latter side.

A summary might not even be needed, since the trailer pretty much lays it out for you:  David Norris (Matt Damon) is a politician who is on his way to big, big things.  He meets Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt), a dancer, in a bathroom and they fall in love instantly because that is something that happens in movies.  However, they are not supposed to fall in love, and so this league of mostly white dudes in hats, led by the most attractive man ever Roger Sterling–I mean Richardson (John Slattery), start trying to adjust his life-path using really hip Moleskin notebooks and magic doorways.  He eventually discovers these men at work, and they explain to him that they are basically like God’s bureaucracy and their job is to make sure things work according to some master plan that constantly changes but is always really important.  After they explain their function, they tell him that if he doesn’t tell anyone about them and he never sees Elise again, they won’t completely erase his brain.  For three years, this works, but then Norris sees Elise again and decides he can’t NOT see her.  His own personal “case worker” Harry Mitchell (Anthony Mackie) feels bad for Norris because he had to do a bunch of other really bad stuff to him over the course of his life and decides to help him be with Elise. Some other stuff happens and there are some really exciting chase scenes through magic doorways in magic hats, and in the end love triumphs over all because, again, that is something that happens in movies.

So yeah, the ending was a little cheesy–I personally hoped for a tragic ending that reminded us that we were but pawns in a giant game over which we have no control.  I wanted the movie to be about the heartbreaking contingency of being human.  The filmmakers, however, wanted the movie to be something people enjoyed, so they made it about how the universe cares about us and our needs and how we will be taken care of if we work hard and make sacrifices for things.  Which is fine too.  I mean, really, the rest of the movie was so good, I didn’t even mind a little cheeseball at the end.

Bobby:
I also hoped for this movie to be about the heartbreaking contingency of being human and was frankly a little disappointed by it. There is a lot for me to pick apart about it and I may not be able to get to it all here. But I actually kind of felt like I was watching two different movies. The charming story of the golden kid from New York who meets this amazing woman in a men’s room with whom he has electrifying chemistry seemed like a completely different movie from the story of: Oops, your destiny case worker fucked up a little bit and somehow we need to repair the fabric of reality. I actually found the sci-fi-ness to be a little hard to take, and there were a few times when I found myself wincing at how it was unintentionally funny. Seriously, there was a dude behind me laughing at pratfalls. Most memorable of these was the line: “Sir! He’s got a hat!!” which in the logic of the movie makes perfect sense.  Wearing a hat allows you to go through the magic doors, so it makes perfect sense that there would be concern over David, who isn’t supposed to know about the adjustment bureau, wearing a hat. But taking a step back, I found it hard to take seriously, even after suspending my disbelief enough to take the initial fact of, “We are here to make sure you don’t have free-will and are the best person you are capable of being.”

I guess I just felt like the not-terribly well-done sci-fi aspect of it didn’t sit in the same camp as the cute story of these two charming people. Not that the thriller aspect was awful, just that it was not as good as the other meat of the movie.

I also felt like this was a psychological/existential thriller for people who don’t really get psychological thrillers and need everything carefully explained to them. Like they couldn’t be confident enough about mainstream audiences appreciating a weird abstract story, so they made it as simple as possible for the widest imaginable audience and also explained everything in the preview.

Susan gets real with Bobby after the cut…

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Sunday Review: Unknown

Posted on February 28, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Editor’s Note:  Once again, this review is going to ruin the whole movie for you because Geoff and I can’t be bothered to avoid spoilers.  The twist is actually pretty decent this time, so if you want to see the film and be surprised, turn back now.

Susan:
For those of you who are too busy to read the whole of this review, let me offer a brief summary:  At first, this movie is lame because January Jones is like, super boring and bad at acting and also kind of over, really, even though she’s still very pretty when she doesn’t try to make emotions with her face.  Then this movie gets REALLY AWESOME because it has CAR CHASES and EVIL GERMAN SPY DUDES and TERRORISM and PLOT TWISTS and FIST FIGHTS and what have you.  And then it ends which is fine because you get to see January Jones explode and seriously why is she ever even in movies or TV shows when we can just look at still pictures of her which is what she is really good for.

The plot is SUPER AWESOME and you can mostly tell what it is from the trailer:  A dude named Martin Harris (OR SO HE WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE; Liam Neeson) goes to Berlin for a biotechnology conference (OR FOR A SUPER SECRET SPY MISSION) and gets in a car accident while he’s rushing back to the airport for the briefcase that he forgot there.  After the accident, he goes into a coma for four days, and when he wakes up, he finds that he has been replaced in life by some other dude who is better looking (Aidan Quinn) and that his wife (OR SUPER SECRET SPY PARTNER; January Jones) is also pretending not to know him.  Later, when he is in the hospital again after a fainting spell, some scary evil German spy-type dude with a Bluetooth headset comes to kill him in the MRI room, but he escapes by closing a bunch of airlocks and sneaking onto an ambulance (AWESOME).  He enlists the help of a ex-East-German-security spy dude named Jürgen to figure out how to prove that he is who he says he is, and right when Jürgen finds the proof, another spy agent guy (also super old — why are all the spies in this movie old instead of young and hot?) comes to kill him because (and here is the big plot twist reveal) MARTIN HARRIS IS ACTUALLY A MADE UP PERSON TO BEGIN WITH and Liam Neeson has gone rogue because of head trauma from the accident.  We find out that Neeson is actually part of a spy organization himself and was supposed to pretend to be Martin Harris to get into the biotech conference to kill some botanist who has made some crazy new corn that is going to end world hunger (BOTANY IS THE NEW NUCLEAR ARMS TRADE, Y’ALL).  So along with the super hot, illegal Bosnian cab driver who saved his life (Diane Kruger), Neeson (after realizing who he actually is) decides to set things right (for reasons that are not clear) and to kill the would-be assassins that have taken his place.  Did you follow all that?

Best line of the movie:  “I didn’t forget everything.  I remember how to kill you, asshole!”  Action movie lines, psychological-thriller-style drama and intrigue, AND a love story (or two maybe, although that part is not very well developed)???  SO MUCH AWESOME FACTOR!!

Geoff:
I don’t know if I loved it on the scale you did, Susan, but I can’t deny this movie’s a lot of fun. I almost always love Cold War spies, and maybe my favorite character in the whole film is Jürgen, who sits there and sips his straight glass of bourbon or scotch or whatever while listening to Liam Neeson’s not-Martin Harris (I don’t know how else to name the character) tell his tale, who still solves puzzles by calling his old intelligence buddies and writing things down on paper while looking over the top of his glasses. No computers, no gizmos. Just a sharp mind, a good memory, and cyanide for when the enemy comes to get information the hard way.

With a thriller like this, about 75 percent of what you’re waiting for if you’ve seen the preview is to find out whether the pay-off is going to be as intriguing as the setup, and here I was sufficiently satisfied. Is it unlikely and a bit ridiculous? Sure. But is it fair? Yes, for the most part, so I can go along with it. One of my other favorite things with this kind of movie is is to ponder the characters’ life after the credits start rolling. Liam Neeson’s not-Martin Harris has just remembered he’s a deadly assassin, but he doesn’t want to go back to that life, so now he’s going to … start fighting back against the very people who trained him and made him who he is? Pull a Jason Bourne and try to go into hiding, only to be drawn back out by the people who know his secret? Get a nice little place for himself and tend to a garden? And where’s that Bosnian going? I want to see the movie about her life ten years from now, when she tells some friend in the land of American Bohemia (for, you see, she’s portrayed in the film as a starving artist struggling to escape Eastern European hardship) about the time she helped a spy remember his past.

Sufficient is the word I’d use for this movie overall, I think. On a level, the movie’s just plain fun, and I’d wholly recommend it on that level. I don’t know if the acting, editing, direction, or writing are going to be remembered by anyone anywhere five years from now, but there are worse ways to kill your afternoon than watching Neeson bring out his gravelly voice and kick some serious ass before January Jones gets blown up in a scene that, while I don’t think it was being played for laughs, ended up being pretty amusing.

The mostly-agreement continues after the cut…

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Friday Review: Cedar Rapids

Posted on February 25, 2011 by | 3 Comments

Geoff:
First off, I should admit that I’m probably way too close to this material. I grew up in Mount Vernon, Iowa, and went to college in Iowa City, both of which are only about 25-30 minutes from the small industrial city for which the film Cedar Rapids is named. Some of my earliest memories are of visiting my Dad’s accounting office in the middle of downtown, and I can remember my parents taking me to pick up Hardy Boys and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books at the Cedar Rapids Public Library as a kid. I’m personally, deeply familiar with the overpowering fart-like smell from the city’s Quaker Oats factory that wafts over your car when you drive past it on Interstate 380, and a good portion of the movies I’ve seen in my lifetime I first saw at either the Carmike Cinema 7 or Wynnsong 12 multiplexes on either side of town, near the Lindale and Westdale malls. Basically, as much of a shithole as I can admit the town definitely is, I’ve also managed to romanticize it.

So, I went into Cedar Rapids not sure what to hope for but hoping that the movie would at least be kinda good and kinda funny since Cedar Rapids is not New York and will probably only have one studio film made about it ever. Unfortunately, when I left, I mostly just felt empty inside.

A plot rundown for you, of what little plot there is: Ed Helms is Tim Lippe, a small-town insurance salesman in Wisconsin who’s portrayed as a farcically over-the-top stereotype of all small-town Midwestern white men. His company is so God-fearing that prayers take place during corporate culture meetings. After one of the company’s top salesman, who had earned Lippe’s small-town branch a special award at the annual convention in Cedar Rapids several years in a row, dies from auto-erotic asphyxiation, Lippe is sent in his stead to earn the award again. While there, he meets a party-hearty Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly), a lonely Joan Ostrowski-Fox (Anne Heche) looking for a nice, time-limited escape from her marriage, a small-town black man played brilliantly by Isiah Whitlock Jr., and a prostitute (Alia Shawkat) who for some reason is hanging outside of the Courtyard Marriott-style hotel Lippe’s company is holding their annual convention in.

I’m running out of time, but if you know Cedar Rapids, this film just plays oddly. The screwball comedy (which you see most of in the preview) is mixed with … some form of sincerity? I think? I think the film was trying to make fun of the Midwest while writing a love letter to it, but for me the whole thing just felt muddled. Alexander Payne is a producer, and having seen About Schmidt, I can’t help feel he had something to do with it.

Susan:
Totally.  This thing was the most hack piece of shit ever.

Like, okay.  The Midwest is boring.  Haha, that’s super funny.  But to me, saying the Midwest is boring is like saying that chicks are crazy. That was probably a funny thing to say when it wasn’t something someone else had already said to you.  But chicks aren’t INHERENTLY crazy, and the Midwest is not INHERENTLY boring, and for those of us from the Midwest, there are far more interesting and funny things to say to say about the region.  Fargo is an excellent example of an on-point skewering of what is funny about the Midwest without losing the qualities that make up the heart of the region.  Fargo is a love letter.  Fargo knows its subject.  Cedar Rapids reads like two dudes who did some comedy in Des Moines once trying to write a regional movie someone would buy.  It’s not exactly right, and it’s not exactly funny.  It’s just a movie about a place that could be any place.  There is nothing real about the Cedar Rapids the movie produces.

You call it a fart smell, but I would say it is so much more than that.  The smell of Cedar Rapids is unique and grain-y.  A friend from Texas recently asked if it would be a smell similar to that outside a brewery.  I said maybe.  But I like to think that the Cedar Rapids smell is unique — the product of years and years of processed grain, of accidents at the cereal factory, of smog and burnt wheat and delicious Quaker Oat Squares.  Driving into Cedar Rapids is a THING.  And it is a thing you can only really GET if you’ve done it.

And really, my biggest beef with this film is that they didn’t GET it. There was a time, Geoff, when you were a similar character to the one played by Ed Helms in the movie.  But they just get it wrong.  Ed Helms isn’t human and he sure as shit isn’t Midwestern, and he just doesn’t quite know how to play this role.  Yeah, sweet and innocent is a part of the Midwestern je ne sais quoi, but there is a brand of Midwestern nice that you just don’t know what to do with.  The people in this movie are manipulative and mean, but not in the passive-aggressive Midwestern way.  There is no Midwest backpedal.  Fargo gets it — how can you be polite to someone you HATE?  It’s a skill we learn in the Midwest and it’s hard to capture when you haven’t been raised around it.  And this movie just misses.  It’s a bunch of people who could be from anywhere behaving like people who could be from anywhere.  If it were called, “Anyplace, USA” it would be another shitty comedy.  But if you locate a movie somewhere real, use that place to make your movie better. Just don’t make a bunch of pot shots that are obvious and boring and then end the thing.  I was super disappointed.

The geographically based anger continues after the cut…

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Friday Review: Just Go With It

Posted on February 18, 2011 by | 1 Comment

Susan:
The thing I’ve always loved about Adam Sandler Movies as a genre is that very early on the filmmakers let you know that what you are watching is a crazy movie about something crazy happening in a crazy world.  Yes, this world looks much like our own, but someone has a fake nose or a fake mole or is in a fat suit or something to help us realize that something about this world is a little bit off.  It makes it much easier to swallow everything that comes after — both wacky and sappy — when I know up front that I’m not dealing with a world that is supposed to accurately reflect reality.

So I was happy to discover two minutes into Sandler’s most recent picture, Just Go With It, that I was indeed watching an Adam Sandler Movie and not just another romantic comedy.  The movie opens on a bride and her bridesmaids, one of whom has a comically large nose.  We soon find that this bride is set to marry young Danny (Adam Sandler), who also has a comically large nose.  He overhears his bride-to-be bragging about her sexual conquest the night before the wedding and decides to call it off.  However, he soon discovers upon retiring to a bar to drink his sorrows away that wearing a wedding ring is an excellent way to get no-commitment sex.  Flash forward a few years:  Danny is now a successful plastic surgeon with a human-sized nose working in an office in California with his long-time assistant Katherine (Jennifer Aniston), but he’s still wearing that fake wedding ring.  He meets Palmer (Brooklyn Decker) at a party and they hit it off, but when she finds the wedding ring in his pocket, she assumes he’s married.  Katherine suggests he tell her he’s getting divorced, and he asks Katherine to be his fake-soon-to-be-ex-wife.  She agrees in exchange for a ridiculous spending spree, the lie gets bigger and bigger (as lies in rom-coms are wont to do), and eventually the whole “family” (Katherine, her two precocious kids, Danny’s cousin/Katherine’s fake boyfriend, and Palmer) ends up in Hawaii because Katherine’s son wants to swim with the dolphins (long story).  Danny and Katherine fall in love, Palmer meets Andy Roddick on her plane ride home, and everyone lives happily ever after.

I really didn’t know how I was going to feel about this movie.  I’m not a huge fan of hack rom-coms, but this one had enough zany and enough actual heart to keep me invested.  Adam Sandler has always been great at falling in love, and this movie is no exception to that rule.  He’s got sweet and silly on lock-down, and Aniston works wonderfully against him.  I didn’t have high expectations for this flick, but I came out of theater not only completely satisfied but even a little moved, which was a huge and welcome surprise.

Geoff:
I’m going with you on this one, Susan. Or, should I say, I’m going with it. See what I did there?

You’re right that every Sandler movie makes it clear from the outset that it’s taking place in a realm of the extremely absurd, and often it goes so far that I get a little tired. The senseless screaming of a frustrated Sandler or the jokes about bodily functions or sex with old people inevitably get overwhelming and tiresome, and eventually I want to quit, but here it’s toned down just right. Sandler does not shout and fall into tantrums every two seconds, there are fewer bodily function and sex-with-old-people jokes, and (mercifully) Rob Schneider is completely absent.

In fact, I think part of what I like about the film so much is not just the fact that Sandler’s forced to show some comedy chops outside his usual range (while still displaying plenty of his traditional skills, such as low-simmering anger); I also like that Sandler is matched up here with other actors who can actually keep up with him and who shine just as equally. Aniston, as you said, is totally amazing and charming and by the end you understand completely why he’d fall for her, and even the film’s child actors (a breed I typically struggle not to loathe) were fun and funny and complemented Sandler well in the scenes they had (I’m thinking particularly of the bargaining scene in the pizza place).

And can we please give a shout-out to Nicole Kidman and Dave Matthews in their cameos as Devlin and Devlin’s husband? I don’t want to give away too much for anyone who hasn’t seen and plans to (I’m also running out of time before I have to send this back Susan’s way), but I laughed aloud so much at the line, “Don’t pour over me. Don’t pour OVER me. Let me bring my glass to you.”

In all, I too went in with floor-level expectations and was charmed, by Aniston and Sandler’s chemistry, by plot points that were smarter than I expected them to be, and by a lot of jokes I honestly didn’t see coming.

The jovial agreement and praise-heaping continues after the cut…

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Wednesday Review: The Roommate

Posted on February 9, 2011 by | 5 Comments

Geoff:
The Roommate exists as an excuse to get Minka Kelly and Leighton Meester in a movie together and for a camera to drool over close-ups of their lip-gloss-moistened lips as much as possible in the span of an hour and a half. Sure, other stuff happens, but it’s basically all so you can feel like you have a reason for staring.

The plot, for those who haven’t had the pleasure of chuckling at the preview, is basically a modernized rehash of Single White Female in a college setting. Sara Matthews (Kelly), a sweet freshman gal who shows up in her University of Los Angeles dorm all the way from Des Moines (of course she’s from Iowa), is paired up with a shy, awkward roommate named Rebecca (Meester) who, over the course of the movie, turns out to be deeply psychotic. The audience gets to watch as Rebecca (don’t call her “Becky”) tears out the belly ring of Sara’s other potential new friend, kills Sara’s new kitten in a dryer to keep Sara from leaving, seduces and then blackmails a fashion teacher (played amazingly by a peddler’s cap-bedecked Billy Zane) who hits on Sara, kills Sara’s persistent high-school ex-boyfriend by dressing herself to look like Sara, and seduces Sara’s long-time lesbian friend/possibly relative/who knows in order to tie her up and hold her against her will and lure Sara into a final trap. Oh, and she glares a lot at Sara’s squinty-eyed new college boyfriend and then tries to kill him, too.

The film is bad Hitchcock. You get all of the suspense without an ounce of narrative depth into the reasons for Rebecca’s psychosis. At one point, Sara meets Rebecca’s parents for a Thanksgiving dinner, and the mother says, “Is Rebecca taking her medication?” When Sara (quite understandably) presses for more information, the mother drops the subject completely. Why? Because the writers are too lazy to actually come up with anything.

If you’re planning to see it to laugh at and revel in the B-grade acting and writing, you’ll probably leave pretty satisfied, but if you want an awesome thriller, I can tell you already you’ve seen better.

Susan:
OH MAN GEOFF WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT???

This movie was classic Hollywood AWESOME.  Who needs narrative depth in a dumb thriller?  This thing was totally entertaining and legitimately suspenseful and hilarious and everything that a dumb thriller should be.  We are talking instant-sleepover-classic here.  Where can I even begin talking about how much I loved this stupid stupid movie??

Okay for starters, let’s talk about Alyson Michalka, also a supporting cast member in Easy A, who has really cornered the market on Sexually Liberated Best Friend roles.  Michalka is part of the Ke$ha vanguard of women currently getting up in yer teenage daughters’ heads and fucking with their ideas about what femininity looks like, and I applaud her efforts.  She delivers the best line of the film:  When confronted about why she ditched our sweet-and-pretty lead for the vaguely-middle-aged-looking dude she met at a club, she says, “Dude, that guy had a Porsche and a hot tub.”  Damn right, girl!  I’m still going to say it was a shitty move to leave when she had her friend’s phone and wallet in her purse, but her motivation is flawless.

I also wanna give MAJOR props to Billy Zane as well.  Going bald was the best thing that ever happened to that man.  I don’t know how Sara is going to ditch the smokin’ hot, well-dressed, shaved-head-and-stubble Zane for some whiny little spikey haired pinch-faced frat boy.  What was wrong with that dude’s face anyway?  It was like it was too small for his head.  And who dates the band’s DRUMMER?  Everyone knows you can’t trust a drummer any farther than you can throw him.  Polemics!

So as you can probably tell, I was pretty invested in the world this movie created, as dumb as it may have been.  I didn’t find it hard at all to suspend my disbelief and just LOVE the thing.  Maybe it’s my inner 13-year-old girl, but I unequivocally recommend this to anyone who has ever screamed in the dark in a friend’s basement while eating chips in their sleeping bag.

Discussion of Billy Zane’s peddler’s cap continues after the cut…

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Sunday Review: The Rite

Posted on January 31, 2011 by | 3 Comments

Susan:
Ostensibly, I should have loved The Rite. It has so many things I love in it:  brooding dark-haired men with blue eyes, college, Catholicism, Anthony Hopkins, Italy.  And while I would say I enjoyed a good 60-80% of the movie, as a whole I can’t really recommend anyone go see it.  It’s the kind of movie you should “watch” in the background while you’re cleaning the house or making an intricate baked good.  Maybe then you’ll only see the good/interesting parts and miss the awkward lines at the end that make you embarrassed for Anthony Hopkins.

The plot seems fairly standard, although maybe not for a movie about exorcism:  Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue, who I would guess is Irish-Italian because he is beautiful in that way only Irish-Italian men can be) is the son of a mortician who decides to become a priest because apparently in his family, if you aren’t going to prep dead bodies, you have to become a man of the cloth.  He attends seminary school, but right before graduation decides he wants to resign and not take his vows, citing a lack of faith.  After watching Michael perform Last Rites on a woman who has been hit by a car suddenly, the Father Superior at the school convinces Michael to take a course on exorcism at the Vatican before deciding to resign.  Because Michael does everything anyone ever tells him to do apparently, he goes to Italy, where he meets Father Lucas Trevant (Anthony Hopkins) who does exorcisms for a living.  Michael still suffers from a lack of faith, despite seeing a bunch of crazy possession stuff happen (over and over and over again) and keeps wanting to blame psychosis for what he sees.  Eventually Lucas Trevant gets possessed (it’s not really a spoiler — you see it coming early on) and Michael has to save him with the help of a pretty young girl-reporter, Angeline (Alice Braga), which causes him to start believing in the Devil and therefore in God, which means he finally has enough faith to beat the devil back to hell or whatever.  Then the movie ends, but I don’t really remember how, except for that the filmakers left a lot of space open for a potential sequel, which is gross and hopefully will not happen.

So anyway, it’s basically a story about finding yourself.  The stuff about religion I found interesting and compelling.  The possession stuff was okay the first 3-4 times it happened, and then the possessions got a little tedious.  Anthony Hopkins did as much as he possibly could with a relatively ridiculous script.  I mean really, I totally liked the thing for the first hour or so, and then they just couldn’t see to sustain it.  So I guess I’m giving it a “meh.”

Geoff:
I could probably go with a “meh,” I guess. I was pretty bored for most of the movie, but maybe that’s just because the whole possession thing feels pretty played out. The demonized individual writhes, seduces, cajoles, screams, and strains while one priest looks on horrified and another calls out the prayers.

Michael’s discussions in the Vatican with the elder priest about the difference between psychosis and possession were interesting to me, but they take up only about five minutes of actual screen time, so for most of the movie you’re just watching Anthony Hopkins be as awesome as he can be with the words he’s given. (I can’t deny he’s a damn good reader, but some of the stuff they have him spouting toward the end is, as you said, pretty ridiculous.)

I’ll go ahead and be honest with everyone here and mention that I nodded off for a few minutes in the middle, so it’s possible I missed something integral (though I don’t think I did) somewhere between the death of the possessed pregnant woman and Michael’s discussions with the possibly possessed little boy. I just … I was THAT bored. I wasn’t getting anything out of the film except that Father Lucas seemed to be your friendly neighborhood exorcist with tons of cases in a little region of Italy.

I guess the film’s one constant thread is Michael’s struggle with belief, but it mostly feels like trodden territory, and really you’re just waiting for him to go ahead and believe already by the end of the film. (Like, seriously, dude. Father Michael is clearly possessed. He’s saying stuff only dead people you know would know about. Just BELIEVE.) So … I might even downgrade the film to “meh” with a dose of “bleh.”

The yawns continue after the cut…

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Posted in Drama, Horror

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