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.

Geoff:
Man, I was really trying not to give away the ending. Oh well.

I can see why you would enjoy yourself, Susan. It’s still part of a horror series that’s very likable overall, and I’d be curious to hear your reactions to the others, and you’ll have even more of a ’90s freak out when you watch them. I’m not calling the fourth film awful, but I would say there’s been a marked depreciation in value as the series has dragged along if you’ve had the opportunity to see the first three.

The way I see it, the first movie chuckled at the horror genre and called attention to its tropes while still itself BEING a skillfully done horror film. And the second one still held itself together fairly well, too. But particularly with the third and now fourth films, though, it seems like it’s been harder to walk that tightrope because the levels and layers of irony and awareness have to keep outdoing themselves. To maybe put it more directly, the first movie is aware of itself, the second movie is aware of its awareness. and by the third and forth movies, the franchise is aware of just how aware it is of its own awareness.

And all the cleverness and irony that results makes it harder for the actual scariness to shine through effectively because it has created an audience that itself is now aware on new and untold levels. In the first film, there were still death scenes that could sober you (on a level, sometimes), and the characters were fleshed out and had semblances of backstories to make you feel like something was at stake when they were under attack and fleeing Ghostface. And they actually seemed to have a CHANCE of fleeing Ghostface sometimes.

Here, there’s little of that, and all the new characters have pretty much nil backstories and are just bodies to add to an eventual body count. Every now and then, there were flashes of what made (at least the first two) pretty damn enjoyable, but they were only flashes to me. Again, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this one once you’ve seen the others and have had a chance to compare.

Susan:
It also might speak to your age and awareness too, Geoff.  I mean, we’re talking about a moviegoing Geoff who was also 15 years younger (or so), and despite the fact that I would believe you if you told me you’d sprung fully formed from your mother’s head with a brain like a movie rolodex at birth, perhaps you were also less astute and aware and what have you.  What I’m saying is that maybe if I saw the first movie NOW at this stage of my movie-watching game, it would not strike me the way it struck you.  Or maybe it will, because I am but a nascent horror-flick-watcher.

IRREGARDLESS.  What you say about the many layers of irony is absolutely true, and I could pick up on that, even being a newb.  Sort of like the layers of plastic skin coating Courtney Cox’s old-young-lady upper lip.  HEYO.  (But seriously:  Neve Campbell looks GREAT and Courtney Cox looks WEIRD.  I wish she and Nicole Kidman would just age gracefully.  They always seemed like such normal people until THE CHANGE.)  I also was waiting for the black cop to note the fact that he was the only black character in the movie and would therefore certainly be killed, and that never came.  And man, that cast was still LILY WHITE.  There’s a trope I could get behind someone being self-reflexive about.

I guess in the end the movie just gave me what I wanted.  I don’t know that I want sobering deaths.  Maybe I watch for something different than you do.  I don’t think I want to be legitimately FRIGHTENED so much as startled and maybe haunted just a bit, but not so much that it affects my life outside of the theater.  This thing swallowed me up for two hours and then let me go about my business, and that’s just what I want from my popcorn flicks.  Light and palatable and easy.

So yeah.  This thing wasn’t the best thing on earth, but it wasn’t the worst.  I’m going to rank it a couple notches above “meh” and recommend it as a decent example of the kind of stupid horror movie it works just hard enough to be.

Geoff:

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.

Geoff:
I guess a central question I have for you that maybe gets to some of the differences between how we watch movies is this: why is it we can’t fault it for being a live-action video game? It’s a movie, so give it some space? Is it wrong to ask a movie to try harder even if all it’s trying to do is entertain? Maybe I’m just a cruel king who’s executing jester after jester for not quite living up to my expectations. Only the best jesters in the kingdom shall do, I say!

I agree with you on the discomfort that comes with rape threats and sexualized girlishness as motifs. I feel like Zack Snyder might want to believe he’s making a movie about empowered women, but the constant crying jags and the infantilization and the fact that, outside the fantasies, Baby Doll never really wins or bests a goddamn thing … well, it all kinda sets the attempt back. A lot. You could maybe say something gets put over on the seeming caretaker at the end of the film, when he’s being dragged away screaming, but it’s nothing really that Baby Doll did. Carla Gugino’s pyschologist just figured out what was going on a wee bit too late.

I can get on board with movies depicting layered fantasies. I can get on board with hyper-stylized genre films. I can get on board with action sequences. I can even get on board with women kicking ass while scantily clad. But this movie fucks all those things up and does them in the laziest way possible.

This is Snyder’s first movie not based on a comic book, and it’s clear to me he needs to spend some more time touching up his dialogue and narrative-storytelling skills. You can’t just play a dramatic cover of Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” over a brief montage of Baby Doll doing hard labor and staring off into space and expect that to stand in as effective character development (in fact, I would like to issue a moratorium to all filmmakers that “Where Is My Mind?” or any covers of said song are never to be used again in any film even tangentially related to psychology—quit taking the easy road, people). The movie feels like it was never developed beyond the most basic of outlines.

Susan:
I agree with your points, Geoff, but I still can’t help but be ambivalent.  Why can’t we fault it for being a live-action video game?  Because that’s all it was trying to do.  The point I was making was that the movie was trying to be just exactly what it was.  So I’m not going to say it fell short of anything.  If you didn’t like the movie, you didn’t like the effect the director was going for, but it wasn’t like the director failed.  That’s all.  I suppose you can fault it for being a shit story, but you can’t fault it for trying to be something it wasn’t.  That’s all I’m saying.

But we are definitely on the same team re: the movie’s treatment of ladies.  I mean, distilled to its essence the moral of the story is that Baby Doll wins by allowing herself to be lobotomized and thereby never giving herself to the creepy caretaker guy who wants to bone her.  It’s like a sacrificial virgin story but more fucked up, because it’s like it’s okay for her body to be “defiled” as long as her mind is not in it.  To which I say, “WHAT?? What does that even MEAN?”  And the likelihood is that it means nothing because Zack Synder is clearly not that smart (remember the thing he said about The Watchmen and how he took the easy road because he’s stupid? I do), but if I think about it too hard, it’s probably going to make me angry anyway.

There are more political things I could attack this film for (the fact that the cadre of ass-kickers were white, Asian, and Latina but not black; the fact that at the end of the film the person who REALLY saves the girl is an old white dude, not another woman) but I don’t want to beat a dead horse.  I left the theater ambivalent about this movie because it’s probably not actually saying anything except, “Look!  A thing!”  And the thing I was to look at was indeed fun to see.  So I dunno.  It’s probably going to be better on the big screen, but we also need to stop supporting Zack Snyder projects.  So whatever.  Go see it if you want, but don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Susan:

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.

Susan:
I definitely don’t disagree with you, Geoff.  It’s just that I did find it charming and sweet enough to not really want to say anything too bad about it.  But really, this is an insta-Netflix classic in the making.  It’s going to be really good when it’s free.

I think it speaks to the dearth of good bits that I’m struggling now to think of more things I enjoyed to cite here.  Most of the jokes were joke-y and not really surprising enough to stick with you or to warrant repetition.  I guess my favorites were the ones that pointed out how awful America is–like the conversation with the cop in the gas station, where he says, “I heard they don’t have guns in England,” and when the Brits respond, “Yeah, not very many,” he said, “Well how are the police going to shoot anybody?”  I thought that was a pretty funny commentary on gun culture in the US and also the whole police-state thing that so many academic folks are talking about these days.

There was nothing really OFFENSIVE about the film, but there was also nothing really AWESOME.  Which is shocking mostly because the cast was full of people who I find almost inherently funny.  I mean Kirsten Wiig, Bill Hader, AND Jason Bateman all had major roles in the thing, and I’m still struggling to remember good moments?

I think you’re right:  The thing just relied too heavily on homage and kitsch.  It’s a bit like a tacky alien gift shop somewhere along the highway near a tourist spot–full of a bunch of junk that’s pretty neat but that you don’t really need to buy and take home.

Geoff:
An apt final analogy, Susan. And I’m left with very little else to say. The movie is an incredibly bland brand of funny. The pacing’s not all that great (something Edgar Wright probably would have helped with a lot–not to harp on that point too much) and the plot is just there to service the humor, so what you’re left to try to appreciate is the cleverness and/or wryness of the humor, which itself misses about as much as it hits.

Unlike you, Susan, I enjoyed “that cop movie” (better known as Hot Fuzz), and I thought maybe Pegg and Frost had found a niche for themselves writing good original mockery of/homage to specific film genres. But Paul ends up being more mockery/homage than anything all that original, which in a lot of ways makes me see it as a step back for the duo. I guess I’ll just have to wait around and hope their next thing’s better.

Geoff:

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.

Geoff:
Fascinating. It seems we have both a similar and (somehow, at the same time) opposed philosophy on what a good movie’s supposed to do. I like my movies as escapes, too, but I still prefer complicated and conflicted. An overly simplified escape from reality is often boring and all style and no substance unless the filmmakers are highly skilled at working within and manipulating that style and milking it, and this movie has a few good set pieces, but the script and ham-handedness and bombast (that really is the best word) just kill it for me.

You were crying? Like…Aaron Eckhart’s a good actor and all, but this movie doesn’t really ask anyone to act all that much. Which of the cardboard characters did you care so much about exactly? You say it’s a film meant to distract you from reality, but on some level it still has to observe the rules of reality, no? The humans in this movie have to seem on some level compelling as human beings, but they don’t feel much like any humans I know at all, which seems antithetical to the realism of the footsoldier-P.O.V. directing and also makes the movie incredibly shitty even as comfort food.

Susan:
Acting, schmacting.  There was no need for good actors in this thing to make me cry.  It’s just situational:  the little boy’s father dying, the loss of a brother-in-arms, self-sacrifice in the face of a powerful enemy.  You put even the worst of actors in certain situations and I’m gonna cry.  This is how Disney makes us cry with animated things.  Situations.

I mean, they are fighting for HUMANITY, Geoff, you heartless bastard!  Against insurmountable odds!  And they are just HUMAN.  They are types, they are characters from every war movie ever, and so you don’t have to learn about them anew, you can just go with it.  And that’s what I did:  suspended the old disbelief and let the waves of easy crash over me.

I mean, I can see what you’re saying about wanting something more complicated.  This is sensory overload, a la Apocalypto, where the action is endless and fast paced and tense.  It is an embodied movie, not a cerebral one.  So if you need to THINK to escape, this probably isn’t the flick for you.  Or if you think even when you’re escaping, like our friend Geoff does.  Thinking is probably going to ruin this movie.  It’s about spectacle, about overwhelming your senses.

So I guess it comes down to what you want or what you’re in the mood for.  I think if you walk in with the right attitude and you want the kind of product this movie is offering, you’ll have a great time.  But you’ve really gotta shut the brain down to do so.

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:
BOBBY!  Ugh, you sucked the fun right out of the room.  You are worse than Geoff, and Geoff is THE WORST.

Sure, there was some over-explaining, but I still felt like there was not SO MUCH explanation that I couldn’t buy the thing anymore.  And this movie also wasn’t guilty of the Inception thing where you have to explain the logic of the world because it is just a bunch of arbitrary rules.  Well, other than the hat thing I guess, which is pretty arbitrary and silly.  But most of the things that were going on were completely parallel to actual human bureaucracy–the need to stick to the chain of command, the requirement that you trust the plan even when you can’t see what goes on above you, the middle manager who doesn’t want to stick his neck out for fear of losing his job.  The fact that there are no women. (Who knew the legion of angels had a glass ceiling, amiriteladies??) And just as the rules of human bureaucracy are kind of dumb and just there for their own sake, so were the rules in the movie’s logic.

I think the two stories went together well.  I bought them.  I was impressed with Damon and Blunt’s performances, and I would watch John Slattery eat a sandwich.  There were even moments when watching when I could feel the old-timey-ness coming off the thing, which made the revelation at the end of the film that it was based on a Phillip K. Dick story make so much sense.  Sci-fi stories never translate exactly right to the screen, but this one got it pretty darn close.  I don’t know how “seriously” you’re supposed to take it, really.  I mean, it’s a story about God and bureaucratic angels and love at first sight.

And also pratfalls are unequivocally hilarious.  So like, laugh away, dude in the row behind you.

But really, I mean, there’s always something to pick apart in a big Hollywood movie thing.  But this one had few enough seams that I could drink my giant Coke and watch my giant stories and leave the theater feeling entertained.  I didn’t even look at my watch once.

Bobby:
Fair enough re: it being an entertaining thing to watch/not doing the Inception thing. It seemed to me, though, that they were marketing it as Inception Lite. Though I agree, I would also watch John Slattery eat a sandwich.

I can also see your point about it being true to actual bureaucracy. And I liked at the end when Thompson (Terence Stamp) was given the memo that their plan had been changed and he no longer had to care whether or not they were together because it no longer violated the plan. I liked that he was like, “OK, sounds good, I’m going home.” Because he doesn’t actually care if these two people are together, he was just following orders. None of these people actually care if they are together.

Although that was another thing that kind of bothered me:  who throws their entire destiny into upheaval for a girl you meet for two minutes in a men’s room who is running from hotel security? If the angels of fate came to you and said, “We have actual proof that your being with this person will fuck up your entire future and the future of the country,” who actually cashes in their chips and goes for the girl? I mean, who besides Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting who had to go see about a girl? My whole thing is–big sea, other fish.

There were other issues I had that aren’t that important, or that could be argued against, but whatever. I could go on, I’m saying. See this movie if you want to be pretty entertained and charmed by some stuff that has to do with romance and fate.

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.

Susan:
Yeah, that scene is totally hilarious because as January Jones is trying to defuse a bomb hidden in a wall, you can tell she wants to make her face seem nervous or like, anxious, or maybe determined or something, but it just sort of looks like she’s about to scold Sally for tracking mud into the house or hanging out with Glenn or something.  It’s really either Pretty Laugh/Smile or That Other Thing She Does With Her Face when it comes to January Jones’ range of emotional expression.  So when she gets blown up because she couldn’t defuse the thing in time, it’s more Ha Ha than Oh No.  Also because whatever, she is least developed character in the movie, so who really gives a shit if she gets blown up?

I will agree that there is very little about this movie that is “believable” (including but not limited to the idea that January Jones would let Liam Neeson put his creepy old-man hands on her in a shower — eewwwww that scene was so super incredibly gross ugh.  Hollywood:  Please stop showing close-ups of older actors’ creepy old-man hands when you want me to believe they are not that old.  It’s like Bill Murray caressing Scarlett Johansson’s hair at the end of Lost in Translation all over again.  Ew ew ew ew ew.) but there is enough flash and pop that who really cares?  It is easy to suspend your disbelief, I totally didn’t see the twist coming, and hey, that dude got to give the world his corn idea so that no one would be hungry without interference from any sort of evil capitalists.

The one scene I would have liked to see?  Jürgen fighting the other old spy dude Yoda-style in his apartment.  The cyanide thing was a nice detail and still showed him as a tough-as-nails old bird, but man, I was getting really hyped for an old man fight in which they used old-man fighting techniques.  Now THERE is a scene that calls for close-ups of creepy old-man hands.

I would agree with your assessment of “fun,” Geoff, although I really did think it was pretty eff-ing awesome.  There were a lot of camera moves I thought were really “old-timey” at this point — the evil guy at the window staring down the good guy before running after him; the close up shot on the phone ringing that then quickly moves up to the person about to answer the phone;  fighting in front of a mirror and then breaking the mirror and then killing a dude with the broken mirror.  In a world of slow motion bullets and everything being in 3-D, it was nice to see a sort of “new classic” spy thriller.  Easy to swallow, but exciting enough to be worth your time.

Geoff:
Oh, the movie definitely hearkens back to thrillers from the ’80s and ’90s (if I’m even allowed to be nostalgic for those yet — and if I’m understanding your term “new classic” right), and it even takes up a lot of the old tropes. An important suitcase, clandestine meetings in public places, characters being tailed to intense music, and stone-faced foot-soldier spies who don’t shoot you right away and instead threaten you with all sorts of hypodermic needles. (Here, the Bluetooth-wearing goon wields a regular hypo in the hospital, and then he breaks into the Bosnian woman’s apartment to stick not-Martin Harris with some sort of futuristic flash-drive looking needle—only to pull out a gun when everything goes wrong. Smart, dude.)

What makes this movie fun and easy to swallow is its familiarity, I think. We know it, and we recognize it, and nothing about it offends our senses or our perception of what we should expect. That’s why I say it’s fun and nothing more. But it also doesn’t TRY to be more. So don’t go if you want your mind blown.

Geoff:

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.

Geoff:
Yes to all of what you just said. Looking back over what I first wrote while you were writing, I felt like maybe I hadn’t adequately described the plot, but it really is that barren. I guess I forgot to mention whether Lippe wins the award or not, but I’m sure readers can make an educated guess. The film doesn’t care all that much about telling a story, it doesn’t care about establishing even a remotely authentic sense of place, it doesn’t really care about its characters, and (worst of all, since it’s a comedy) it just plain fails to be all that funny—except for Whitlock, who, even though his character’s largely a cutout, too, still at least made me smile a few times because of how he carries himself genuinely like an aging, single Midwestern man who’s just generally pretty satisfied with everything all the time and maybe has a hobby like making beer or carving wood or putting models together in his basement.

But the times Whitlock’s character is moderately amusing are when he feels at least somewhat GENUINE. The fact that you and I can discuss the specifics of the Quaker Oats factory’s smell (which you’re right in saying has complex overtones of grain rather than the full-on sulfur of a traditional fart—it’s a sick-sweet smell that’s surprisingly difficult to fully describe for someone who hasn’t experienced it firsthand) stands as proof that there are people who live and have lived in an actual place called Cedar Rapids that has tangible details that those people feel real things about. But this film’s not interested in those people. It’s interested in cheap jokes at their expense. And instead of a genuine exploration of the landscape, there are merely toss-off details such as Iowa’s legalization of gay marriage or the flood of 2008, and these details don’t showcase the filmmakers’ knowledge of the region so much as make them seem like folks who want to APPEAR like they have knowledge of the region.

You wrote about me once being similar to Ed Helms’ Lippe, Susan, and I had that same thought during the movie. Lippe has the Midwestern mental capacity to handle the world that I did around ages 12-15, and (because the movie wants to be over-the-top) this might have been okay or at least workable if he didn’t also encompass every single Midwestern stereotype imaginable. He finds it novel to encounter a black man firsthand, he doesn’t drink because … well, just because, and he thinks of Cedar Rapids as a big, scary, exotic city—all of which creates a character who’s not only unfunny in his predictability but who also fails to feel in any way authentic.

Matt Damon in The Informant! That’s an authentically over-the-top portrayal of a middle-class Midwestern white dude, and the nailing of the nuances of that character is what makes that movie so fun and funny. By comparison, this movie plays like a hollow husk.

Susan:
Bringing up The Informant! is an excellent point.  That movie made me miss home because it kept it so real.  This movie made me miss the seven dollars I spent to see a matinee showing of it.

Even factually, this movie has too many missteps:   Who would FLY from southern Wisconsin to Cedar Rapids?  If Alia Shawkat’s prostitute character is supposed to be a meth user, why on earth is she so healthy looking?  Why does she keep asking people for “burners” when she wants cigarettes?  NO ONE SAYS THAT!! You can’t just MAKE UP slang words and hope people don’t notice or don’t know the difference.  Phil Johnston, the writer, apparently grew up in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and I just feel like someone who cares about a place should work harder to get it right.  Maybe we can blame the director or something.  It all just seemed so half-assed.

In an effort to not COMPLETELY pan it, though (because in the Midwest we believe that you can always find something nice to say if you look hard enough), I will say that I thought Anne Heche’s character was great — the hard-partying Midwestern mom on vacation from her life seemed both well-written and well-played by Heche.  She skillfully towed the line between concern for Helms and commitment to a life that exists elsewhere.  And you are totally correct in your characterization of Whitlock’s small town guy — that dude DEFINITELY has a hobby and probably doesn’t talk about it a lot and probably would bore the snot out of you if he did.  OH!  AND!  The other really on-point moment was an enraged Helms saying, “My FOOT,” which, for those of you who were not raised by a rather prim Iowan, is a stand in for “my ass.”  Thinking back, I don’t know if I’ve ever heard anyone but my mother use that expression.  So fair enough, Cedar Rapids, I’ll give you that one.

But even with this handful of strong moments, there’s just not enough about this movie to like.  You can maybe check it out when it streams on Netflix, or you could maybe just skip it.  Or if you’re Iowan, you can watch it and get mad about just how wrong they get it.  That’s what Geoff and I did.

Susan:

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.

Susan:
Totally and 100% agree with all of that.  I mean, I HATE Dave Matthews!  But even HE is charming here!  It’s wonderful.

I also love how this movie flirted with so many familiar tropes and yet shifted each one of them far enough that you were still somewhat surprised by what ended up happening.  For example, a criticism many people leveled against the trailer of this movie was that it appeared as though Aniston was going to be “transformed” from a girl with glasses into a pretty girl via a new hairdo and a nice dress.  And yes, to some extent that is what happens.  However, in other films that use that trope, often the bespectacled girl is a teenager who hasn’t yet become a woman and is manipulated or whatever into lady-hood by friends/an older woman relation/what-have-you.  Here, however, Aniston is ALREADY a woman who has clearly made a choice for some reason to be a glasses-and-Old-Navy-wearing, ponytailed person.  When she’s offered nice clothes she takes them and knows how to wear them right, but it isn’t as though she was “taught” this or “made” to do it by Sandler or someone in his camp.  She wanted to do it and knew how to do it and just hadn’t bothered with it in years.  The movie doesn’t judge her for that, either.  It was amazing.  It’s an argument I make in real life all the time:  I know how to clean up nice when I feel like it, but it’s just so much work.  GENDER IS A PERFORMANCE YOU GUYS!

But yes, Adam Sandler’s comedy is totally maturing in a way I really like.  (One wonders if perhaps the lack of sex-with-old-people jokes has something to do with the fact that Sandler himself is getting closer in age to “old-people” than “young-people,” but I’ll take it either way.)  I loved the repeating joke wherein “Devlin” replaced “shit” in a variety of phrases — totally a parenthood joke.  I also loved the scene where they are walking across the parking lot in slow motion and a young kid does something that makes his mother mad, and we see her yell at him in slow motion too.  It is clearly still Adam Sandler’s sense of humor, but it’s just becoming more worldly with age.  I love it, and I hope he and his films keep growing this way.

Geoff:
If anything, the sex-with-old-people jokes are leveled at Sandler himself, what with the constant jokes about N’Sync being Palmer’s favorite band and her realization that she would have been in grade school when Danny was still going through his own roaring twenties. The fact that Sandler is so willing to make fun of himself was one of the bigger perks of the film for me. Much like with his turn in Funny People, the comedian takes a nicely self-referential and self-analytical approach here, and it works a lot better than the two quintillion comedies where older guys are with younger women and nobody even sees fit to make mention of it in the context of the narrative.

Also, what you’ve articulated about Aniston is something I noticed, too, but definitely hadn’t formulated in my brain so extensively. I firmly believe that woman is underused in Hollywood, and because this movie had to be largely improvised, I don’t doubt it’s largely the contributions of her own intelligence and insight that helped round out her character they way you describe. Aniston took what could have been a paper doll and turned her into something you could believe and empathize with. That takes some skill.

This movie’s worth your time, people! Just go see it. I’ll stop with the terrible puns if you do.

Geoff:

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.

Geoff:
But that’s what I’m talking about in terms of enjoying it on a B-grade level. You say classic Hollywood, and I say bad classic Hollywood. This is one you’d find in the $5 bin at Wal-Mart, one movie on a disc of four thrillers nobody remembers, and you’d buy it and maybe have a good time with it if you’re 13 or if you’re looking to look past a lot and have a good laugh and a few jumps.

To be capital-A AWESOME, though, the film still needs to show me some character motivation. I’m not asking to make it realistic or wholly believable. This is nowhere even close to being about disbelief suspension; this is just about rounding out your key fucking players a little bit so that it’s not JUST about the jumps. That’s all I want.

Maybe we’ll just have to agree that Billy Zane’s peddler’s cap was the best part of the movie.

A couple other awesome details for those who like to pay attention to background elements:

1. The characters exist in a world that doesn’t have Facebook. It has a site called Frienderz. I guess they couldn’t afford the rights to Zuckerberg’s logo.
2. The name of the boyfriend’s band is The Walthers. I think that alone explains why they’re not getting any gigs.

Susan:
OMG I am so glad you brought up Frienderz!!  Frienderz is the real star of this movie.  It should have gotten top billing followed by “Pouty Mouths.”  Really, that dude’s band should have been called “The Pouty Mouths,” too.  This movie should have been called “Pouty Mouths.”  BUT ANYWAY.

Yeah, man, so much ridiculous stuff happened in this movie.  There’s also that amazing scene where they go to Rebecca’s high school haunt and see that girl she was obsessed with in high school or whatever, and the girl says, “You were never my friend,” and Rebecca gets all twitchy about it.  MAN.  That was hilarious.  And then when that gets brought up again at the end of the movie when Sara is LITERALLY stabbing Rebecca in the back???  HAM-HANDED METAPHORS ARE MY FAVORITE THING EVER.  LET ME JUST MAKE THIS REALLY OBVIOUS FOR YOU, VIEWER OF THE MOVIE.  SHE IS GETTING STABBED IN THE BACK HERE.  Ugh, this movie was so good.

Oh Geoff, you know I don’t need character motivation to make something capital-A AWESOME.  This thing got me hook, line, and sinker.  Even when I was laughing at how stupid it was, I was still totally a part of what was going on.  I had just enough shiny to keep me entertained, and just enough vague personality to make me care about the characters not getting killed.  Except for that pinch-face weirdo.  A frat boy who takes you AND your friend back to the dorm when you get too drunk and doesn’t try to make a move and turns out to be a really nice guy who wants to be your boyfriend???  YEAH RIGHT.  I can suspend my disbelief, but only so far, Hollywood.  Designer dorm room furniture and amorphous psychiatric disorders sure, but a sensitive, caring frat boy?  Might as well be a unicorn.

Susan:

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.”

Susan:
Only a nice boy from Iowa could fall asleep during a movie and still give it a review of, “Well, it was OKAY I guess…”

I didn’t nod off but I did become distracted — I kept wanting to check my phone or to make lists in my head of what else I needed to get done with the rest of the day.  I also struggled with Michael’s lack of faith because he just wasn’t fully developed as a character before he left for Italy.  Why not just become a mortician?  Why does the priesthood seem like a better option?  Why does he need to “run away” from his father, as the movie tells us over and over again he does?  Why does he go through all four years of seminary school without dropping out if he doesn’t want to be a priest?  Why haven’t all of his stupid, superficial questions about psychology and religion been answered by the time he gets to Italy, considering he’s been in priest-school for four years?  I mean, really.  There are giant rifts in the character that just cannot be reconciled.  And so yeah, you know that all his bluster and bravado is just going to come crashing down at the climax.  It’s formulaic.  And as pretty as he is, Colin O’Donoghue doesn’t seem to have the acting chops to pull off the role.

Also, Angeline (who, like Beth in The Dilemma isn’t even given a last name) didn’t seem to have any reason to be part of the story.  I got the sense that at some point someone said, “Hey wait, there are no women in this story.  That’s probably going to be an issue,” and someone else said, “Let’s put an exotic looking reporter in the same class as Michael to add some will-they-or-won’t-they tension.”  Are we really supposed to believe that The Vatican is going to let a MAGAZINE REPORTER into its class on exorcism?  Is that a thing that happens?  Why aren’t there more exposés on exorcism and the what-not being published then?  I dunno, her character just seemed like an afterthought.

So yeah.  I can see where your bleh comes from, although I can apparently watch anything about Catholicism and remain kind of interested because I think the ritual and strength of the sect is fascinating.  Again, it’s a background movie.  That’s about all I’ve really got to say about it.

Geoff:
Truly, the first thought through my head as soon as Angeline came into the movie was, “Well, it just wouldn’t be a movie without some sexy tension, would it?” And the fact that Michael takes her for a nun-in-training after four years of seminary school is just one more example of a character not feeling real in any way whatsoever. He was pulled out of a screenwriter’s box of stock characters, and so was Angeline.

At the end of the film, you learn the actual exorcist dude the whole thing is based on now lives near Chicago. I thought about going and getting his take because he’s so two-dimensional in the film and I’d love to know how much they diluted or altered (or maybe didn’t at all) the nature of this real guy. Whenever a film says “based on true events” and then says at the end, during the credits, that aspects of the story were significantly altered and bear “no actual relation to any person living or dead,” then you just know the studio heads and screenwriter and director sat around a room somewhere and spit-balled how they could make a mundane story more interesting. Here, they just tried to make it scarier, at the expense of any interesting character development.

My review is not “Well, it was OKAY, I guess …” It is “Well, Anthony Hopkins was OKAY, I guess …” but I still wish they’d used him better. On the whole, I’d say the film felt like an excuse to hire Anthony Hopkins to be all crazy again, but maybe the filmmakers should have just written another Hannibal Lecter film.