Monday Review: The Dilemma

Posted on January 18, 2011 by | 5 Comments

Geoff:
I’m giving a shoulder-shrugging thumbs down to this one pretty much off the bat.

The premise is pretty simple. Ronny Valentine (Vince Vaughn) and Nick Brannen (Kevin James) are just a couple American dudes who happen to own their own engine design company for electric cars. While working on the biggest deal of their lives, Ronny spots Nick’s wife, Geneva (Winona Ryder), with another man (Channing Tatum). But, instead of doing what any normal, even semi-rational human being would do, he decides that not only can he not tell Nick about the tryst (because it would affect his performance during the big car deal) but also that he can’t tell his girlfriend, Beth [no last name] (Jennifer Connelly), because … who knows. It’s one of those very frustrating comedies where, when you think about what you would do in Ronny’s shoes, you realize that there really wouldn’t be a movie at all if he weren’t so stupid.

Fine, though. It’s a comedy, so we’re suspending our disbelief somewhat of how stupid he’d be. Even adding that to the equation, though, this movie’s pretty much a dud. The jokes (where they are) are only sometimes funny (I’m thinking mainly of the extended version of Vaughn’s anniversary-toast monologue from the preview), and for some reason Ron Howard felt the need to actually get serious about relationships in the scenes between comedic takes, and instead of the serious and light cohering in a good way, it just sobers you up and you’re waiting for things to at least try to be funny again. All the stuff about Ronny and Beth’s relationship being rocky? Pointless. The weird detail that Nick was actually going to Pilsen to get massages and maybe a hand job? Incredibly bizarre.

I just don’t think Ron Howard was meant for madcap comedy.

Susan:
It wasn’t madcap, and it wasn’t emotional.  It was just a big dumb mess of a thing that didn’t even know what kind of movie it wanted to be.  It was a frog in a blender.  It was awful.

You know what is not in any way interesting?  STUPID GENDER STEREOTYPES.  Like, no one in America should be rooting against the American automotive industry at this point, but this movie made me want to root against American automakers.  Why?  Because if we as a culture are still seriously worried that our cars aren’t loud enough (which I totally thought was going to become a thing when Vaughn was staking out Tatum’s apartment in his stupid loud muscle car — THEY SHOULD HAVE HEARD YOU, DUMMY) because being quiet is “gay” (I am not kidding — that is actually how the movie framed the problem with the electric car) instead of being worried about that fact that gas is crazy expensive and the industry is CRUMBLING, then seriously let the economy fall apart because whatever, we are all fucked anyway.  Seriously, quiet, small, efficient cars are “gay”?  Am I in a high school cafeteria?  I hate when movies make totally unprofessional stupid ignorant-ass behavior into a thing that is for some reason situationally okay.  Dumb.  Dumb dumb dumb.

And the gay comment is only the tip of the iceberg.  There was a moment, during Vaughn’s first conversation with Winona Ryder about her infidelity, when I really thought they were going to make the movie about the fact that when you are outside a marriage you shouldn’t meddle in it because you don’t actually have any idea what is going on and you might do/say something to make things worse instead of better.  But instead, they make Winona Ryder into some sort of evil lying harpy who is going to fake tears to get away with her cheating.  WOMEN AREN’T INHERENTLY EVIL.  WE DO NOT FAKE TEARS TO GET OUR WAY.  And the worst part of portraying women like that isn’t even that it’s offensive and stupid, but that it’s BORING.  Regurgitating stupid played-out misogynist bullshit is just DULL.  If I already know what the characters are going to do because of how they look, then why the fuck I am watching your stupid movie anyway?  Dumb.  Waste of my life.

So yeah, shoulder-shrugging thumbs down from me too.  Like, it made me annoyed, but I was too busy being bored to even notice how annoyed I was until I left.  I’m so sick of this stupid buddy-bro crap they keep parading through the multiplex.  If you’re going to reinforce cultural norms that make me want to off myself because it seems easier than fighting the battles, at least entertain me while you’re doing it, for Christ’s sake.

The angry dismissal continues after the cut…

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Sunday Review: Country Strong

Posted on January 10, 2011 by | 5 Comments

Susan:
In the introductory writing course I teach, we tell the students that they should set up their credibility in their first paragraph.  So with that in mind, I want to say that I walked into the Sunday morning showing of Country Strong in Austin, TX (one of the supposed settings for the movie) in theater one at the AMC in the Barton Creek Mall.  What was playing in theater two?  If you guessed a movie, you would be wrong.  Because they were holding A CHURCH SERVICE in theater two.  Praise hymns blaring, awkward teens in the lobby each holding their own individual Bibles, boys scolding their female friends for holding the door for them (I am not kidding).  And if that ain’t Texan, I don’t know what is.

What I’m saying here is that I live within the world this movie was trying to portray.  I grew up in the rural Midwest, another country hotbed, and now I live in Texas.  And this movie was such a pandering, phony, bullshit thing, I wanted to throw something at the screen.

Let me give a brief summary of Country Strong; or Watch Gwyneth Paltrow Pander To What She Thinks Middle America Is.  Beau Hutton (Garrett Hedlund) is a young honky-tonk country singer (he’s supposed to be the “authentic” or “real country” one and yet dude can’t even grow a proper beard) whose day job is at the rehab center where fading Faith-Hill-esque superstar Kelly Canter (Paltrow) is detoxing from like, booze and sadness or whatever.  Her husband James Canter (Tim McGraw) pulls her out of rehab before she’s all the way better to go on a three stop tour of Texas (because that is a thing people do apparently) that will end in Dallas, where some awful, unnamed thing has happened in the past.  She demands Beau open for her, but her husband wants pageant queen Chiles Stanton (Leighton Meester) to open instead because she is hot and bad at performing.  Your basic music tour/struggle with mental illness movie follows.  Beau and Kelly sleep together; James and Chiles sleep together; then Beau and Chiles fall in love and decide not to be famous because “fame and love can’t live in the same place.”  Oh and Kelly kills herself (spoiler alert but seriously whatever, who didn’t see that one coming?).

It wasn’t as ridiculous as Glitter, and all the actors turned in decent performances.  But it didn’t matter, because from the very first scene of the movie when Beau is performing in a Nashville bar, it is clear that NONE of these actors (except Tim McGraw) have any understanding of country music or the people who love it.  They are doing their best impersonation of the kind of country tough the movie wants to be about, but what it actually looks like is the poppy, inauthentic crap version of country the movie critiques.  I used to hate Gwyneth Paltrow, but now I really hate her.  Why not let someone who actually cares about country music do this movie instead of the Marie Antoinette of American celebrity?

Geoff:
Yup, yup, yup, yup. You’re absolutely right that there wasn’t one goddamn authentic thing in the entire film. On top of that, it was as close to incoherent as a film can be. From scene to scene, the film forgets where it’s headed and what it’s trying to do, and the characters forget what they were just doing and who they seem to care for. One minute Paltrow loves Beau and her husband’s an asshole, and then she loves him again and he cares kinda, and then Chiles and Beau suddenly have a thing, and then Paltrow’s back with Beau for just a scene, and then he’s back with Chiles, and what the hell is going on??? Since when are country megastars able to escape the press for long enough to hop on the back of a train car? Since when is that something that a country megastar would even do? How does she get back to where she was from that train car??? Since when does a tour not get canceled after the megastar breaks down onstage during the first show and fails to even MAKE IT TO THE STAGE for the second show? For the first two thirds of the movie, the characters are panicking about how the tour might be canceled because Paltrow can’t cut it. Over and over they’re panicking about this. Guess what: the show would have been canceled.

Also, let’s take a moment to reflect on the fact that, because this film takes place over the course of just three legs of a tour, everything is theoretically unfolding in the span of … what? A week at most? I saw this with two good friends from grad school who were kind enough to accompany me, and when Chiles runs to Beau’s room after the second show to panic AGAIN about it possibly being canceled, we were almost rolling on the floor.

How did this movie get made? What producer watched it and said, “Yeah, this at least makes sense on the most basic levels of logic and empathy.”

Fuck this movie. Fuck this movie for trying to pretend like it knows the country crowd, and fuck this movie for not even trying to put itself together and be a presentable product. It just wants your money. Do not offer it over.

Geoff and Susan continue to rip apart this stupid movie after the cut…

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Sunday Review: Hereafter (2010)

Posted on October 25, 2010 by | 5 Comments

Geoff:
Clint Eastwood’s 347th movie (or at least it feels like it) deals with the afterlife and hits all the sad and weepy tones you would expect from a movie about the afterlife.

It’s one of those multiple-POV movies where you can see all the characters drawing closer and closer together. There’s a young twin boy who’s lost his brother and is looking for ways to speak to him now that he’s gone. There’s a Parisian woman who nearly died when a giant wave hit the resort she was staying at in south Asia, and now she can see visions of the afterlife. And there’s a psychic played by Matt Damon who can also see the afterlife but doesn’t want to anymore because it basically makes his encounters with every other human being a great, big bummer. (P.S. I’m glad the script could find such diverse global locations as Britain, France and the U.S., but I don’t know that there’s much point dissecting the politics of it.)

On an emotional level, I found the film effective at times, as I typically do with Eastwood films, but some of the story lines are better fleshed out than others (read: Damon’s narrative’s just a little more personal whereas the other two feel a little bit more like Cliffs Notes versions). Also, Eastwood is always noted for his spare experimentation and economical camera movements and edits, but do others ever find themselves just a hair bored with his work when the acting and writing are on autopilot? You end up with nothing in particular to take note of.

On the whole, it was a nice little film with a maudlin ending. I’d be willing to say it’s worth a viewing, but it’s not going to move any mountains.

Susan:
No way.  No freaking way.  This movie was the WORST.

(Note:  I went to see The Town belatedly on Friday night, and then saw this on Saturday.  If you had told me there would ever be a weekend in my life when I went to see both an Affleck movie and a Damon movie in the same weekend and the Affleck movie was going to be the GOOD one, I would have called you crazy.  But there you go, it happened.)

This movie was boring, dumb, and emotionally manipulative.  There were affecting moments, sure, but I’m pretty sure that anyone talking about death in any way has the potential to affect the audience emotionally.  But the tropes were old, the dialogue trite, and the characters totally uninteresting.  I never see Clint Eastwood movies because they always look awful, and now that I’ve seen one, I feel like I need to tell myself “I told you so.”

To give you an example of the truly PROFOUND level of BORING this movie dumps on you like a bucket of warm spit, Damon’s character, who is maybe the most interesting thing in the film (which truly speaks to his ability as an actor because HOOBOY the script was awful), is obsessed with Charles Dickens.  That’s right.  Charles Dickens.  Who wrote those really long, incredibly dull novels that your 9th grade English teacher made you read or that you had to read in college so that you knew about the development of English literature or something.  No one likes Charles Dickens, and if people DO like Charles Dickens, I bet they are SUPER BORING.  Just like this dumb, dumb, stupid, dumb movie.

Another totally hack move by Eastwood was including both the tsunami in south Asia and the bombings in London from a few years back.  Certainly there must be a narrative reason for their inclusion, I thought.  I’m sure the political statement the movie is making will become clear later on.  But at the end of the movie you realize, no, there is no narrative reason to include these tragedies other than because they were probably politically hot among the wealthy white liberals when the movie got green-lit.  Just more emotional blackmail, more really obvious, uninteresting ways to make your audience feel sad so they get tricked into thinking you made a good movie.

Seriously.  I hated this movie, and I hate Clint Eastwood.  Why does everyone like this kind of shit so much?

The generalized disagreement continues after the cut…

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Sunday Review: Buried

Posted on October 18, 2010 by | 2 Comments

Editor’s Note:  Once again, we are bad at not including spoilers, so if you don’t wanna know what happens to Ryan Reynolds at the end, turn back now.

Susan:
When I first saw the trailer for Buried, it was the scariest two minutes of film I had ever seen.  It made my skin crawl.  Awesome, I thought, a horror movie about being buried alive!  That will be scary but will reassure me that if I am ever buried alive, everything will be okay.  Because we all know that the hero always survives the end of a horror movie.  So despite the fact that being buried alive is my number one fear (followed by snakes at a close number two), I agreed to see this film when Geoff suggested it.  BOY WAS THAT A MISTAKE.

First off, THIS IS NOT A HORROR MOVIE.  A horror movie scares you in the fun way.  This is a horrific movie about how if you work as a contractor in Iraq and get attacked and buried alive, no one is going to care about you or your family and then you are going to die.  Seriously.  The plot is:  Ryan Reynolds wakes up in a pine coffin.  The people who put him in the pine coffin left him a cell phone, which he uses to make a bajillion calls to everyone on earth trying to get someone to come find him and let him out of the coffin, but no one really cares, including the company he works for and the U.S. government.  Then the people who put him in the coffin (the movie is careful never to call them terrorists or insurgents — they are just “people”) call him and tell him they are going to ransom him.  Some other stuff happens.  Then, just when you think things can’t get worse, HE WAKES UP WITH A SNAKE IN THE BOX WITH HIM, at which point I climbed out of my own skin and ran around trying to shake the creepy-crawlies off me.  He gets the snake out of the box (not very believable — we all know that snakes will kill and eat you even if you are armed with a Zippo lighter and a hip flask — nice try, independent film industry, but I know better), but then the ground above him is bombed and the coffin starts leaking sand.  Not to give anything away, but HE TOTALLY DIES BY BEING BURIED IN SAND BECAUSE THEY DON’T KNOW WHERE HE IS BURIED.  In other words, buried alive, snake in the box with you, death by sand.  WORST POSSIBLE THING EVER.

I should also mention that ALL of the action of the film takes place inside the pine coffin, except for a few seconds of video seen on the cell phone’s video player.  It was visually less claustrophobic than I anticipated, and it wasn’t until the end, when I realized that I was watching a film that was going to reinforce in my mind the idea that if and when I am ever buried alive, I am basically just going to have to wait to die, that I started feeling sort of stressed for Reynolds.  This was one of those movies that was actually totally affecting and amazing, and yet I cannot imagine RECOMMENDING that anyone see it.  It is saying important things, but man, not a very good distraction from Real Life.

Geoff:
You’re right. Definitely affecting, and definitely also wholly unbelievable in certain scenes. Would he really lie there and waste his phone battery and listen to his company fire him while he’s FUCKING BURIED IN A PINE BOX IN IRAQ? Hard for me to see him actually doing that. The premise invites a lot of speculation on what one might do upon waking in a coffin with only a lighter, a cell phone, and a knife, and the moments when Reynolds is doing what you can’t imagine anyone doing in that scenario are the ones that end up being the most annoying.

Otherwise, this is basically an hour and a half of discomfort with a few moments of amusing observation mixed in (the hold music, the annoyed friend of his wife, etc.). Discussing whether it’s entertaining or not is probably missing the point because the movie is basically meant to make a few statements, some about the conflict in Iraq and the people (not soldiers–civilians) that have been sent over to die, and some about narrative expectation and how much we’re all just waiting for the happy ending to come. Here it doesn’t come.

It’s not a lot of fun to cheer for a guy for 90 minutes only to watch him die, so I’d have to agree with Susan that this is a difficult film to recommend. However, if you’re looking for a story told in an interesting, creative way, and if you’ don’t have a fear of snakes, then feel free to give the film a shot. It certainly won’t bore you.

The good-natured agreement continues after the cut…

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Sunday Review: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Posted on September 27, 2010 by | 1 Comment

Geoff:
Oliver Stone’s sequel to his ’80s ode to Reagan-era greed is slick, well-acted, and quite timely. In fact, the whole thing’s basically a fictionalized re-hash of the last 6-8 years as the U.S. approaches the housing bubble and then watches it pop. The whole thing is interesting on a general level, but the characters lost me a bit, and the plot gets convoluted in a way that’s difficult to care about toward the end.

Here’s the breakdown. Jake (Shia LaBeouf) is a money-hungry Wall Street trader with a green-tinged idealism, as evidenced by his interest in alternative energy sources, but he’s still out to make the cash, just like everyone else. Winnie (Carey Mulligan) is his live-in girlfriend and then fiancee who also happens to be the daughter of one Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), whom you may remember from the first film as the smug asshole who carried the message that “Greed Is Good.” Gekko just got out of prison for white-collar crime, and now he’s using Jake as a way to get closer to his daughter again, or so it seems. Turns out he maybe just wants the $100 million he left for her in a Swiss bank account, or maybe he really does care about her, too, but is still ultimately greedy. The ending seems to favor the latter idea. Meanwhile, while all of this is going on, there’s also an entire other plot in which Jake is taking on Bretton James (James Brolin), head honcho for Churchill Schwartz, which is a fictional stand-in for Goldman Sachs. That whole story basically puts a two-dimensionally human face on Goldman Sachs’ interactions with other banks during the time of the crisis and how they basically got away with robbery of the Federal Reserve.

Again, the movie’s well made, but I felt pretty overwhelmingly meh by the whole thing, especially with the maudlin ending, when Gordon Gekko grows a heart because he learns his daughter’s pregnant. It just didn’t feel right, like doing a sequel to Apocalypse Now in which Colonel Kurtz is somehow still alive and now a compassionate human being.

Susan:
I mean, overall, sure.  This movie was pretty boring, in the same way that the original Wall Street was pretty boring.  Do you like to listen to people talk in financial jargon for two hours or so?  No?  Then you are probably going to find this movie pretty lame.  HOWEVER.  We need to talk about some really important pros:

1) Shia LaBeouf cuddling shirtless under a down comforter with his girlfriend within the first 10 minutes/Shia LaBeouf walking around his fancy loft apartment in boxer briefs toward the end.  Some people don’t think Shia is the most attractive actor out there, but those people are stupid and wrong.  Thank you for existing, Mr. LaBeouf, and thank you for getting him out of his clothes, Mr. Stone.

2) VISUAL BUBBLE METAPHORS!  Do you want to watch bubbles float toward the sky for roughly 30 seconds longer than is interesting right before something important happens?  Because that is going to happen all the time.  GUYS.  THOSE ACTUAL BUBBLES ARE JUST LIKE THE METAPHORICAL BUBBLES THAT HAPPEN IN THE STOCK MARKET.  I personally am a huge fan of ham-handed metaphors in my big-budget popcorn flicks, and this film did not disappoint.

3) Charlie Sheen’s plastic surgery!  Bud Fox, Sheen’s character from the original film, shows up for like a minute and a half or something, but he’s on screen long enough to see that in the last twenty years or so he’s gotten his face stretched in some interesting ways and also has a crazy look in his eye now that makes me uncomfortable.  It’s like visual proof that everything Denise Richards said about him was true.  There is nothing I love like a celebrity trainwreck.

So yeah, this movie wasn’t the most exciting or even interesting film ever, but it is so glossy and pretty and full of big eyed people getting teary!  UGH SO MUCH PRETTY.  So many good sweaters.  So much nice furniture.  It was the cinematic equivalent of walking through an IKEA on a weekday morning.

The exchange of half-hearted responses continues after the cut…

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Sunday Review: Easy A

Posted on September 20, 2010 by | 1 Comment

Susan:
Stanley Tucci is the most charming man ever.  And yes, this is my biggest take-away from a teen comedy starring Emma Stone.  If you’re going to see one movie this year, see Easy A so that you can watch Stanley Tucci be so charming that your face melts.

But seriously, this movie was pretty good.  The plot was actually pretty novel for a teen comedy:  Olive (Emma Stone) is an “invisible” high school student who lies to her friend about having lost her V-card to a college freshman.  The lie is overheard by an uptight Christian student (Amanda Bynes (who I like basically can’t stand anymore)) who spreads the rumor around school, which causes Olive to become much less invisible.  As she embraces her new “image,” she begins to have fake-sex with gay kids, nerds, fat kids, etc. to help them out socially and also in exchange for gift cards to big box stores that undoubtedly sponsored the production of the movie.  Meanwhile she is in love with the school mascot, Woodchuck Todd (Penn Badgley who I totally thought was James Franco’s brother or something because MAN they look alike), who ends up coming to her rescue and declaring his love for her in the third act.  And then they all live happily ever after.

Although not perfect, this movie was self-conscious about its teen-movie cliches and for the most part a really solid film.  Stone, Tucci, and Patricia Clarkson, who plays Olive’s mom, all had absolutely standout performances.  Some of the younger actors overplayed it, but no more than would be expected in a teen comedy.  The subject matter was interesting and well-handled and I, on the whole, really liked the thing.  If this is the kind of movie that Mean Girls has inspired Hollywood to make more of, I am totally on board.

Geoff:
Can we get a shout-out for Thomas Haden-Church as the cool teacher as well? I’m aware it’s a cliche, but every school really does have one, and I could have seen myself easily falling for Church’s antics, which far surpassed those of my real teacher for The Scarlet Letter. I learned a few things under your tutelage, Mrs. Richardson (the five-paragraph essay, the importance of proofing rather than just using spell check, etc.), but how to actually enjoy a piece of literature was unfortunately not among them.

I too had a good time with this movie and found it charming as hell. In fact, all the charm almost overdid it for me. There are times when the characters are so cute and quirky and understanding and progressive that you kind of want to say “Is nobody going to create a crisis or some drama? Quick! Show me some miscommunication! Somebody pull some hair!” This while the rest of you watches and says “aw” a lot and ponders what adolescence would have been like with parents like Tucci and Clarkson at the helm.

If there was anything I was annoyed by, it might’ve been  theme of self-consciousness about self-consciousness. Pretty soon we won’t be making movies. We’ll be making movies about movies about movies. I mean to say, is anybody going to remember this film in ten years, or will they remember the ’80s movies the film vocally borrowed from and/or referenced? This is a minor perturbance though — pretty much every film’s going to have a little bit of that these days. In all, there’s enough here to entertain you for the length of a matinee viewing.

The semi-reserved praise continues after the cut…

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Sunday Review: Resident Evil: Afterlife

Posted on September 13, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Geoff:
Resident Evil: Afterlife is bad. It is so bad. It is Paul W.S. Anderson’s ode to everything that is bad, and that man has made some bad films, including Alien vs. Predator and the first Resident Evil film, both of which were measurably better than this … this brainless, lifeless thing, which Susan and I both went and saw in 3-D.

The plot isn’t really relevant, but in the unlikely event of reader interest, I’ll summarize it as follows: we’re now four movies in to the post-apocalyptic, T-virus-ridden future in which the Umbrella Corporation fucked everything up for everyone else. Somehow there are still survivors. Somehow L.A. is STILL on fire (it’s been several years by this point, yeah? Yet the city still burns as if there were riots yesterday). Somehow there are still armies of corporate goons with heavy assault rifles and massive underground facilities that Alice (Milla Jovavich) can break into with ease. I guess it helps though that the facilities don’t even have basic safeguards, such as the ability to stop their own computerized elevators.

The movie isn’t even scary. It is glossed up, cold-ass shit where people fire weapons without a hint of expression on their face. To describe the characters as stock would not express how convinced I am that Anderson just pulls their traits from a sparse Rolodex. You have the evil guy that shouts a thousand commands and then states in a low voice, “And I want DAMAGE REPORTS.” There’s the cynical guy whose every line is a wryly spoken cliche. Every character is just a thing to move around a gameboard that by this point has been completely emptied of all color and intrigue, if it really even had any to begin with.

I paid $15 to see this thing in 3-D. I beg the rest of you not to see it at all, lest Anderson get the sense he’s done something right.

Susan:
UGH NO KIDDING.  THIS MOVIE WAS FUCKING AWFUL.

I am going to stop using all caps because it would be annoying if everything in this part of the review were in all caps, but please, imagine that I am using all caps here:  The 3-D wasn’t even good.  There was no discernible plot or character development, the action sequences were boring, the zombies were stupid and boring (which I didn’t even know was possible), and on top of all that badness, the 3-D wasn’t. even. good.  It was totally unnecessary.  There were maybe two scenes where I even remember it making an impact.  I only paid $11.50 for my ticket, but it STILL was WAYYYYY too much.  WAY too much.  I think the minute portion of the cost of my Netflix subscription that I would technically pay to watch this thing on streaming and NOT in 3-D might not be worth it.  This movie was really effing bad.

I went to see it with Nick and Jeffi, two Austin friends who checked with me beforehand to make sure Milla Jovavich was in it because they were basically going so they could look at her.  When we left, Jeffi said that during the portions of the film where Milla does her close-up video diary entries, HE GOT TIRED OF LOOKING AT HER FACE.  This movie was so bad, IT RUINED MILLA JOVAVICH’S FACE.  It was the worst movie in the history of movies.

I am trying to think of the things I marked in the film as being “redeeming” when I was watching it, but they have all left me.  The only thing that remains is memories of terrible, awful action movie lines like Alice’s incredibly stupid, “Is that any way to treat a lady?” and of those stupid slow-motion action scenes that were cool in the Matrix but became overused and played out like 10 years ago or something.  Oh wait, no, there is one thing I liked:  The scene where the ladies fight the giant dude with the hammer in the shower room.  That was the most video-game-esque scene and it was the only one where I was like, well, okay, this is kind of cool.  But seriously, too little too late, Resident Snoozeville.

The throwing up all over the place about this movie continues after the cut…

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Sunday Review: The American

Posted on September 7, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Editor’s Note: This review has spoilers in it, but whatever, I don’t know that it even really matters.

Susan:
I’m sure that at some point in my life I’ve said the following sentence: “If there were a movie called George Clooney Eats a Sandwich that was about George Clooney eating a sandwich, I would see that movie.”  Clooney is a dreamboat, and I really thought that I could be satisfied watching him watch paint dry.  That is, until I saw The American, which is basically a series of pretty pictures of George Clooney interspersed with some shots of the Italian countryside and some shots of boobs.  TOTAL SNOOZEFEST.

The plot is basically that George Clooney is like, a hitman or a weapons manufacturer or something who is doing a job in Italy while being chased by some Swedes who apparently want to kill him.  He goes to a little town where a lot of tense things happen.  Then he falls in love with a hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold, because that is what you do when you are a lonely white dude who isn’t allowed to get close to people.  Because he is so in love with this awesome hooker stock-character, he decides to get out of the spy/hitman/gun-builder game, but then some people try to kill him and when he goes to meet his lady at the river, he dies as soon as he gets there.  OH, THE PAINFUL IRONY OR NOT IRONY BUT THE THING THAT PEOPLE ALWAYS THINK IS IRONY.

The first two minutes of the movie are probably the best introductory two minutes of film I’ve ever seen:  Clooney and his ladyfriend (not the hooker one, another one), living in Sweden or something (the snowy part of Europe, basically), are walking one morning when some dudes in snow-camo come out of nowhere and start shooting at them.  A tense shoot-off entails, and then the movie begins.  It was suspenseful and disorienting and awesome.  But then the rest of the movies happens, and you get kind of sick of George Clooney brooding and tense things happening and blah blah blah.  You don’t get to know any characters in the flick and you don’t see any real or believable relationships develop.  It’s just a lot of trite, spy-movie crap and a BS plot line about a troubled man falling for a whore.  I liked it better the first time when it was called every film noir/spy movie ever.  I mean, I don’t even know who that dude is supposed to be or why he’s doing what he’s doing or what the fucking point is of the things that are happening.  I dunno, it all just seemed pretty rote and recycled to me.

Geoff:
Interesting. Rote? Recycled? Every spy movie ever? It was a very quiet film, I’ll grant that. And yes, some of the characters are a little odd (your friendly neighborhood prostitute who runs into you at the coffee shop with her friend, your fallen priest who’s accepting of egregious sinners and who can’t help talking in broad, grand statements — okay the second one’s a stereotype, but I’ve never seen a working girl meet her mark at the store). But I found myself pretty immersed in the tension of Clooney’s character, a man who spends every day waiting for a bullet to enter his brain from the front, back or side, a man for whom the walk to the grocery store, or even to the mailbox, could be the final one.

I guess when I think spy film, I think James Bond or Mission Impossible, and I think thrill-a-minute: bombs inside briefcases that nobody in the room but the main character knows about and acrobatic people breaking into super-secret areas without tripping any of its dozens of security measures. It seemed like this film was trying to go against some (not all — you’re right that there were boobs aplenty) of the tropes of the spy film, to just show the workaday life of an assassin for hire, one who plays so far off the grid that he can’t even trust any of the people he’s been hired by.

Ultimately, the pretty shots of Italy and the moments of silent intensity worked for me. My interest was held trying to guess whether his prostitute/girlfriend/whatever was assisting the Swedes or whether she was just another innocent party like the unfortunate gal in Sweden. I can understand why someone would be bored, but I myself was pretty into it.

The polite disagreement continues after the cut…

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Sunday Review: The Switch

Posted on August 30, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Geoff:
At least a month before The Switch came out, I was already pretty tired of it. Oversold (with a thirty-second preview making its way into seemingly every commercial break and also into any number of pre-video commercial slots on Hulu), played up even more in the media once Bill O’Reilly began railing against the intentional single-parenting of the female lead, the movie itself became an afterthought by the time I went to see it. Despite the media fatigue though, the film managed to charm me.

You might know the basics from previews, but here’s the plot: Wally (Jason Bateman) is a pessimistic nice guy (yeah, it’s possible) who wears sweaters and who’s become dear friends with his ex-girlfriend, Kassie (Jennifer Aniston), who meets him for lunch one day to declare that she’s going to have a baby by herself. Wally immediately thinks this is a bad idea, mostly likely because it’ll make it harder for him to try to win her back (his blatant over-protectiveness might be one of the most annoying aspects of the film), but she goes through with it, finding herself the high-quality, athletic seed of a married donor dad named Roland. Depressed, Wally gets blackout drunk at the insemination party, inadvertently finds the medical cup containing Roland’s stuff, and ends up replacing it with his own. (There’s a pretty good Diane Sawyer joke here that’s carried through the rest of the movie). Fast forward seven years, and Roland’s divorced and on the market, and Wally only begins to remember what he might have done when he meets Kassie’s son, Sebastian, and notices similarities.

The film has its moments and take-away messages that make you narrow your eyes, including the fact that Kassie seems to plan only for a boy and not a girl and the fact that she and Wally get happily married in the end despite his pretty hefty and invasive transgression. But at the same time there are so many smaller things to enjoy, including Sebastian’s picture frame collection and his sponsorship of canine kill shelters on his birthdays and every scene stolen by Jeff Goldblum as Wally’s thrice-divorced friend and the look on Juliette Lewis’ (she plays Kassie’s lewd friend) face when she enters the room after everyone’s learned of Wally’s actions. There were enough small, inspired chuckles to even out the irksome bits, and I wound up pretty content by the roll of the credits.

Susan:
I will see your content and raise you a really pleased.  Maybe because I don’t have cable or maybe because I just don’t pay attention, I had not heard almost anything about this film before seeing it.  When Sebastian is first introduced, I remembered that I had seen a trailer for it long ago, but I didn’t remember much about the plot.  All I knew was that the movie starred the love of my life Jason Bateman and Jennifer Aniston, whom I still root for, despite the fact that the media wants to paint her as some kind of insane person.

My lack of exposure to the film’s content before seeing it might account for our difference in opinion here, but man, I really really liked this flick.  Outside of the last line of the movie (“I’m beginning to think this human race isn’t actually a race at all” or some such bullshit — VOMIT, amiriteladies?), I thought it was honest, well-executed, and well-acted.  It had just enough predictable rom-com tripe to settle me in without exposing me to so much that I felt like I’d seen the movie before.  Batemen and Aniston are both consummate actors, and the boy who played young Sebastian reminded me of a Jerry-Maguire-era Lipnicki.  DID YOU KNOW SHARKS DON’T HAVE BONES??

Mostly though, it was just NICE.  It was funny enough and edgy enough and didn’t try to be anything it wasn’t.  Despite the potentially political nature of the single-mom plot-line, the movie doesn’t grandstand or make statements about things.  Kassie’s choice is presented as a fact, as something that happened and is, and Bateman’s reaction to that choice isn’t based on the politics of motherhood but rather on his personal feelings and neuroses.  Even the switching of the sperm, which seemed like a preposterous conceit when I first read summaries of the film, reads as pretty darn believable in the context of the movie.  Do people really have conception parties?  I don’t know, but if they did and your ex-boyfriend got too drunk at yours and started playing with the donor sperm, he totally might drop it and have to replace it with his own due to some sort of drunken logic in which he would never be found out that way.  I bought it.  (Though to be fair, I think I am likely to believe anything Jason Bateman says/does when he loosening the button on his slim-fit corduroy pants.)

I guess what I’m saying is I didn’t find my eyes narrowing much at all.  I was pleasantly surprised at how NOT cheesy and GENUINELY ENJOYABLE this movie was.  But I dunno, maybe I was just in the right kind of mood for a weird, matinee love-story.

The niceness continues after the cut…

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Monday Review: Cyrus

Posted on July 5, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Susan:
Let me start by addressing my good friend Geoff:  Man, I am so glad we decided to see this instead of The Last Airbender.  Not that The Last Airbender didn’t look awesome, but man, The Last Airbender really didn’t look awesome.  Cyrus on the other hand?  It’s like if Judd Apatow bought a hand-held DV camera and made a movie on a rainy day when he’d had too much red wine.

The movie is basically a love story about John (John C. Reilly) and Molly (Marisa Tomei).  They meet at a party, they fall in love, they have crazy hot sex, he makes her dinner.  It’s all super adorable.  But then (DUHN DUHN DUHN) John shows up at her house one day and finds out she lives with her 21-year-old son Cyrus (Jonah Hill).  And not only does the son live there, but he and his mother have a strangely close relationship.  Like, wrestling and hanging out in the bathroom together and leaving bedroom doors open and stuff.  Cyrus tries to sabotage John, John retaliates, Molly gets caught in the cross-fire, and hilarity/heart-felt conversations ensue.  Seriously, it’s Emo-Apatow.  Apatemo if you will.

Even though I joke, I really really really liked this movie.  I loved how John wasn’t just another doofy schlub who gets to bang the hot chick but actually seemed aware of his luck and invested in the relationship.  I loved that the movie was both really funny and really genuine.  I loved that at the end of the film lessons are sort of learned but not in a saccharine way.  Though it did get slow in the middle and though Jonah Hill probably shouldn’t be expected to carry dramatic weight, the movie on the whole is totally solid and well worth a watch.

Geoff:
Man, do I ever love John C. Reilly. I will watch him in anything, and he’s one of the few who has incredible comedic timing and tone while also being able to convey a genuineness even in the most bizarre of situations. Tomei does a great job, too, but she’s the straight character, so it’s a little harder for her to stand out here, I feel.

The film is written by the Duplass brothers, who — depending on how much of an indie-film freak you are — you might recognize as the gentlemen behind The Puffy Chair and Baghead. They’re famous for shooting on a shoestring budget with more of an outline of a script and letting their actors pretty much improvise the entire thing, and this is the first time they’ve been given the opportunity to work with some bigger names. Looks like mumblecore’s going mainstream.

The loose structure works beautifully for the most part, and especially for the comedy. I was laughing but good for large swaths of the movie (Jonah Hill holding the butcher knife comes to mind, and then there’s Reilly pretending he had panic attacks as a kid), and Reilly and Tomei, even in improvisation, are able to pretty convincingly pull off the awkwardness of people falling into something quickly.

The only time things kinda fell apart for me was near the end, when, as you’ve already pointed out, Susan, Jonah Hill’s attempt at something sincere and heartfelt falls a little short as Cyrus pleads for John to come back to make his mother happy again. Improvised drama is tough, and I just don’t know that Hill’s completely up to the task. I should give the guy a break though. He’s up against Reilly, who really is just a powerhouse, and by the time John was pulling up in his car and exchanging looks with Molly as she stood on her porch for the final scene, I was already saying “aw” again.

As much as it might have been fun to rag on Airbender, I think we made the right choice.

The praise continues after the cut…

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