It would seem like Safety Not Guaranteed is a movie that was made in the 1990s and somehow got lots in the shuffle, only to be released now. It has the generally feeling of a generally safe and broad-enough-but-also-a-bit-weird '90s romcom (think So I Married an Axe Murderer) and seems weirdly to have no idea what's going on in the world today. Still, it's a generally enjoyable movie (with a very surprising ending).
At its core, this is a story about living in the past versus living in the present and future, or living in a fantasy world versus living in the real world. Jeff and Darius (Jake M. Johnson and Aubrey Plaza... yes, Darius is a girl... just go with it) work for a magazine in Seattle. They get tipped off to a story out in the middle of nowhere where there is a guy who claims to be building a time machine to go back and fix mistakes that were made in the past. Interested in the story, they go off to meet him and look into his life.
Darius meets the guy, Kenneth (Mark Duplass... yes, you basically need to be a Duplass or on a TV sitcom these days to be cast in any movie), who is at first weary of who she is and why she's coming to him. He seems paranoid and weird, but she falls for him right away. She never lets on that she's a journalist only interested in his time machine for the story, but they slowly fall in love. Of course the relationship is based on lies, so once the truth comes out, it will ruin their relationship.
Kenneth lives in the past and can only look back on mistakes he made (something about running his car into the living room of a woman he was interested in... ooops!); Darius is also hurt from past history (something involving her dead mother), and is interested in the possibility of going back in time. She's not as stuck in the past as he is, but she's not a very optimistic person. Jeff, on the other hand, is a rather brainless frat boy who is looking to get drunk and laid as much as possible. He is a buffoon, but a generally happy one with few regrets.
At some point the movie turns from a rather typical romcom to a darker, more dramatic heisty scifi movie (the time machine might actually be a real thing and not just a paranoiac's pipe dream). I rather like this pivot and appreciate that it's a brave, atypical move to make with the story.
Mark Duplass is becoming a very good dramatic/comedic actor. He plays serious better than he does silly-- and this role is much darker than he normally does. This is probably his richest, best and fullest performance to date. He seems to act in weird, small movies to make money to finance his own directoral work, and I really appreciate it. Sorta a comedic Wally Shawn or Sam Shepard, I guess.
This is not really an important movie, but it's a good movie. I forgive it for being a bit dated (I don't know many magazines today that would send a team of writers to a far-off town to write an article about a crackpot) because it's sweet and has a clever idea about what it is. It's a very creative exploration of a legitimate human psychological dilemma presented here in a charming way.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
Showing posts with label Romantic Comedy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Romantic Comedy. Show all posts
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (Saturday, June 23, 2012) (58)
What's not funny about a doomed romance as the world is about to end?! Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, the directoral debut and second screenplay for Lorene Scafaria (who previously wrote the oddly toned Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist), is an offbeat romcom, filled with lots of grossout jokes and a comforting level of sadness that's hard to find in most mainstream fare.
There is an asteroid falling to earth in the next few days and all hopes of human survival are lost. Dodge (Steve Carell) is an everyman with a wife and a comfortable life. As soon as it becomes clear that the end of the world is nigh, his wife bolts, leaving him alone to deal with his fate. He meets crazy English neighbor girl Penny (Keira Knightly) who is looking for companionship as she's stuck in the U.S., while her family is in Britain. The two begin a weird, funny friendship as he promises her that he knows a guy with a plane who could take her home. They go on a road trip, visiting some of the weirds throwing caution to the win in their last days as they drive to this alleged plane.
The whole film feels like it really shouldn't work; it would seem like it has too broad an appeal to really be funny and puts two actors with no particular sexual chemistry together to fall in love. Yet it does work -- in a very uncomfortable uncanny way (not unlike Carell's previous work in "The Office"). Knightly and Carell seem to be in two separate movies, he in a morose man-looking-back-at-the-end-of-his-life-with-regret movie and she in a zaney comedy about a magical girl who doesn't see the world as seriously as everyone else. But Scafaria makes these two styles work together by showing that they each like in the other person what they themselves lack. He's serious and she's silly.
I'm a little upset that the film goes from something a bit bizarre and unconventional to something more sentimental and conventional in the final minutes, but that doesn't take away from the generally good story and the very funny acting. I really like moves that take big risks, and this is not at all a safe, straightforward story. I appreciate that Scafaria presents a world with very few moments of redemption, where people pay for bad decisions and are mostly unable to change their ways (which is even more of a reason the last two scenes are bad for the overall film). I like the way she mixes happy and sad to make a richer comedy.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
There is an asteroid falling to earth in the next few days and all hopes of human survival are lost. Dodge (Steve Carell) is an everyman with a wife and a comfortable life. As soon as it becomes clear that the end of the world is nigh, his wife bolts, leaving him alone to deal with his fate. He meets crazy English neighbor girl Penny (Keira Knightly) who is looking for companionship as she's stuck in the U.S., while her family is in Britain. The two begin a weird, funny friendship as he promises her that he knows a guy with a plane who could take her home. They go on a road trip, visiting some of the weirds throwing caution to the win in their last days as they drive to this alleged plane.
The whole film feels like it really shouldn't work; it would seem like it has too broad an appeal to really be funny and puts two actors with no particular sexual chemistry together to fall in love. Yet it does work -- in a very uncomfortable uncanny way (not unlike Carell's previous work in "The Office"). Knightly and Carell seem to be in two separate movies, he in a morose man-looking-back-at-the-end-of-his-life-with-regret movie and she in a zaney comedy about a magical girl who doesn't see the world as seriously as everyone else. But Scafaria makes these two styles work together by showing that they each like in the other person what they themselves lack. He's serious and she's silly.
I'm a little upset that the film goes from something a bit bizarre and unconventional to something more sentimental and conventional in the final minutes, but that doesn't take away from the generally good story and the very funny acting. I really like moves that take big risks, and this is not at all a safe, straightforward story. I appreciate that Scafaria presents a world with very few moments of redemption, where people pay for bad decisions and are mostly unable to change their ways (which is even more of a reason the last two scenes are bad for the overall film). I like the way she mixes happy and sad to make a richer comedy.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
Lola Versus (Saturday, June 16, 2012) (57)
I am a big fan of the 2009 film Breaking Upwards, directed by Daryl Wein and co-written by Wein, Zoe Lister-Jones and Peter Duchan. It's a very mature story of the end of young love and the coming to terms with who we are as grown-ups. Now in their second movie, Wein and ZLJ, come back with Lola Versus, which feels at times like a pseudo-sequel to the first film and at other times like a fresher indie romcom.
Lola, played by the magnificent Greta Gerwig (again, Greta, I always say this, but you never do it: call me! I'll make you happy!), is a twenty-something New Yorker who lives with her boyfriend-cum-fiance, Luke (Joel Kannamen). Just before they're gonna get married, he dumps her unexpectedly. She runs to the the arms of her best friends Alice and Henry (ZLJ and Hamish Linklater) who support her through the initial shock of the event. (I say pseudo-sequel, because Upwards really is about the breakup and not so much about the afterwards.)
She starts sleeping with Henry and continues to get questionable advice from Alice. She goes on a few dates with creeps (one of whom is played by Wein in two hilarious sequences) and learns that being alone is not the worst thing in the world, despite her constant feeling that it is. Luke comes back a few times, but she feels betrayed by him and can't reconnect to his new life without her.
This is a very sweet and funny movie, with clever writing and some good insight into singledom (in New York, at least). It does get a bit sappy and trite at times (particularly in the last scene), but generally is good and entertaining. All the young characters seem to be friendly and people we want to hang out with (that is, aside from deeply wanting to be naked with GG).
There is really nothing totally magical about this movie, but it is a good romcom that doesn't slip too much in to banal stereotypes about manhattaniana. I like what Wein and ZLJ do - they make these nice, small movies that feel unpretentious, honest and sometimes very funny. This is not as serious and sad as the first film (which I do like a bit more than this one), but it is a good movie.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
Thursday, April 5, 2012
The Five-Year Engagement (Thursday, April 5, 2012) (34)
In the ever-rising tide of adult-themed romantic gross-out comedies comes The Five-Year Engagement, a totally preposterous film with one of the weirdest, most fat-laden stories and scripts I've seen in awhile. There are lots of funny moments (many provided by Jason Segal, who is quietly turning into one this era's most talented comics... er, except for the fact that he co-wrote this screenplay... OK - so let's call him inconsistent...), but much more excess and overly graphic situations, making watching it more of a chore than a joy.
Directed and co-written by Nicholas Stoller (of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek fame), the movie revolves around Tom (Segal), an up-and-coming chef in San Francisco, who gets engaged to Violet (Emily Blunt). They fully plan to have a timely wedding, until she gets into grad school in Ann Arbor. They move and his life begins to spin out of control after he's unable to get a "respectable" restaurant gig (featuring a fun "A-squared" resto montage, for anyone who went to school or ate dinner there). She thrives and he shrivels and their wedding moves further away. In the meantime his best friend (Chris Pratt) and her sister (Alison Brie) get married and have babies and the world moves along. Just when you think they're gonna figure it out, everything falls apart, possibly irreparably.
Typical of many recent gross-out comedies, the stakes are raised to silly heights as we see the characters behaving ridiculously and see frank pain and embarrassment in every other scene or so. At one point, when Tom freaks out about their pending wedding, he gets drunk and sleeps in the woods in the middle of winter, almost naked. He wakes up with frostbite on one of his toes, which has to be cut off. In another scene, the couple's niece shoots one of Tom's arrows (he's a bow hunter) into Violet's leg -- but just for shits and giggles and no real plot point.
I actually appreciate the frankness of these moments, and the reaction they bring to us in the audience (shock and horror with uncomfortable laughter), but they're especially difficult to endure as they're interspersed with typical RomCom comedy and come generally as surprises. It's all a bit too much for too little pay off.
The real sin of this film, of this script, is that it's just not very efficient and almost every scene goes on about one to four minutes too long, making the whole film feel bloated and cumbersome. The transitions between one bit and another are clumsy and the amount of serious reflective time allotted to each character is too much, making this weirdly heady at times -- not the best tone for a stupid comedy.
This really feels like it was cut down from a script that was probably twice as long, a script with every joke and every set-up the writers could imagine, but then cut it to this overweight 120-some minutes. I think if they had trimmed the script more (like by another 30-40 mintues) they could have had a pretty good movie. Instead we get a weird movie that's not really enjoyable and doesn't move well, despite some honestly funny moments.
Stars: 1 of 4
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Crazy, Stupid, Love. (Tuesday, August 16, 2011) (71)
Omigod - there's so much punctuation in the title of the film Crazy, Stupid, Love.! What's going on there? It's a list with a period at the end? Is it a statement? Is it a description of the three acts of the film? What the eff?! Ugh!
This very sweet movie, written by Dan Fogelman and co-directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, has a very nice story with a wonderful little twist at the end. It's totally unoffensive and a wonderful love story ... or, well, four or five love stories, or something.
Cal (Steve Carell) is a sad-sack forty-something dad who is kicked out of his house by his wife of twenty-some years, Emily (Julianne Moore). He goes to the bar at a mall (naturally) where he meets the lothario Jacob (totally the name of a lady-slayer... in the Old Testament) (Ryan Gosling) who proceeds to update Cal's wardrobe and give him lessons on hitting on women and general gamesmanship.
Meanwhile, Cal has two young kids who have a 17-year-old babysitter, Jessica, who is in love with him, and Jacob is trying to make it with a redhead law student, Hannah (Emma Stone), who thinks she's better than him. (Oh - I love the idea of a hot gentile couple called Jacob and Hannah! Oy vey! The Elders of Zion indeed!) Then Emily's mister, David (Kevin Bacon) is hanging around too, and Cal's son, Robbie, is in love with Jessica... and Marisa Tomei plays a woman who Cal takes home from the bar.
I hate ensemble stories. They're so goddamn overly complicated and unnecessarily redundant.
Suffice it to say that most of the humor in the film is us laughing at Cal and the ridiculous situations he gets himself and his family into. There is a silly quid pro quo, straight out of Beaumarchais and a scuffle that ensues (physical comedy!!). It's all very nice, but really not earth-shattering.
Gosling, as always, is very funny and self-assured. I still have no idea what is up with his affected speech and it wears rather thin, when he's playing a very fashion-forward guy, leaving him sounding like he's some millionaire hood-rat. (Did he learn to speak like that from Eminem? Isn't it really fake for both of them? I still think I'd rather hear Ryan rap than MM.) Carell is very good in a more dramatic role with less goofiness and less "look-at-me-I'm-being-silly" hammy stuff we're used to from him.
This is a very watchable movie, filled with tiresome cliches and only the most polished-down modernist style. It won't upset anyone and will make everyone kiss their loved one. Bo-ring.
Stars: 2 of 4
Friends with Benefits (Tuesday, August 16, 2011) (70)
The magical thing about Hollywood is that movies frequently come in pairs. Sometimes that's a result of silly luck (like how last year had two mall-cop movies open), but sometimes it's because ideas float around and don't get made and then other versions are written and produced that copy from them. That is the case with Friends with Benefits, which was based on a similar screenplay bouncing around Hollywood for awhile, called No Strings Attached. Now we have two movies about "fucking friends" and they're very similar.
As with NSA, Friends with Benefits is a surprisingly watchable film. This is not to say that it's deep or interesting, or particularly good, but it is silly and fun and generally holds together storywise. Dylan (Justin Timberlake) is a magazine designer who is recruited from LA for a big job at GQ in New York. Jamie (Mila Kunis) is a headhunter in NYC who brings him to the position. After he accepts the job, the two become fast friends and commiserate over their mutual dislike of dating and their love for sappy rom-coms (OMG - so meta!).
They decide they'll start having sex all the time, but only remain friends and not consider themselves "dating". This of course goes terribly wrong at a certain point when it becomes clear that they have different expectations from their arrangement and that "friends with benefits" is really a sloppy situation.
As with most young rom-coms these days, this is an extremely foul-mouthed film with tons of frank details about sex and sexual desires. There's something strange about a guy (JT) saying he sneezes after he cums - because it's both shocking and banal at the same time. We never hear guys talking so directly about sex, but, of course, talking about it in a studio film like this, makes it tremendously less risque, more bubble-gum. Eh.
Timberlake shows himself (again) to be a true "triple-threat" talent. He's handsome as shit, funny with great timing and very good at conveying his point. Kunis is very good here (I'm not as familiar with her work, aside from Black Swine), though her role here is more regular than his. (I have to admit, in my ideal world, I would take JT from this one and NatPort from NSA to make the perfect film... but then you'd have Kutcher and Kunis - which might make a good movie poster, but would die onscreen.)
It's funny that kids who are so happy to be fluid about what "making out" and "hooking up" is, are so concerned about titles of relationships ("dating", "friends with benefits"). I guess I don't really related to these stories in some weird way - maybe I'm too old for them? They really feel like a younger generation's idea of sex projected onto characters around my age. Interesting.
Then again, I don't know why people as perfect-looking as Kunis and JT would ever get frustrated dating and having sex with as many people as possible (you could call it "pretty people's burden"). (This goes back to the Jennifer Aniston politique, where she is not a convincing sad-sack girl who can't get a date.)
And then, of course, one has to ask what the difference is between "friendship" that involves emotional support and unlimited sex and "dating". I guess I'm old-fashioned.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
Monday, May 23, 2011
Bridesmaids (Monday, May 23, 2011) (34)
Lord help us. Beginning what is sure to be a never-ending trend in girl gross-out comedies, Bridesmaids come out swinging (and talking about giving blow jobs, swallowing cum and having explosive diarrhea). What begins as a funny movie in the first half devolves into a rather banal rom-com way off-target for what it should be. The worst part is that considering this is such a long movie, at 125 minutes, 40 minutes could have easily be cut out, making the final product near perfect.
Annie (Kristen Wiig, who also co-wrote the film) is a sad middle-30s woman in Milwaukee (home of great tax breaks for filmmakers, dontcha know!) who is unlucky in love and in life. Her best friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph) is having better luck as she's getting married to a very wealthy guy in Chicago who moves in a circle of a very rich set. Lillian asks Annie to be her maid of honor and introduces her to the other bridesmaids. One of them is Helen (Rose Byrne), the rich wife of one of Lillian's husband's work buddies, who immediately gets into a competitive battle with Annie over who is a better friend to Lillian. Of course, Annie is dirt poor, after her baking business collapsed in the recession, and Helen is a fancy housewife with nothing to do but be a fancy hostess. This back and forth sets off a series of silly vignettes where Annie ends up looking like an ass as her average style doesn't cut it with Lillian, Helen or the other bridesmaids.
Somewhere in the second act, this turns into a pity-party for Annie, who alienates everyone and screws up every wedding event by pushing too hard against Helen. There's an aborted trip to Las Vegas (hello, The Hangover 1.5: Girls Gone Wild), a bridesmaid's dress fitting with tainted food that causes everyone to get sick, and a tantrum at the wedding shower. Everything goes downhill for Annie (and for Lillian's wedding). Meanwhile she meets and sparks a relationship with a local cop... from Ireland... uh... (to say nothing about her English roommates... it seems that Milwaukee is some International City of Significance for the English-speaking world).
Aside from the need to have jokes that you would be embarrassed to tell to your mother, the main motivation of the movie is to show scenes that make women in the audience say "oh -that happened to me too" (but, of course, these things have never happened to anyone because they're so over-the-top). It's really just a bunch of pretty girls saying ugly things. That's a lot of fun, but it doesn't have the freshness of Harold & Kumar, Superbad or Observe and Report.
Wiig, not being much of a veteran of the big screen, reverts to her signature Saturday Night Live characters too frequently, sometimes saying things under her breath like that woman on the Weekend Update (whose name I don't know, because I mostly watch it in fast-forward). She does have some good acting moments, though; probably the best moment of the movie, which died in the theater I was in, is when Annie sees Helen falling apart from stress and self-pity and she gives this fantastic smirk overflowing with schadenfruede. (I guess the audience I was with was not looking for subtlety, but just for shit jokes.)
Aside from not being particularly funny, the second half gets a bit preachy, like when Annie is told by one of the (fat) bridesmaids that she should pick herself up and dust herself off and stop feeling bad for herself. I get it, but it's totally not the right tone for this movie. This is a juvenile, silly thing, not a self-help dissertation. Yes, Annie, should stop moping around and hook herself up with the Irish cop, but she should do it through burping and saying "shit" and "fuck", not through baking a goddamn cake!
Girl gross-out movie, to thine own self be true. Motherfucker.
Stars: 1.5 of 4
Annie (Kristen Wiig, who also co-wrote the film) is a sad middle-30s woman in Milwaukee (home of great tax breaks for filmmakers, dontcha know!) who is unlucky in love and in life. Her best friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph) is having better luck as she's getting married to a very wealthy guy in Chicago who moves in a circle of a very rich set. Lillian asks Annie to be her maid of honor and introduces her to the other bridesmaids. One of them is Helen (Rose Byrne), the rich wife of one of Lillian's husband's work buddies, who immediately gets into a competitive battle with Annie over who is a better friend to Lillian. Of course, Annie is dirt poor, after her baking business collapsed in the recession, and Helen is a fancy housewife with nothing to do but be a fancy hostess. This back and forth sets off a series of silly vignettes where Annie ends up looking like an ass as her average style doesn't cut it with Lillian, Helen or the other bridesmaids.
Somewhere in the second act, this turns into a pity-party for Annie, who alienates everyone and screws up every wedding event by pushing too hard against Helen. There's an aborted trip to Las Vegas (hello, The Hangover 1.5: Girls Gone Wild), a bridesmaid's dress fitting with tainted food that causes everyone to get sick, and a tantrum at the wedding shower. Everything goes downhill for Annie (and for Lillian's wedding). Meanwhile she meets and sparks a relationship with a local cop... from Ireland... uh... (to say nothing about her English roommates... it seems that Milwaukee is some International City of Significance for the English-speaking world).
Aside from the need to have jokes that you would be embarrassed to tell to your mother, the main motivation of the movie is to show scenes that make women in the audience say "oh -that happened to me too" (but, of course, these things have never happened to anyone because they're so over-the-top). It's really just a bunch of pretty girls saying ugly things. That's a lot of fun, but it doesn't have the freshness of Harold & Kumar, Superbad or Observe and Report.
Wiig, not being much of a veteran of the big screen, reverts to her signature Saturday Night Live characters too frequently, sometimes saying things under her breath like that woman on the Weekend Update (whose name I don't know, because I mostly watch it in fast-forward). She does have some good acting moments, though; probably the best moment of the movie, which died in the theater I was in, is when Annie sees Helen falling apart from stress and self-pity and she gives this fantastic smirk overflowing with schadenfruede. (I guess the audience I was with was not looking for subtlety, but just for shit jokes.)
Aside from not being particularly funny, the second half gets a bit preachy, like when Annie is told by one of the (fat) bridesmaids that she should pick herself up and dust herself off and stop feeling bad for herself. I get it, but it's totally not the right tone for this movie. This is a juvenile, silly thing, not a self-help dissertation. Yes, Annie, should stop moping around and hook herself up with the Irish cop, but she should do it through burping and saying "shit" and "fuck", not through baking a goddamn cake!
Girl gross-out movie, to thine own self be true. Motherfucker.
Stars: 1.5 of 4
Friday, January 21, 2011
No Strings Attached (Friday, January 21, 2011) (2)
No Strings Attached should be a terrible, terrible movie, but is actually pretty decent and not all that bad. In this Ivan Reitman picture, Natalie Portman plays Emma, a super hot, super smart med student. She meets up with a kid she knew in camp (and later in college), Adam (Ashton Kutcher), who works on a TV show. They both think the other is hot, so they fuck. Afterwards they decide it would be awesome if they could just be fuck-buddies and not actually date.
They start fucking all over the place, in cars, bathrooms, parts of the hospital. At some point Adam asks Emma if she would be more than just a fuck-buddy and actually be his girlfriend. She tells him no and then runs away. This ruins their relationship and their deal.
For such a silly idea, the script (by Elizabeth Meriweather) is actually pretty clever. There is some very funny, sharp dialogue and the flow of the narrative moves very well. I find most romcoms fall off a cliff in the third act as they try to figure out how to boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl in a new way. This one works pretty well, actually - partly, I think, because neither character is particularly a caricature of real people; they are both pretty down to earth people and you can see the situation from both points of view.
Somehow the casting of this seems to have come out of my subconscious. NatPort has long been a boyish crush of mine. She's totally cute and clearly very Jewish (she plays a Jew here, which is nice... or something). Her best friend is played by Greta Gerwig, a newish actress I adore. (I actually love Greta more than Nat.) Coming out of mumblecore, Greta is one of the best and most honest actors working today. She's funny and sweet and her girl-nextdoorness is out of control. She's wonderful here in the scene when all the women in the apartment are on the rag at the same time. ("There's red-velvet in here, right?")
Then there's Lake Bell, a girl I went to high school with who would barely give me the time of day then and certainly wouldn't speak to me now. She plays, bizarrely, the dorky, bookish co-worker of Ashton at the TV studio who is madly in love with him. She wears glasses and is mostly seen with a clipboard and mousy hair. It's a bit of a stretch that in Hollywood a sharp-tongued hottie like Lake would somehow be a meek assistant, but this is a dumb movie, so I won't argue too much about it. This character is actually not really necessary to the film and seems to only be in for one joke in the end credits. If the part is left in, I think Lake should have been Nat's best friend and Greta should have been the nerdy assistant (both roles are pretty small).
I don't know if it's because I have such fantasies about the actresses in the film or that it was actually pretty good, but I really think this movie is very watchable. It's pretty sharply written (with some really terrible lines peppered in, including the kicker line of the film before the credits, which is gawdawful) and very modern. It doesn't get bogged down in super-duper now-ness the way a movie like He's Just Not that Into You did (mentioning Myspace, so that by the time the film came out, the line was already a silly old relic of a bygone era), but feels contemporary nonetheless. I like it. Sue me!
Stars: 2.5 of 4
They start fucking all over the place, in cars, bathrooms, parts of the hospital. At some point Adam asks Emma if she would be more than just a fuck-buddy and actually be his girlfriend. She tells him no and then runs away. This ruins their relationship and their deal.
For such a silly idea, the script (by Elizabeth Meriweather) is actually pretty clever. There is some very funny, sharp dialogue and the flow of the narrative moves very well. I find most romcoms fall off a cliff in the third act as they try to figure out how to boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl in a new way. This one works pretty well, actually - partly, I think, because neither character is particularly a caricature of real people; they are both pretty down to earth people and you can see the situation from both points of view.
Somehow the casting of this seems to have come out of my subconscious. NatPort has long been a boyish crush of mine. She's totally cute and clearly very Jewish (she plays a Jew here, which is nice... or something). Her best friend is played by Greta Gerwig, a newish actress I adore. (I actually love Greta more than Nat.) Coming out of mumblecore, Greta is one of the best and most honest actors working today. She's funny and sweet and her girl-nextdoorness is out of control. She's wonderful here in the scene when all the women in the apartment are on the rag at the same time. ("There's red-velvet in here, right?")
Then there's Lake Bell, a girl I went to high school with who would barely give me the time of day then and certainly wouldn't speak to me now. She plays, bizarrely, the dorky, bookish co-worker of Ashton at the TV studio who is madly in love with him. She wears glasses and is mostly seen with a clipboard and mousy hair. It's a bit of a stretch that in Hollywood a sharp-tongued hottie like Lake would somehow be a meek assistant, but this is a dumb movie, so I won't argue too much about it. This character is actually not really necessary to the film and seems to only be in for one joke in the end credits. If the part is left in, I think Lake should have been Nat's best friend and Greta should have been the nerdy assistant (both roles are pretty small).
I don't know if it's because I have such fantasies about the actresses in the film or that it was actually pretty good, but I really think this movie is very watchable. It's pretty sharply written (with some really terrible lines peppered in, including the kicker line of the film before the credits, which is gawdawful) and very modern. It doesn't get bogged down in super-duper now-ness the way a movie like He's Just Not that Into You did (mentioning Myspace, so that by the time the film came out, the line was already a silly old relic of a bygone era), but feels contemporary nonetheless. I like it. Sue me!
Stars: 2.5 of 4
Monday, January 10, 2011
I Love You Philip Morris (2010) (Monday, January 10, 2011) (174)
There's something about Jim Carrey that just never quite works for me. I always feel that he's showing off and doing too much hamming for the camera and sometimes wish he would just act normal (look - Robin WIlliams who is just as silly can play normal beautifully). I Love You Phillip Morris is his latest "serious" role where I am supposed to be wowed by his range and his ability to be serious - but again, all I see is over-the-top zaniness and annoying facial expressions.
In the film, Carrey plays Steven Russell, a guy who seems to be addicted to scams and breaking the law. He begins as a cop in some small town, but them comes out as gay and moves to Miami Beach. Down there, he realized that "being gay is expensive", so rather than working, he figures out ways to get injured and suing for his injuries. At some point he is convicted of insurance fraud and goes to jail. In jail, he meets Phillip Morris (Ewan McGragor) a smart gay guy who was arrested for stealing cars. They two fall madly in love and then spend the rest of their lives going in and out of jail, but always for love... or something.
This movie is basically The Mask meets Catch Me if you Can. Every time Steven has a chance to scam someone, he does. When he's released from jail and goes looking for a job, he forges his resume, gets hired as a firm's CFO and then embezzles money from them. It's all a bit much. Oh, wait ... I can't say it's too much because it's apparently based on a true story. Whatever.
Carrey is wound up so tight, when you see him release into a scene, he goes around so fast, it's hard to concentrate on what the hell is happening. You get your dumb Jim Carrey voices, and your tired Jim Carrey faces, and your silly Jim Carrey physical comedy, but not much else.
I get that the story is based on real events, but it's hard to like a character who is so dimwitted about crime. Does he not think he's going to get caught? Does he think that anyone will care how elaborate his scams are? (They're very elaborate.) You want to shake him and say "STOP!"
McGregor is good here, but it is sorta hard to figure out what the hell he sees in Steven. I guess the fact that they are madly in love (after five minutes of meeting) is enough for us to understand, but it doesn't totally work.
Mostly this movie is fun and easy, but it was frustrating how it kept going on and on and on with Carrey's 1990s jokes, never learning from his mistakes or doing anything differently. He tries one thing and he gets arrested, then gets out of jail and tries the same thing again and again gets arrested, and then a third time and on and on. It's sorta tired and silly.
Stars: 2 of 4
In the film, Carrey plays Steven Russell, a guy who seems to be addicted to scams and breaking the law. He begins as a cop in some small town, but them comes out as gay and moves to Miami Beach. Down there, he realized that "being gay is expensive", so rather than working, he figures out ways to get injured and suing for his injuries. At some point he is convicted of insurance fraud and goes to jail. In jail, he meets Phillip Morris (Ewan McGragor) a smart gay guy who was arrested for stealing cars. They two fall madly in love and then spend the rest of their lives going in and out of jail, but always for love... or something.
This movie is basically The Mask meets Catch Me if you Can. Every time Steven has a chance to scam someone, he does. When he's released from jail and goes looking for a job, he forges his resume, gets hired as a firm's CFO and then embezzles money from them. It's all a bit much. Oh, wait ... I can't say it's too much because it's apparently based on a true story. Whatever.
Carrey is wound up so tight, when you see him release into a scene, he goes around so fast, it's hard to concentrate on what the hell is happening. You get your dumb Jim Carrey voices, and your tired Jim Carrey faces, and your silly Jim Carrey physical comedy, but not much else.
I get that the story is based on real events, but it's hard to like a character who is so dimwitted about crime. Does he not think he's going to get caught? Does he think that anyone will care how elaborate his scams are? (They're very elaborate.) You want to shake him and say "STOP!"
McGregor is good here, but it is sorta hard to figure out what the hell he sees in Steven. I guess the fact that they are madly in love (after five minutes of meeting) is enough for us to understand, but it doesn't totally work.
Mostly this movie is fun and easy, but it was frustrating how it kept going on and on and on with Carrey's 1990s jokes, never learning from his mistakes or doing anything differently. He tries one thing and he gets arrested, then gets out of jail and tries the same thing again and again gets arrested, and then a third time and on and on. It's sorta tired and silly.
Stars: 2 of 4
Friday, April 30, 2010
Breaking Upwards (Friday, April 30, 2010) (38)
Breaking Upwards is a very small and very sweet indie comedy about a young twenty-something couple in New York who love each other dearly but are getting somewhat bored with dating. They decide to begin to take 'days off' from dating to try to live independently. At first this is difficult as they both contact one anther non-stop on the phone, email and Internet. Ultimately they realize that they are drifting apart more and more and they have to come to terms with the reality of their individual single lives.
The film was made on a shoestring budget, but has a really nice feel about it. It's rather hand-made, but there is much more of a script and a structure than anything particularly mumblecore (it's not mumblecore at all - just low budget). It was co-written by lead actors Zoe Lister Jones and Daryl Wein (who also directed the picture) along with Peter Duchan - and the concept is really nice and well done. There is nothing fancy here other than good, if simple, story telling. The dialogue is very punchy and clever - and feels very natural for New Yorkers of this age and background.
I have to say, as much of a fan of mumblecore as I am, it's nice that there are still independent movies being made in New York that are not just mumble. The normalness of the form (the three-act structure and scenes with real beginnings and ends) is refreshing. At the same time, I think part of what's charming about this film is its smallness - the fact that there is an intimacy and a familiarity with the places and things we see. As good a concept as this is, I don't think it would work well as a bigger budget project. It would just feel fake and forced in such a situation.
I also have to mention, of course, the similarities between this and the recent German film that I loved, Everyone Else. They both deal with the same concept - two people who love each other but can't stay together - but in very different ways. They're interesting to see close to one another - especially because this one doesn't have the tragic, sad elements of the Everyone Else, and that one doesn't have the funny smallness of this one. I guess lightning can strike twice but have very different results.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
The film was made on a shoestring budget, but has a really nice feel about it. It's rather hand-made, but there is much more of a script and a structure than anything particularly mumblecore (it's not mumblecore at all - just low budget). It was co-written by lead actors Zoe Lister Jones and Daryl Wein (who also directed the picture) along with Peter Duchan - and the concept is really nice and well done. There is nothing fancy here other than good, if simple, story telling. The dialogue is very punchy and clever - and feels very natural for New Yorkers of this age and background.
I have to say, as much of a fan of mumblecore as I am, it's nice that there are still independent movies being made in New York that are not just mumble. The normalness of the form (the three-act structure and scenes with real beginnings and ends) is refreshing. At the same time, I think part of what's charming about this film is its smallness - the fact that there is an intimacy and a familiarity with the places and things we see. As good a concept as this is, I don't think it would work well as a bigger budget project. It would just feel fake and forced in such a situation.
I also have to mention, of course, the similarities between this and the recent German film that I loved, Everyone Else. They both deal with the same concept - two people who love each other but can't stay together - but in very different ways. They're interesting to see close to one another - especially because this one doesn't have the tragic, sad elements of the Everyone Else, and that one doesn't have the funny smallness of this one. I guess lightning can strike twice but have very different results.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
Saturday, January 16, 2010
The Last Station (2009) (Saturday, January 16, 2010) (216)
This movie has a somewhat strange setup for a little romantic dramedy. It takes place in the last days of Leo Tolstoy's life, when he was living in his country estate after publishing his masterpieces. He has become a cultural and folk hero in the early part of the 20th Century and his manager is trying to influence him to donate the copyrights of his works to the Russian people, rather than keeping them in his family's name.
The movement that has taken off as a result of his writing is in full swing and there is a hippie community on his estate that believes in shared property and no sex. Tolstoy, played by Christopher Plummer, is a lively old man with a long beard. He doesn't totally believe in the message of his followers (he loves sex and, despite dressing like a farmer, likes the riches that come with his life), but lets them fawn over him without correction.
His manager, played by Paul Giamatti, hires a young academic, played by James McAvoy, to be the old man's secretary, hoping he can steer the writer to his will. Tolstoy's wife, played by Helen Mirren, hates Giamatti and doesn't care at all about her husband's proto-socialist movement. She loves her wealth and wants to keep it and grow it.
The Tolstoyan ban on sexuality becomes hard for McAvoy to deal with when he meets a woman, played by the lovely Kerry Condon, who is in the movement on the estate. They fall in love and McAvoy has to figure out if he's going to listen to the passionate, romantic Baroness Tolstoy or the more severe, rational doctrine of the Tolstoy fundamentalists. As this is happening, Tolstoy himself has to figure out if he's going to listen to his brooding manager and give his books to the people or if he's going to listen to his wife and keep them in the family.
The film is a bit too convoluted, I think, for a rather silly and light story. There are too many layers of detail, when all that is needed is a light story about a man torn between his social beliefs (in abstinence) and his passionate heart. Generally the dialogue is snappy and funny, though it does get a bit more serious at times, especially as Tolstoy gets closer and closer to death. I can't figure out if maybe the problem is that it is trying to be a comedy at some level and that it should not be. Perhaps a straight light drama would have worked better. At any rate, it needs about 20 minutes cut out of it.
The acting here is getting a good amount of praise nowadays - and generally there are good performances here. Helen Mirren is very good as the grand old lady who sees her way of life under attack (of course it will come under further attack in a few years with the Bolshevik revolution). She is sensible and passionate and rather at her wits end with her husbands followers. Plummer is also good as a somewhat devilish old man who loves life and thinks all the attention on his is rather fun. He does deal with the copyright question, but this is not an issue that really presses on his mind too hard at first. Giamatti is basically the same character he played in the Howard Stern Private Parts movie - Pigvomit. He is a stuffed suit with no soul and no sense of humor. This role is a bit thin, and Giamatti's performance is OK - but seems a bit recycled. McAvoy is very good throughout the film and plays his character well dealing with the political mess he gets himself into.
I think this is a movie that probably comes off well as a script. It looks interesting, with a dynamic central character (Tolstoy), at least two main points of tension, including a love story. When put on screen, though, it is a bit dead. There is great scenery and nice costumes and everybody has a nice English accent (English accents being a stand-in for people speaking Russian, of course), but there is not much depth to the story. All the issues that the characters deal with feel very superficial and not all that emotional.
Stars: 2 of 4
The movement that has taken off as a result of his writing is in full swing and there is a hippie community on his estate that believes in shared property and no sex. Tolstoy, played by Christopher Plummer, is a lively old man with a long beard. He doesn't totally believe in the message of his followers (he loves sex and, despite dressing like a farmer, likes the riches that come with his life), but lets them fawn over him without correction.
His manager, played by Paul Giamatti, hires a young academic, played by James McAvoy, to be the old man's secretary, hoping he can steer the writer to his will. Tolstoy's wife, played by Helen Mirren, hates Giamatti and doesn't care at all about her husband's proto-socialist movement. She loves her wealth and wants to keep it and grow it.
The Tolstoyan ban on sexuality becomes hard for McAvoy to deal with when he meets a woman, played by the lovely Kerry Condon, who is in the movement on the estate. They fall in love and McAvoy has to figure out if he's going to listen to the passionate, romantic Baroness Tolstoy or the more severe, rational doctrine of the Tolstoy fundamentalists. As this is happening, Tolstoy himself has to figure out if he's going to listen to his brooding manager and give his books to the people or if he's going to listen to his wife and keep them in the family.
The film is a bit too convoluted, I think, for a rather silly and light story. There are too many layers of detail, when all that is needed is a light story about a man torn between his social beliefs (in abstinence) and his passionate heart. Generally the dialogue is snappy and funny, though it does get a bit more serious at times, especially as Tolstoy gets closer and closer to death. I can't figure out if maybe the problem is that it is trying to be a comedy at some level and that it should not be. Perhaps a straight light drama would have worked better. At any rate, it needs about 20 minutes cut out of it.
The acting here is getting a good amount of praise nowadays - and generally there are good performances here. Helen Mirren is very good as the grand old lady who sees her way of life under attack (of course it will come under further attack in a few years with the Bolshevik revolution). She is sensible and passionate and rather at her wits end with her husbands followers. Plummer is also good as a somewhat devilish old man who loves life and thinks all the attention on his is rather fun. He does deal with the copyright question, but this is not an issue that really presses on his mind too hard at first. Giamatti is basically the same character he played in the Howard Stern Private Parts movie - Pigvomit. He is a stuffed suit with no soul and no sense of humor. This role is a bit thin, and Giamatti's performance is OK - but seems a bit recycled. McAvoy is very good throughout the film and plays his character well dealing with the political mess he gets himself into.
I think this is a movie that probably comes off well as a script. It looks interesting, with a dynamic central character (Tolstoy), at least two main points of tension, including a love story. When put on screen, though, it is a bit dead. There is great scenery and nice costumes and everybody has a nice English accent (English accents being a stand-in for people speaking Russian, of course), but there is not much depth to the story. All the issues that the characters deal with feel very superficial and not all that emotional.
Stars: 2 of 4
Love Happens (2009) (Monday, January 11, 2010) (215)
Long cross-country plane trips are great for one thing: seeing terrible brainless movies that you've missed during the year. On my recent trip to Los Angeles, I was able to see Love Happens, a totally lifeless and recycled rom com with the lifeless-est actor in the world, Jennifer Aniston.
In it, Aaron Eckhart plays a guy whose wife died in a car accented and has turned the tragedy into a pick-yourself-up-and-dust-yourself-off self-help empire. It's not totally clear if he's a bad guy or a good guy who likes living dangerously or if he's just a good guy that seems like he might be bad but is actually just good. Whatever. He meets Aniston, a florist who is unexplainedly unlucky in love. The two meet and get off to a rough start and then fall in love. Then some more stuff happens with his self-help club. Then they go to a concert for a band I've never heard of.
I realized most of the way through the film that basically the filmmakers had given up trying to care about making a decent movie and were just putting out scenes with actors speaking words. It is totally boring and unoriginal. I'm not sure if Aniston and Eckhart have any chemistry together, I could barely pay attention to them. For some reason Martin Sheen and Frances Conroy are also in the film - I guess they need to pay their mortgages too.
There is nothing good in this film. It's not hateful, but it's very not good. Everything from the dialogue, to the acting to the direction is boring and hackneyed and bad. It shocks me that a Hollywood studio would put money into a turd like this. I guess it's cheap and easy to recoup the production investment. Whatever - that's a terrible reason to make a movie.
Leap Year, you're on my list for my next long plane-trip in mid-June!
Stars: 1 of 4
In it, Aaron Eckhart plays a guy whose wife died in a car accented and has turned the tragedy into a pick-yourself-up-and-dust-yourself-off self-help empire. It's not totally clear if he's a bad guy or a good guy who likes living dangerously or if he's just a good guy that seems like he might be bad but is actually just good. Whatever. He meets Aniston, a florist who is unexplainedly unlucky in love. The two meet and get off to a rough start and then fall in love. Then some more stuff happens with his self-help club. Then they go to a concert for a band I've never heard of.
I realized most of the way through the film that basically the filmmakers had given up trying to care about making a decent movie and were just putting out scenes with actors speaking words. It is totally boring and unoriginal. I'm not sure if Aniston and Eckhart have any chemistry together, I could barely pay attention to them. For some reason Martin Sheen and Frances Conroy are also in the film - I guess they need to pay their mortgages too.
There is nothing good in this film. It's not hateful, but it's very not good. Everything from the dialogue, to the acting to the direction is boring and hackneyed and bad. It shocks me that a Hollywood studio would put money into a turd like this. I guess it's cheap and easy to recoup the production investment. Whatever - that's a terrible reason to make a movie.
Leap Year, you're on my list for my next long plane-trip in mid-June!
Stars: 1 of 4
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Did You Hear About the Morgans? (Sunday, December 20, 2009) (200)
Writer/director Marc Lawrence clearly loves Hugh Grant - and vice versa. The stuttering Brit star has been in all three of of Lawrence's feature films, Two Weeks Notice, Music and Lyrics and now, Did You Hear About the Morgans? They are all have three different female co-stars and all have Grant in about the same role in each: a nice and cute guy who the women try to hate, but can't. (I guess that's basically the same rose as Grant's who career.)
In The Morgans, Grant and ex-wife Sarah Jessica Parker live exceptionally well but separately in Manhattan. One night, when he is trying to woo her back to him, they witness a murder. They are immediately put into the witness relocation program and end up in Wyoming, where they stay with federal marshal Sam Elliott and his wife Mary Steenburgen. Being from the West, the cowboy duo like guns, rodeo and everything foreign and uncomfortable to the pansy New Yorkers. Grant and Parker learn to love and trust each other again as they deal with a simpler life in a small town.
There's not a heck of a lot of depth to the story - not that one would really expect that. Parker basically plays Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City - but in the Upper Mountain West rather than the Upper East Side. She makes foolish and hateful comments about common people being dumb and doesn't understand that you can buy a sweater that's not cashmere (um, Carrie/Sarah, you can actually shop at K-Mart in New York City too). Why she has decided to take her highest profile roles as a total heartless, affected bitch is beyond me. I have to admit I really hate the roles she plays. She's whiny and out-of-touch with reality (even reality below 42nd street).
Somehow this couple are the first significantly rich Manhattanites to have never been out of the city to know how pretty the natural world is. In one dumb scene, they look at the night sky in Wyoming and marvel at all the stars they see. Are you telling me they don't own a house in the Hamptons or the Hudson Valley? They've never been to Vail to go skiing or Bora Bora for snorkeling? This is dumb.
As with the other Lawrence films, Grant is given some of the best lines of the film - and he does really well with them (particularly the last line of the film). He really does have some magnetic charm to him and is a very good comedian. His performance (and some of his dialogue) as well as the Elliott and Steenburgen characters are the best things in the film. I guess I got out of this what I expected: a rather anonymous and recycled comedy. I would have rather had less aloof, rich New Yorker from Parker, but I'm happy with what I got from Grant.
Stars: 1.5 of 4
In The Morgans, Grant and ex-wife Sarah Jessica Parker live exceptionally well but separately in Manhattan. One night, when he is trying to woo her back to him, they witness a murder. They are immediately put into the witness relocation program and end up in Wyoming, where they stay with federal marshal Sam Elliott and his wife Mary Steenburgen. Being from the West, the cowboy duo like guns, rodeo and everything foreign and uncomfortable to the pansy New Yorkers. Grant and Parker learn to love and trust each other again as they deal with a simpler life in a small town.
There's not a heck of a lot of depth to the story - not that one would really expect that. Parker basically plays Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City - but in the Upper Mountain West rather than the Upper East Side. She makes foolish and hateful comments about common people being dumb and doesn't understand that you can buy a sweater that's not cashmere (um, Carrie/Sarah, you can actually shop at K-Mart in New York City too). Why she has decided to take her highest profile roles as a total heartless, affected bitch is beyond me. I have to admit I really hate the roles she plays. She's whiny and out-of-touch with reality (even reality below 42nd street).
Somehow this couple are the first significantly rich Manhattanites to have never been out of the city to know how pretty the natural world is. In one dumb scene, they look at the night sky in Wyoming and marvel at all the stars they see. Are you telling me they don't own a house in the Hamptons or the Hudson Valley? They've never been to Vail to go skiing or Bora Bora for snorkeling? This is dumb.
As with the other Lawrence films, Grant is given some of the best lines of the film - and he does really well with them (particularly the last line of the film). He really does have some magnetic charm to him and is a very good comedian. His performance (and some of his dialogue) as well as the Elliott and Steenburgen characters are the best things in the film. I guess I got out of this what I expected: a rather anonymous and recycled comedy. I would have rather had less aloof, rich New Yorker from Parker, but I'm happy with what I got from Grant.
Stars: 1.5 of 4
Friday, November 27, 2009
The Ugly Truth (Friday, November 27, 2009) (173)
For reasons I can't explain, recently Hollywood producers seem so bored with the romantic comedy genre that they've decided they should freshen up the films by adding a lot of really dirty language and imagery to them. At least that's how it feels with a movie like The Ugly Truth. For reasons I can't explain the dialogue in this movie is totally graphic and dirty, while the story is totally recycled crap.
Katherine Heigl is a local news reporter in Sacramento who is forced into hiring public access gross-out host Gerard Butler. Butler's show is about how men and women are looking for different things romantically - that men are looking to get laid and women are looking for love and romance. Long story short, Heigl gets Butler to coach her to be a better sex vixen as she woos her hunky next door neighbor, but, of course the two of them end up falling in love. (I couldn't have guessed that from the movie poster!)
I don't get the appeal of Heigl. I guess she's blond and has big boobs (though her boobs are totally unmemorable to me), but she has absolutely no personality and doesn't have the prettiest face on earth. I don't know - maybe it's the Gray's Anatomization of America. People in lousy television shows go out and make lousy movies and sad people go to see those movies and - voila! A star is born! (Interestingly, Heigl seems to have been born 45 days before me in Washington, DC where I was also born - so I guess I feel some cosmic connection to her.... no -wait - that's gas.)
Nothing really moves in this story. Butler seems to be a good father-figure to his young nephew, but then that story is dropped by the second act; there's a trite Pygmalion sequence where Butler is teaching Heigl how not to be an uptight nerd with men, but that goes nowhere; there's another trite Cyrano de Bergerac sequence where he feeds her lines when she's out with a guy on a date, but this goes nowhere too. It's sorta a 'throw pasta against the wall and see what sticks' approach to narrative structure. It's as if the writers (there are three of 'em!) collected a bunch of tired bits from other movies and put them in a pot to make stew. You get a bit of this and a bit of that in every bite.
What you also get is a totally sophomoric script and a film with an R rating for no purpose. It would not have been much different with tame dialogue and, say, a PG-13 rating. Just because you have an adult concept (which this really isn't) doesn't mean you have to season it with stupid expletives. Sorry to sound like a prude here, but there's a place for everything - and for a dumb rom com, there is no need for the foul language.
Stars: .5 of 4
Katherine Heigl is a local news reporter in Sacramento who is forced into hiring public access gross-out host Gerard Butler. Butler's show is about how men and women are looking for different things romantically - that men are looking to get laid and women are looking for love and romance. Long story short, Heigl gets Butler to coach her to be a better sex vixen as she woos her hunky next door neighbor, but, of course the two of them end up falling in love. (I couldn't have guessed that from the movie poster!)
I don't get the appeal of Heigl. I guess she's blond and has big boobs (though her boobs are totally unmemorable to me), but she has absolutely no personality and doesn't have the prettiest face on earth. I don't know - maybe it's the Gray's Anatomization of America. People in lousy television shows go out and make lousy movies and sad people go to see those movies and - voila! A star is born! (Interestingly, Heigl seems to have been born 45 days before me in Washington, DC where I was also born - so I guess I feel some cosmic connection to her.... no -wait - that's gas.)
Nothing really moves in this story. Butler seems to be a good father-figure to his young nephew, but then that story is dropped by the second act; there's a trite Pygmalion sequence where Butler is teaching Heigl how not to be an uptight nerd with men, but that goes nowhere; there's another trite Cyrano de Bergerac sequence where he feeds her lines when she's out with a guy on a date, but this goes nowhere too. It's sorta a 'throw pasta against the wall and see what sticks' approach to narrative structure. It's as if the writers (there are three of 'em!) collected a bunch of tired bits from other movies and put them in a pot to make stew. You get a bit of this and a bit of that in every bite.
What you also get is a totally sophomoric script and a film with an R rating for no purpose. It would not have been much different with tame dialogue and, say, a PG-13 rating. Just because you have an adult concept (which this really isn't) doesn't mean you have to season it with stupid expletives. Sorry to sound like a prude here, but there's a place for everything - and for a dumb rom com, there is no need for the foul language.
Stars: .5 of 4
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Management (Friday, November 13, 2009) (162)
This film might be the most mundane, formulaic independent comedy I've seen in a long time. It is filled with incredibly banal cliches and has such an obvious narrative that it is totally boring and frustrating to watch.
Steve Zahn is a shy loser who lives in his parents' motel in suburban Arizona where he is the night manager. One day, hottie Jennifer Aniston arrives and checks in for a few nights while she does her job, selling hotel/motel artwork lithographs in the area. (You see, the fourth rule of independent films is that you have to have at least one character with a weird job you've never heard of - the weirder the better.) Apparently Zahn has never seen a woman as beautiful as Aniston (really?!) so he loses his mind and begins to solicit her in creepy, inappropriate ways. He asks her if he can touch her butt, and she lets him - though it's unclear why. At some point the two have a quickie in the laundry room before she hits the road again. Zahn, having lost his shit already, follows her around the country for awhile awkwardly stalking her, hoping he can wear down her resolve not to date him.
Zahn is actually one of the best things in the movie. He does well with the terrible material he's given (the script of this is pretty bad) and moves from shy and pitiful to quirky and weird very well. It's hard to be too upset with him because he's very sweet, and it's clear that he painfully has no game, and doesn't at all have a mean agenda with regard to Aniston. Still, the movie moves in bizarre directions for reasons that could only come from an indie screenwriter.
Aniston is as terrible and lifeless as she ever is. I absolutely cannot understand what her appeal is or why people would think of her as a good actor or a above-average beauty. She's totally monotone, bitter and mean and aside from her very common girl-next-door looks, it is unclear why Zahn's character would pursue her. Somehow in the third act, Woody Harrelson is Aniston's ex-boyfriend/future husband, but that whole part made no sense to me.
The only other nice thing to say about the film is that there are a handful of songs from the indie collective band the New Pornographers in the soundtrack. These are nice to have, as they give a few moments of relief from the otherwise unfunny story - but they are extra frustrating that something as good as the Pornographers music would be tied to such a sinking ship as this movie.
This is not a movie worthy of scorn. It is teeny-tiny and would never have been made without the star power behind it (that is Aniston and Harrelson - though I guess Zahn has some indie cache). It is just so awfully trite that it does not deserve any love.
Stars: 1 of 4
Steve Zahn is a shy loser who lives in his parents' motel in suburban Arizona where he is the night manager. One day, hottie Jennifer Aniston arrives and checks in for a few nights while she does her job, selling hotel/motel artwork lithographs in the area. (You see, the fourth rule of independent films is that you have to have at least one character with a weird job you've never heard of - the weirder the better.) Apparently Zahn has never seen a woman as beautiful as Aniston (really?!) so he loses his mind and begins to solicit her in creepy, inappropriate ways. He asks her if he can touch her butt, and she lets him - though it's unclear why. At some point the two have a quickie in the laundry room before she hits the road again. Zahn, having lost his shit already, follows her around the country for awhile awkwardly stalking her, hoping he can wear down her resolve not to date him.
Zahn is actually one of the best things in the movie. He does well with the terrible material he's given (the script of this is pretty bad) and moves from shy and pitiful to quirky and weird very well. It's hard to be too upset with him because he's very sweet, and it's clear that he painfully has no game, and doesn't at all have a mean agenda with regard to Aniston. Still, the movie moves in bizarre directions for reasons that could only come from an indie screenwriter.
Aniston is as terrible and lifeless as she ever is. I absolutely cannot understand what her appeal is or why people would think of her as a good actor or a above-average beauty. She's totally monotone, bitter and mean and aside from her very common girl-next-door looks, it is unclear why Zahn's character would pursue her. Somehow in the third act, Woody Harrelson is Aniston's ex-boyfriend/future husband, but that whole part made no sense to me.
The only other nice thing to say about the film is that there are a handful of songs from the indie collective band the New Pornographers in the soundtrack. These are nice to have, as they give a few moments of relief from the otherwise unfunny story - but they are extra frustrating that something as good as the Pornographers music would be tied to such a sinking ship as this movie.
This is not a movie worthy of scorn. It is teeny-tiny and would never have been made without the star power behind it (that is Aniston and Harrelson - though I guess Zahn has some indie cache). It is just so awfully trite that it does not deserve any love.
Stars: 1 of 4
Saturday, October 17, 2009
New York, I Love You (Saturday, October 17, 2009) (149)
This film is a re-make of the recent French picture Paris, Je T'Aime that had a series of simple one-scene film shorts about people falling in love in the French capital. As only dunderheaded Hollywood folk can do, producers felt that if it worked OK en francais, pourquoi pas en Anglais. (OK- I'll stop with the French, though I do like to think of film people speaking French when ripping off a tired idea.)
The main problem with the concept, though, is that the French film as thin and treacly. In other words, there was once a bad French movie that was re-made in New York and the re-make is really bad.
So the outline of the film remains the same: A pastiche of short films set in New York City dealing with people falling in love, flirting, falling out of love or fucking. I should be clear here - by 'people,' I'm only speaking of white people and by 'New York City,' I'm only speaking of Manhattan and Jewy Brooklyn. How there could not be a single story of black people, Latino people, Korean people, Russian people - let alone a single gay person of any gender - is shocking to me and makes me think the production had nothing to do with New Yorkers at all. (To be fair, there is one Sikh man, one Chinese woman, one bi-racial whore, one Orthodox Jewish woman, and an old Jewish couple - Yay! Diversity!)
Each short is directed by a different film maker and each one has its own personality and style. One is silly and funny, one is tragic, one is romantic, one is naturalistic. Then in between each sequence, there are a few characters who tie all the stories together (because as American film viewers, we are apparently dumbfucks and can't possibly understand a bunch of shorts without a few directorial guides). Rather than helping to tie the stories together, these interludes create more unusual segues - suggesting connections that are not actually there at all. Letting one short butt up against another would be much easier to comprehend. Instead we are left asking if there is one major story that we're missing as we watch all the small films. (There is not.)
Easily the biggest surprise of the whole thing is that some of the actors and directors who I would expect the least from give some of the best moments. Director Brett Ratner, who I think normally can't direct his way out of a paper bag, does a great job in his short about a boy (Anton Yelchin) who is tricked into taking a girl in a wheelchair (Olivia Thirlby) to the senior prom. It's a very funny bit and generally well done -and easily the best of all the shorts. Actor Shia LaBeouf, who I think is a terrible actor, is very good in a serious role in a heavy-handed, but elegant-ish short by Shekhar Kapur (a director I don't think much of either).
The main problem with the concept, though, is that the French film as thin and treacly. In other words, there was once a bad French movie that was re-made in New York and the re-make is really bad.
So the outline of the film remains the same: A pastiche of short films set in New York City dealing with people falling in love, flirting, falling out of love or fucking. I should be clear here - by 'people,' I'm only speaking of white people and by 'New York City,' I'm only speaking of Manhattan and Jewy Brooklyn. How there could not be a single story of black people, Latino people, Korean people, Russian people - let alone a single gay person of any gender - is shocking to me and makes me think the production had nothing to do with New Yorkers at all. (To be fair, there is one Sikh man, one Chinese woman, one bi-racial whore, one Orthodox Jewish woman, and an old Jewish couple - Yay! Diversity!)
Each short is directed by a different film maker and each one has its own personality and style. One is silly and funny, one is tragic, one is romantic, one is naturalistic. Then in between each sequence, there are a few characters who tie all the stories together (because as American film viewers, we are apparently dumbfucks and can't possibly understand a bunch of shorts without a few directorial guides). Rather than helping to tie the stories together, these interludes create more unusual segues - suggesting connections that are not actually there at all. Letting one short butt up against another would be much easier to comprehend. Instead we are left asking if there is one major story that we're missing as we watch all the small films. (There is not.)
Easily the biggest surprise of the whole thing is that some of the actors and directors who I would expect the least from give some of the best moments. Director Brett Ratner, who I think normally can't direct his way out of a paper bag, does a great job in his short about a boy (Anton Yelchin) who is tricked into taking a girl in a wheelchair (Olivia Thirlby) to the senior prom. It's a very funny bit and generally well done -and easily the best of all the shorts. Actor Shia LaBeouf, who I think is a terrible actor, is very good in a serious role in a heavy-handed, but elegant-ish short by Shekhar Kapur (a director I don't think much of either).
But this is, like, the worst praise a movie can get, right? That the people who really suck in general didn't suck as much as expected and were actually pretty OK. Well - that's about all I'm going to give the film. Why there were not love stories set in Washington Heights or Spanish Harlem with people who spoke Spanish, or why there was not, say a Korean story in Queens - or, forgodssake, a gay love story - is totally beyond me. I don't think this is going to get much attention or play outside of New York and I think New Yorkers are rather bored by such a safe, white script purporting to be about the whole city.
Stars: .5 of 4
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Julie & Julia (Saturday, August 22, 2009) (119)
This movie is a mashup of Julie Powell's blog and book by the same name and Julia Child's book 'My Life in France'. Written by directed by Nora Ephron, the movie is mostly annoying - or at least half annoying - with an annoying lead character and a twee storyline.
In the movie, Julie Powell, a writer in New York who works for the some post-September 11 government aid organization, has reached a low point in her professional life. She has a bunch of horrible, unloving friends who seem to be more successful than she is. She has a wonderful husband, who she seems to treat like crap, and they move to Astoria to a nice apartment - which she thinks is totally terrible (for the location and the space).
To turn her life around she starts cooking and blogging about every recipe from Julia Child's cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Her blog becomes a sensation and she gains some feeling of self-worth or something.
All along the way, there is a parallel with Julia Child in Paris where she learns to cook and writes her cookbook.
Meryl Streep is very funny as Child, although her performance is very much in the realm of imitation rather than interpretation. Add this to the long list of funny voices in Meryl's quiver. Still, she's very likable and not painful to watch.
Amy Adams, on the other hand, is very annoying and whiny and annoying to watch. It's actually hard to say if this is the writing or her performance (I do normally like her). The character is an ungrateful girl and doesn't seem to have anything to offer. It's never clear why she has to begin the project other than to have something to keep her mind off what she considers her terrible life - which isn't that terrible at all. Her husband is supportive throughout and she seems totally self-absorbed and totally uninterested in him or the nice things he says. She constantly bitches about living in Queens - as if Astoria was three hours away from Manhattan (it's not - it's more like 10-15 minutes from Midtown - much closer than I am actually). (The whole Astoria thing, I think is much closer to a status thing - that she's upset because it's not cool to live in an outer borough - let alone Queens. This is stupid and unrealistic and baseless and hateful.)
The Julia parts in Paris are mostly delightful and light and nice. If the movie was just about Julia Child in Paris, it would have been a nice movie, probably.
Julie does finish her cooking project, but never really seems to grow or learn anything. It wouldn't be crazy to think (in an alternate universe) that over the course of the process of cooking the whole book and working so closely with a woman (Child) who she sees (and we see) as a saint Julie would become a better person and rise above her hateful, commercial-obsessed friends. But no - she is in the end as she was at the beginning - a dumb girl.
Probably the most frustrating thing for me about this movie is that is could so easily be a great food movie like Babette's Feast or Big Night or Like Water for Chocolate where you walk out of the theater salivating and hungry for great stuff to eat. Instead we're shown only very limited food-stuff and the cooking and eating seems to be background. Throughout the film, Julie is haunted by the fact that the last dish she has to make is some de-boned duck with some ground meat stuffed inside. This sounds great and looks great for the brief seconds we see her preparing this on screen - but it would be wonderful to see more if it. I would love to see the finished product and imagine what it tastes like. I don't understand why we don't get this chance. It's a tragic decision by Ephron.
Stars: 1 of 4
In the movie, Julie Powell, a writer in New York who works for the some post-September 11 government aid organization, has reached a low point in her professional life. She has a bunch of horrible, unloving friends who seem to be more successful than she is. She has a wonderful husband, who she seems to treat like crap, and they move to Astoria to a nice apartment - which she thinks is totally terrible (for the location and the space).
To turn her life around she starts cooking and blogging about every recipe from Julia Child's cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Her blog becomes a sensation and she gains some feeling of self-worth or something.
All along the way, there is a parallel with Julia Child in Paris where she learns to cook and writes her cookbook.
Meryl Streep is very funny as Child, although her performance is very much in the realm of imitation rather than interpretation. Add this to the long list of funny voices in Meryl's quiver. Still, she's very likable and not painful to watch.
Amy Adams, on the other hand, is very annoying and whiny and annoying to watch. It's actually hard to say if this is the writing or her performance (I do normally like her). The character is an ungrateful girl and doesn't seem to have anything to offer. It's never clear why she has to begin the project other than to have something to keep her mind off what she considers her terrible life - which isn't that terrible at all. Her husband is supportive throughout and she seems totally self-absorbed and totally uninterested in him or the nice things he says. She constantly bitches about living in Queens - as if Astoria was three hours away from Manhattan (it's not - it's more like 10-15 minutes from Midtown - much closer than I am actually). (The whole Astoria thing, I think is much closer to a status thing - that she's upset because it's not cool to live in an outer borough - let alone Queens. This is stupid and unrealistic and baseless and hateful.)
The Julia parts in Paris are mostly delightful and light and nice. If the movie was just about Julia Child in Paris, it would have been a nice movie, probably.
Julie does finish her cooking project, but never really seems to grow or learn anything. It wouldn't be crazy to think (in an alternate universe) that over the course of the process of cooking the whole book and working so closely with a woman (Child) who she sees (and we see) as a saint Julie would become a better person and rise above her hateful, commercial-obsessed friends. But no - she is in the end as she was at the beginning - a dumb girl.
Probably the most frustrating thing for me about this movie is that is could so easily be a great food movie like Babette's Feast or Big Night or Like Water for Chocolate where you walk out of the theater salivating and hungry for great stuff to eat. Instead we're shown only very limited food-stuff and the cooking and eating seems to be background. Throughout the film, Julie is haunted by the fact that the last dish she has to make is some de-boned duck with some ground meat stuffed inside. This sounds great and looks great for the brief seconds we see her preparing this on screen - but it would be wonderful to see more if it. I would love to see the finished product and imagine what it tastes like. I don't understand why we don't get this chance. It's a tragic decision by Ephron.
Stars: 1 of 4
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Adam (Saturday, August 1, 2009) (104)
This movie might have the dullest name of all the movies I've seen this year. It's fitting, though, as the film itself is super-duper boring and trite. Adam, the eponymous lead character, is a rather high-functioning man with Asperger syndrome who lives alone in his Upper West Side apartment. There he meets a young woman who is his upstairs neighbor. Somehow the two fall in love (I don't know - something about her needing a 'reliable man' and having daddy issues and him being turned on by her casual friendliness to him).
There's some silliness with the woman's father - played by Peter Gallagher - who is a bully that walks all over her mother - played by Amy Irving (ah, Amy Irving, mmmmm). Much of the time is spent with him being weird and 'Aspergery' (for laughs, of course) and her trying to re-train him to act more standard-like. This is boring for the most part. A few times the two get in fights because he doesn't always know how to behave in normal situations and she gets frustrated. But this is stupid because she should expect at least a few of these moments when she gets involved with him (it's not as if he's more normal sometimes and she can forget his situation - he's always a bit off-normal).
The acting is actually pretty good. Hugh Dancy is believable as Adam (although I always wonder if it's easier to play a character with a mental handicap rather than a 'normal person'); Rose Byrne is good as Beth; Gallagher is fine as a jerk; Amy Irving looks magnificent though her role is limited; Frankie Faison is funny as always as the old wise friend.
Mostly my problem is with the writing and directing with is silly and boring. I love to think about how sill the pitch was: 'The movie is Say Anything meets Rain Man. A woman with an Electra complex meets an guy with Aspergers and they fall madly in love. Will he be able to replace her daddy when he fills his shelves with cereal boxes? Will she ever be able to understand that he likes to be touched - but not too hard?!' Oy vey.
Stars: .5 of 4
Sunday, July 19, 2009
(500) Days of Summer (Sunday, July 19, 2009) (95)
I went into this movie expecting to be annoyed by its painful hipness and saccharine romantic non-lovstoryness. All the advance press I saw and heard about it made me cringe. The soundtrack was apparently *so very important* and the director gave the actors ipods with moody tracks on them to get them in the right frame of mind. Oh - and the couple is doomed because they both love the music of the very unlucky-in-love Smiths. Bah! I have to admit, however, that I was pleasantly surprised by the final product, which was a very mature, fun and interesting take on a romantic-ish comedy.
The story is told in a choppy way where we jump around in time looking at different points (different days) in the relationship between and young man and young woman. Through the course of the film, we get the full chronology and understand the relationship pretty well. They meet in the office, he falls in love with her; she is oblivious to him. They rather fall for each other, but she doesn't want to be in a relationship. They break up and try to be friends and see what happens next.
The soundtrack is an important part of the film. It's quirky and clever featuring songs by the Smiths, Regina Spektor, Feist and Simon and Garfunkle (to name a few). They all add to the interesting atmosphere of the film - somewhat nostalgic and retro and also very ultra hip(ster). I must say, I could have done with a bit less hipster skinny retro fashion. It felt a bit forced and silly at times.
The acting is generally very good. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is great and his performance here is as good as his work in Mysterious Skin, Brick and the Lookout. He plays very well with Zooey Deschanel, who has always been cute, but actually pulls off a good performance here. He comes over very honestly as a wide-eyed optimist and hopeless romantic; she is a very believable modern urbanite who doesn't believe in conventions like 'relationships' and 'love'. (In her one scene, Minka Kelly, Lila Garrity from Friday Night Lights, is very good too).
Overall I'm rather impressed by the direction by Marc Webb. At times it does feel a bit showy and trite, but there are some very fresh moments too. There were some clever post-modern touches from the first moments where a voice over says that this is *not* a love story and Brechtian titles throughout. There is some very nice use of split-screens including a clever 'fantasy/reality' sequence. The use of music and animation is very nice and effective.
I guess lots of people (reviewers and viewers) are talking about the interesting dynamic here where the man and woman switch typical gender roles so the man is the romantic and the woman is the dispassionate rationalist unable to love easily. I feel, however that there's not much to this role twist - knowing this switch doesn't really change my feelings about the characters much or make them particularly more interesting. It's a bit of an obtuse detail, honestly.
Overall this is a nice movie. I would absolutely watch it again - partly for the interesting style and partly for the great acting and the dynamic relationship between Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel. I think there are some corny moments in it, but there are a lot of nice moments too. It is romantic, yes, but it is also realistic and set totally in our world. That's a nice change.
The story is told in a choppy way where we jump around in time looking at different points (different days) in the relationship between and young man and young woman. Through the course of the film, we get the full chronology and understand the relationship pretty well. They meet in the office, he falls in love with her; she is oblivious to him. They rather fall for each other, but she doesn't want to be in a relationship. They break up and try to be friends and see what happens next.
The soundtrack is an important part of the film. It's quirky and clever featuring songs by the Smiths, Regina Spektor, Feist and Simon and Garfunkle (to name a few). They all add to the interesting atmosphere of the film - somewhat nostalgic and retro and also very ultra hip(ster). I must say, I could have done with a bit less hipster skinny retro fashion. It felt a bit forced and silly at times.
The acting is generally very good. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is great and his performance here is as good as his work in Mysterious Skin, Brick and the Lookout. He plays very well with Zooey Deschanel, who has always been cute, but actually pulls off a good performance here. He comes over very honestly as a wide-eyed optimist and hopeless romantic; she is a very believable modern urbanite who doesn't believe in conventions like 'relationships' and 'love'. (In her one scene, Minka Kelly, Lila Garrity from Friday Night Lights, is very good too).
Overall I'm rather impressed by the direction by Marc Webb. At times it does feel a bit showy and trite, but there are some very fresh moments too. There were some clever post-modern touches from the first moments where a voice over says that this is *not* a love story and Brechtian titles throughout. There is some very nice use of split-screens including a clever 'fantasy/reality' sequence. The use of music and animation is very nice and effective.
I guess lots of people (reviewers and viewers) are talking about the interesting dynamic here where the man and woman switch typical gender roles so the man is the romantic and the woman is the dispassionate rationalist unable to love easily. I feel, however that there's not much to this role twist - knowing this switch doesn't really change my feelings about the characters much or make them particularly more interesting. It's a bit of an obtuse detail, honestly.
Overall this is a nice movie. I would absolutely watch it again - partly for the interesting style and partly for the great acting and the dynamic relationship between Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel. I think there are some corny moments in it, but there are a lot of nice moments too. It is romantic, yes, but it is also realistic and set totally in our world. That's a nice change.
Stars: 3 of 4
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Confessions of a Shopaholic (Wednesday, July 15, 2009) (91)
There's a line near the beginning of this film about how 'cost and worth are very different things'. Renting this film was a negligible cost for me through Netflix, but it was worth an hour and 45 minutes of my life that I'll never get back.
This is a terrible, unfunny, sexist, trite and dull movie. I've liked Isla Fisher in the past (she was good enough in The Wedding Crashers and good in The Lookout), but here she takes a few steps back to shitiness. But she's really not the problem with this movie.
The story in a nutshell has a so-called 'shopaholic' (of just a girl with no sense of her credit limit and an over-inflated idea of designer label clothes) who is something like $10,000 in credit card debt (seriously - that's all?!) who is laid off from her job as a journalist at one magazine. She then takes a job at a business magazine partly because the editor is hot and partly because she hopes that it will lead to another job at another magazine - some Vogue sort of thing. I don't know - from there she writes, uh, one column about investing in fashion or something and turns into a media superstar. Then she goes on TV and is outed for being in debt (again, she's in $10,000 of credit card debt, which somehow is a big amount of debt).
I couldn't figure out if the writers/director/producers thought that it was just Fisher's character was an idiot whose idea of journalism is to google the topic and copy from a For Dummies book, or if they felt that all women were idiots and would align with Fisher's character and waste their money on this piece of trash.
One of the worst things about this is for a movie about a clothes horse, Fisher didn't have a good fashion eye at all. Not a single outfit looked good on her. I couldn't figure out if they did this on purpose, but if they did, I didn't understand what kind of point they were making. Also - if your making a movie about being in credit card debt, you have to use a bigger number than $10,000. It seems to me that a real shopaholic could spend that much in one spree. Shouldn't she be, like, $100,000 in debt or more?
Whatever. Writing any more about this garbage is a waste of my time. This is a movie with absolutely no redeeming qualities. The acting is bad, the writing is terrible - even the directing is dull (if I have to see another 'Going to Miami' sequence in a movie begin with a helicopter shot over the Biscayne Bay, I might die).
Stars: None of 4
This is a terrible, unfunny, sexist, trite and dull movie. I've liked Isla Fisher in the past (she was good enough in The Wedding Crashers and good in The Lookout), but here she takes a few steps back to shitiness. But she's really not the problem with this movie.
The story in a nutshell has a so-called 'shopaholic' (of just a girl with no sense of her credit limit and an over-inflated idea of designer label clothes) who is something like $10,000 in credit card debt (seriously - that's all?!) who is laid off from her job as a journalist at one magazine. She then takes a job at a business magazine partly because the editor is hot and partly because she hopes that it will lead to another job at another magazine - some Vogue sort of thing. I don't know - from there she writes, uh, one column about investing in fashion or something and turns into a media superstar. Then she goes on TV and is outed for being in debt (again, she's in $10,000 of credit card debt, which somehow is a big amount of debt).
I couldn't figure out if the writers/director/producers thought that it was just Fisher's character was an idiot whose idea of journalism is to google the topic and copy from a For Dummies book, or if they felt that all women were idiots and would align with Fisher's character and waste their money on this piece of trash.
One of the worst things about this is for a movie about a clothes horse, Fisher didn't have a good fashion eye at all. Not a single outfit looked good on her. I couldn't figure out if they did this on purpose, but if they did, I didn't understand what kind of point they were making. Also - if your making a movie about being in credit card debt, you have to use a bigger number than $10,000. It seems to me that a real shopaholic could spend that much in one spree. Shouldn't she be, like, $100,000 in debt or more?
Whatever. Writing any more about this garbage is a waste of my time. This is a movie with absolutely no redeeming qualities. The acting is bad, the writing is terrible - even the directing is dull (if I have to see another 'Going to Miami' sequence in a movie begin with a helicopter shot over the Biscayne Bay, I might die).
Stars: None of 4
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