Cinematic Sass From A Film-Lovin' Floozy

Adventures in Netflixing: "27 Dresses"

I like Katherine Heigl.  She's a broad with balls.  Not in the tranny way - I just mean that she's gutsy, not afraid to speak her mind.  Even before Emmy-geddon, she was dissing how women were portrayed in Knocked Up, and commenting on how certain Grey's Anatomy ex-co-stars ought not to speak in public.   She's also talented and gorgeous.  Here Heigl joins forces with a lady director and a lady screenwriter.  How could they not emerge a triumphant triumvirate, or at least churn out the female equivalent of Wedding Crashers?

  Eh.  27 Dresses wasn't terrible.  But I'm not sure it ever had much of a chance to punch outside it's weight class, either.  A heroine isn't exactly going to be a feisty ball of fire when she is obsessed with weddings, and the happy ending involves one of her own.     

Heigl plays Jane, an executive assistant who is secretly in love with her perfect boss (Ed Burns), a handsome, sensitive, self-made, eco-friendly vegan mogul.  (This character concept is pretty clever - how Burns winds up being not even a little bit funny is mystifying.  Steve Martin's variation of this character in Baby Mama was all that and a bag of Sun Chips.)  At any rate, when Jane isn't busy bending over backwards for Burns (which he somehow never takes in a sexual way), she likes to unwind in her spare time by donning one taffeta monstrosity after another and catering to the every whim of a rapid succession of her altar-bound friends.  Jane is too nice, it turns out.  We learn this because, as if her actions did not already provide ample proof of this, the supporting characters in Jane's life drive it home repeatedly by gettin' all up in her bidness with Oprah-approved adages about how she ought to stop being the wind beneath everyone else's wings and learn to soar on her own.

Rounding out the cast is James Marsden as Kevin, a lifestyle section newspaper journalist who is hungry to churn out fodder far more filling than wedding cake exposés, and Malin Akerman as Jane's malignant man-eating sister, who bursts onto the scene and straight into the arms (and heart) of Jane's beloved boss.  

At one point, Jane and Kevin embark upon a road trip that hydroplanes them straight into a ditch on a rainy night and forces them to drag their wet and bickering selves into a nearby bar for refuge.  This set-up provides them with that pivotal opportunity to not only flirt drunkenly but - more importantly - croon and dance along to Elton John's "Benny and the Jets."  Because only in the movies are people contractually obligated to follow up the declaration, "OH MY GOD!  I LOVE THIS SONG!" with leading a rousing sing-along that brings together everyone in the bar - even the toothless vagrant slumped near the pool table - in a toe-tappin', hand-clappin', feel-good burst of unity.

Also only in the movies is the second-choice guy as hot, witty, kind, charming and hell-bent on wooing as James Marsden's character.  In real life, a guy this persistent has a crawl-space where he keeps the sacrificial voodoo altar built in homage to the woman of his dreams.  In real life, he would be categorized by your average FBI profiler as not "borderline" anything, but "certifiably" something - and it wouldn't be something good.  In real life, he would look a lot more like Robert Englund. 

Sometimes a chick flick is just a unique casting choice away from being reclassified as horror.

Like a one-legged bridesmaid at the bouquet toss, this flick stumbles around an awful lot.  I give it a C++. 

Adventures in Netflixing: "The Eye"

Geez.  Guys sure will go to great lengths to see Jessica Alba slink around in a nearly-sheer tank top.  They will even construct an entire crappy movie around such a thinly veiled (so to speak) premise.  I have a vague recollection of the original Chinese version of this movie, 2002's Gin Gwai, being infinitely scarier, no doubt in part because of its emphasis on, you know, ghosts, and death, and stuff.

Jessica Alba plays Sydney, a blind violinist who receives a cornea transplant which imparts the gift of sight.  And second sight.  Yup.  These are some highly prophetic peepers.  See, the hospital doesn't adequately screen its transplant donors for transferable diseases like Witchcraft-itus or Haley-Joel-Osment-in-Sixth-Sense Syndrome.  You'd think that would leave the door wide open for a malpractice suit, and even scarier, an ambulance-chasing personal injury lawyer, which might have lent the movie some genuinely horrifying moments.  Alas, no such luck.  Speaking of Sixth Sense, they even recycle the "I see dead people" line, without a trace of cleverness or humor.

Worse, this death-centric flick continually points out (in clumsy, heavy-handed fashion) that life is meaningful.  While in the hospital, Sydney meets a plucky, chemotherapy-walloped bald kid who dishes out brave advice like, "Don't be afraid!  The world's a beautiful place!" as a post-op Alba prepares to leave the hospital.  Bleccccccch.   I'm sorry, but I watch scary movies in order to enjoy watching ghouls, or lunatics, or even rogue cell phones terrorizing vapid young models/actors.  If I wanted someone to get all Deepak Chopra on me, I'd check myself into an ashram.

And the warm, gooey schmaltz continues to bubble up from the non-depths of these characters' very souls, right up to the spunky, perky anti-climax.  One of Alba's final lines goes a little something like this: "You don't need eyes to see what's really important in life."  Now, that line might not necessarily have made me retch if it had been Freddie Krueger delivering it, having just plucked the eyeballs out of some insolent blond hotel heiress.  It's all about context. 

Otherwise, watching Jessica Alba ladle out bowlfuls of life-affirming Chicken Soup for the Soul-type truisms with a straight face was mildly amusing, maybe even disconcerting......but not the least bit creepy. 

Grade:  F.

Adventures in Netflixing: "No Country For Old Men"

No Country for Old Men appears to be a place not popular with barbers, either.

Javier Bardem plays a man with the soul of a psychopath and the haircut of a big dork in this thriller that was justly lauded at Oscar time.  Focusing on a Beatles-esque haircut might seem like sacrilege when the coiffure in question is surrounded by so much sharp dialogue, sharp acting and sharp shooting, but I think the haircut really underscored the fact that this character was so cold-blooded and hot tempered, no one would dare laugh at the follicled folly atop his head.  I'm sure Donald Trump's underlings can relate.  Anyway......

Josh Brolin plays a flinty-eyed Everyman who, while out hunting one day, stumbles across a drug deal gone bad.  He absconds with a suitcase filled with a bazillion dollars.  Only Bardem wants the money, too.  In fact, he'll kill for it.  Don't read too much into this, because he'll also kill random people, like gas station attendants and hotel desk clerks, if they so much as look at him funny.  And who wouldn't look at him funny when he's sporting such a haircut?  Herein lies the circuitous condundrum from which much of the film's action springs.  

Tommy Lee Jones plays an old been-there done-that sheriff who has....well....been there and done that.  He nonetheless tries to stop the inevitable bloodbath from unfolding.  (I was going to plop the adjective, "crusty," in front of "old been-there done-that sheriff," but it would just be redundant, because any character that TLJ plays at this juncture of his career is going to fall under the "crusty" umbrella.  He's so crispy and withered, it appears that all you'd have to do is lightly brush his arm by accident, and the whole thing would just snap off like a charred twig.)

As everyone knows, the Coen brothers wrote and directed this picture.  I love the Coens in the way that I used to love unicorns and sparkle stickers when I was ten years old.  I just do.  For one thing, these guys have an enviable way with dialogue.  A favorite exchange of mine takes place after Josh Brolin stumbles home with the suitcase full of loot.  When his wife queries as to where he got it, his stoic reply is, "The gettin' place."    

Good stuff.  I give it a B+.

Mamma Mia The Movie

I have a deep-rooted, unabashed love for ABBA's music.  I realize this is a bit weird when juxtaposed with my love of horror and sci fi.  What can I say?  My ABBA fixation is simply one of those hard-wired character traits I don't have a rational explanation for. 

Even so, I was never compelled to go anywhere near Mamma Mia, the stage musical.  At some point, I did catch wind of the vague rumors that they were going to adapt it for the big screen, but I simply thought to myself, "HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!  What kind of sucker is going to go see that?"

Meanwhile, not far away, some marketing guy at the movie studio was saying to his boss, "I'll tell you what kind of sucker is going to come see this!  First, we get the suckers who love ABBA music!  BUT we're also gonna pull those suckers who think they're too edgy and introspective for musicals!  How?  Meryl Streep, goddamnit!!  You know - Sophie's Choice?  Meryl Streep!" 

I hate to say it, but they had me at, "Meryl Streep, goddamnit!"  The impeccable, flawless, unrivaled, peerless, never-short-of-fabulous Meryl Streep. 

When you throw Meryl Streep into a movie with ABBA songs - uh.......that's awfully tempting.  And improbably, it gets even better.

First, if you're unfamiliar with the basic story:  Meryl plays the single mother of a daughter who is about to marry.  The daughter would like to discover her father's identity, so he can perhaps walk her down the aisle.  Daughter snoops around, reads Mom's diary, and discovers there are three likely baby daddy candidates.  Daughter invites all three to the wedding.  Hilarity, and not infrequent musical interludes, ensue. 

Now, I hate to give movie studio bigwigs credit for doing a good thing on purpose......since I'm unfamiliar with the musical origins of this picture, and since perhaps the above-referenced "good thing" was merely part of an original story they were too lazy to rework, I might not have to.  Regardless, here's where it gets interesting:  Meryl (the actress) is not 20 years old.  Nor is she attempting to play a character who is 20 years old.  And yet more than one of her old suitors appear to have a go at rekindling the flame with her.......versus having a go at the nubile young daughter she has, which is where most Hollywood plotlines would lead.  Handsome leading men (especially of Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth's ilk) courting a woman their own age is pretty damn radical for the big screen.

Can you hear the drums, Fernando?  They're part of a tribal voodoo ritual being conducted by cinema's lady-elders, who traditionally have been vanquished to a remote island after turning 40.  Occasionally one was retrieved by rowboat in order to play someone's kindly old grandmother in a cameo, but otherwise, they had little hope of seeing the mainland on a regular basis.  It's good when one is able to cast a magic spell so potent that she can sneak past the guards and snatch the immunity charm dangling from Jessica Alba's neck.  Maybe someday the whole lady-elder tribe will get all Braveheart-y and paint their faces and stage a coup and spear the casting couches and infiltrate the plotlines of movies everywhere, and this won't even be a big deal anymore.............. 

Oooops, didn't mean to get all politically charged there.  I'd go see the movie anyway, because "Dancing Queen" is such a catchy number.

Can't wait for this one.       

Adventures in Netflixing: "One Missed Call"

This movie lures its audience in with the ol' bait and switch tactic......it baits you with a likable actor of Ed Burns' caliber, and then instantly switches into a movie that Ed Burns wouldn't be caught dead in if not for the fact that he, like most of us, must be getting his hide chapped something fierce by the current state of the economy.  We all have bills to pay.  I get it.

Worse, this flick recycles the old "killer cell phone" premise:  a person receives an ominous phone call portending his or her death.  Even more remarkable, that portent comes via the victim's future self calling his or her present self with the last words he or she will speak before kicking the bucket.  But wait - there's more!  The cellular curse then chooses its next victim from the contacts list of the last victim's phone.  Which only goes to prove how powerful those cell phone companies have become, if even a murderous supernatural entity is afraid to incur extra charges by stepping outside the bounds of your standard calling circle scheme.  On the other hand, I ought to grant this movie a few token points (let's say 2 out of 100) for originality.....it's the first time I've seen an exorcism performed on a cell phone. 

Oh, and Shannyn Sossamon, who is normally likable enough, plays a student preparing for a career in psychiatry, which infuses her with both the clinical expertise and vocabulary to diagnose her friends' increasingly erratic behavior as "weirded out." 

The most interesting thing about this film is that its German release title was Tödlicher Anruf.  That basically translates as "deadly call."  And yes, "tödlicher" is pronounced an awful lot like "toadlicker."  Which is why I love the German language.  But I digress.....

This movie is so saddled with hang ups, it fails to connect to its audience on any level.  I give it an F. 

Adventures in Netflixing: "The Orphanage"

The filmmakers responsible for this one obviously took a page from Guillermo del Toro's book (and probably more than one check from his checkbook too, seeing as how he receives a producing credit here)  - they take a basic haunted house premise and dress it up in such fancy clothes that reviewers trip over themselves to replace phrases like, "Good movie!" with "Rich allegory!"

The Orphanage is in fact a good movie, rich in allegory.

I must fess up and admit that a particular scene - one in which the heroine begins a game of facing a wall, counting to three and then repeatedly looking over her shoulder to see if the ghost children she is attempting to conjure have come out to play - spooked me to such an extent that I utilized both the reliable squinted-eye filter and the relatively foolproof hand-over-face filter to watch it.  It's been a long time since I had occasion to peer through either.  In my defense, it was late at night, the floorboards were creaking and I was the only one in our household still awake and watching this.

The Orphanage is visually beautiful, emotionally nuanced and does manage to run a few chills down the spine, although the overriding theme of parental grief was pretty damn heavy.  Somber sophistication oozes out of the Gothic architecture here - in direct contrast with how cheap thrills are typically heaped like zebra-pattern throw pillows upon the leopard-print duvet of your standard slasher flick. 

On a lighter note, the moral of the story seems to be, "DON'T be rich and live in a mansion so vast that you run the risk of misplacing your child in some remote, far-reaching wing, never to be seen again!" 

Rich people have such silly problems, when you think about it.

I still liked this quite a lot.  A-.

The Andromeda Strain

  I'm looking forward to catching The Andromeda Strain.  Er.....poor choice of words.  I'm looking forward to watching The Andromeda Strain.  Although my anticipation has made me realize what profoundly weird creatures we humans are.  Nowhere else in the animal kingdom do you find a species whose members, during their leisure time, for fun, like to watch movies about their worst fears.  Mice don't watch movies about hungry, marauding cats going on mice-chomping sprees.  Cats don't watch movies about hungry, marauding dogs going on cat-chomping sprees.  Dogs don't watch movies about worldwide chew toy shortages.  Chimps don't watch movies about worldwide banana shortages.  Why we homo sapiens would want to amuse ourselves by watching a movie about a highly infectious disease that threatens to exterminate the entire human race is an intriguing anomoly.

Self-awareness is a double-edged sword for a species to wield.  We think too much sometimes. 

Well, not all of us........

Adventures in Netflixing: "Death at a Funeral"

 This was an occasionally amusing trifle of a comedy, which is too bad - because it had the potential to be a riotous juggernaut of a comedy.  It's well-populated with many cleverly conceived and rendered minor characters who could have easily kicked this flick up to the next level, had they just summoned a bit more moxie, shoved aside the plodding primary characters and commandeered center stage. 

There's Rupert Graves as a pathologically narcissistic novelist......... Ewen Bremmer as a smarmy lovesick loser who uses the titular funeral as an opportunity to try and re-ignite sparks with a one-night-stand who can barely stand the sight of him......and it's a crime that Peter Dinklage wasn't given a far larger role as the gay midget hustler on acid. 

Alas, these fellows were restrained much like junkyard dogs tethered to a stake in the ground; you can't really blame them for chewing the scenery after being starved for richly deserved screen time.  Meanwhile, the rote roles of the principal protagonists were about as tepid as American tea in this standard English comedy of manners. 

Grade: C-.

Adventures in Netflixing: "P.S. I Love You"

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What?  Were you looking for a more in-depth analysis of this movie?

OK, fine. In case you weren't already aware of the basic premise:  Gerard Butler plays a sexy (complete with Irish accent and ability to woo with guitar in hand) and implausibly doting husband who dies of a brain tumor, but not before making elaborate arrangements for his wife (Hillary Swank) to periodically receive encouraging love letters from him after his passing - letters that contain instructions as to how she can get on with her life.  Being implausibly doting and all, he posthumously sends her cake on her birthday, and plans a trip to Ireland for her and her two best girlfriends, and so on.  Yup.  He has more sensitivity in his rigor-mortis-infused pinkie finger than many living husbands possess in their entire bodies.  In fact, this dead husband is so thoughtful, he even nudges his wife in the general direction of his best friend, who has all the makings of an awfully compelling replacement hunk - an equally handsome and sensitive Irish musician who will gamely jump into bed with the widow in an effort to help her move on with her life.  The replacement hunk is also implausibly doting, of course.

The handful of Irish guys I've met in real life have been implausibly drunk.  Some are even missing teeth from bar fights, or are involved in shady business dealings.  A few are implausibly drunk, missing teeth from bar fights, and involved in shady business dealings all at once.  I'm not saying that the Irishmen I've encountered are definitive representatives of their picturesque country.  I'm just suggesting that only in a chick flick are you most likely to find TWO sexy, sensitive Irish musicians who make implausibly doting husbands.

  Which is why I won't apologize for my occasional tendency to indulge in a chick flick.  They are like a good hallucinogen, or a portal to an alternate universe, one in which guys who are as smokin' hot as Gerard Butler not only plan elaborate, thoughtful surprises for their wife on her birthday - or even more amazing, plan elaborate, thoughtful vacations for their wife when it isn't even a special occasion - they furthermore manage to do this from beyond the grave.  Lots of guys who are still breathing can't even plan a day ahead of time to ensure they'll have a clean pair of underwear to wear.

Oh, and Harry Connick Jr. meanders around in an ill-fitting subplot about a third, socially inept suitor.  Sadly, he doesn't really stand a chance with all those studly yet sensitive Irish musicians growing on trees.

What's really embarrassing is that I found myself tearing up at a few different scenes. I was probably mourning the death of the idea of the perfect husband.  Hey, I recognize that this is a fictional construct - one with awfully nice biceps and a lilting Irish accent.

Eh, P.S. I Love You was decent enough.  It's kind of annoying to be reminded that the men who live in chick flicks don't really exist.  On the other hand, the movie offers up a nice heapin' helpin' of hot steamin' man candy.  I give it a B-.

Adventures in Netflixing: "Atonement"

Spoiler Alert!  I shall hereforth reveal which main character bites the big one.  Although if you think about it, life is one big spoiler alert, seeing as how (Spoiler Alert Within The Spoiler Alert!) we are all going to die eventually...........

Don't you hate it when you settle into the upholstered bowels of your sofa, thinking you are going to watch some sweeping, epic, romantic WWII costume drama about a Strapping Young Servant's Son who boldly courts an Imperious Rich Girl whose days are spent skulking about a ginormous mansion and its grounds as she complains about the terrible heat or is otherwise busy instructing the hired help to place a guest's luggage in the blue room - a girl who furthermore wholeheartedly embraces the maxim, "You can never be too rich or too thin!" with her bony arms as her prominent skeletal structure struggles to uphold a rapid succession of wardrobe changes which consist of little more than luxuriant wisps of fabric - and whom the Strapping Young Servant's Son proceeds to make love to in the library, risking both the implosion of the inflexible social caste system of the time but also risking being shredded upon her box-cutter-like hipbones, although it's the former that proves slightly more lethal because Imperious Rich Girl has a meddlesome imp of a kid sister whose days are largely spent concocting fanciful romantic stories and who kind of has a crush on the Strapping Young Servant's Son, which goes awry when she stumbles across the boy and her big sister gettin' it on in the library, which eventually leads her to falsely accuse the Strapping Young Servant's Son of a sex crime he did not actually commit (a crime which is instead committed by one of the rich family's posh friends, who makes convenient use of the fact that servants are easy targets when you need a scapegoat for the sex crime you've just perpetrated), which gets Strapping Young Servant's Son sent away to prison, who after four hard years in the big house finds his sentence commuted to a stint in the armed forces instead, and so he has to struggle to survive the hell of war and eventually reunite with Imperious Rich Girl, who has washed her hands of her snooty, high-falutin' family of lying liars and taken a job as a nurse in London, and a few years pass, after which the meddlesome kid sister (who is wiser now) begs for forgiveness because she has learned her lesson, and Strapping Young Servant Son and Imperious Rich Girl find love and happiness again and live happily ever after, only not really, because it turns out that the whole second half of the film is just basically an elaborate dream sequence, or more specifically, a work of fiction penned by the meddlesome kid sister who by story's end has grown up to become a best-selling novelist, and the love story she has written is her means of atoning for the horrible thing she did, which did not result in a grand epic love story at all, for the Strapping Young Servant's Son winds up dying near a beach in France due to his war wounds, and her big sister, the Formerly Imperious But Since Humbled Rich Girl, is killed by the bombs dropped on London, and you realize you were tricked into watching a nihilistic depressing movie about how what goes around does not always necessarily come around instead of a grand, epic, sweeping romance?

I've always been a fan of Ian McEwan's novels, and of his ability to be so emotionally macabre, so I can't believe I didn't see the plot twist coming.  I liked this well enough, though I get annoyed with myself if I am too accepting of movies that grovel so shamelessly for Academy approval.  I give this a B.