Hilary Swank plays a pianist with a slight tremor in her hand that quickly turns out to be ALS, which will kill her brutally and swiftly.
Watching a movie like this unlocks a lot of emotions for me, and I should really know better than to attempt it. I’m a wayyyy-too-sensitive person who feels all the feelings because I can relate to almost anything personally. This makes me a very good therapist and a very vulnerable movie watcher. Even a bad movie, which this is, can hold quite a punch for someone who lives with a chronic disease, which I do. While my brain is telling me that I’m nothing like Hilary Swank, my heart is in total panic mode.
The ALS attacks Kate viciously – about a year and a half from the first twitch, she can’t walk unaided, and she can’t use her hands. Her husband (Josh Duhamel) feeds her, bathes her, and puts her to bed at night. She has become his patient rather than his wife. She fires her day time caregiver because she too tries to treat her like a patient while Kate is still struggling to hold on to the last of her dignity, still trying to deny the severity of her illness. So when Bec (Emmy Rossum) breezes in, unqualified and inattentive, it seems like the perfect pairing. Kate won’t get babied, and Bec won’t get evicted. And she arrives just in time to help Kate uncover her husband’s infidelity. Kate seems to absorb it as almost deserved at first, but Bec is a show of strength (if nothing else) and gives her the courage to throw her husband out, even after everything he’s done for her.
Two things: Although I generally felt this movie was too schmaltzy for my taste, I did think this was an interesting question that people seem to react very differently to. Since Kate is so dependent on her husband now, and by all accounts he’s been very attentive to her medical needs, is his cheating maybe a little more acceptable? Especially since he and Kate haven’t been intimate? Should she have looked the other way? Accepted that their marriage is just different now?
Second thing; Like many, I first came across Emmy Rossum as Christine Daae in The Phantom of the Opera. She seemed pure and ethereal and untouchable, so it’s funny that the only other thing I really know her from is Shameless, where she plays white trash so, so convincingly. Bec is a lot like Fiona, brash and foul-mouthed but selfless when push comes to shove.
The disease is overshadowed and the director’s intentions tend toward the kleenex box, unabashedly. I knew this movie wasn’t even taking itself seriously when Josh Duhamel was cast so I didn’t have much in the way of expectations and it didn’t do much to try to exceed them.
Once upon a time it was movies based on Young Adult Fiction week, and I watched some stuff that I would normally never watch. Some of it was bad, some of it was not bad, and some of it was so bad it was almost good. In the end I was so glad to put it behind me I never got around to talking about the stuff that didn’t fit in either category – not good enough to endorse, but not bad enough to make fun of. So here it is, the middle of the road:
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen or heard of City of Ember because I didn’t know there was a Billy Murray movie I hadn’t already smothered in love. He plays the mayor of a town built deep underground by a team of scientists just as the world was ending. They buried instructions on how to return to the surface after 200 years too, but stupidly entrusted them to politicians, who predictably bungled the thing and lost the instructions and now their city is crumbling, the power supply is failing and food is running out. Things are dire: teenagers to the rescue! Two “young adults” (Saoirse Ronan & Harry Treadaway) take it upon themselves to do the thing countless older, smarter, more intrepid people (including their parents) failed to do.
The visuals are stunning. I loved the sets of this underground world, everything just a little off-kilter, labyrinthine without being claustrophobic. But the story never quite lives up to what our eyes suggest. The plot is modest, maybe even thin. Writers of this young adult genre seem to follow a pretty strict guide when it comes to their dystopian adventures: the founders, vague as they are, have decreed that people be assigned specific jobs and these jobs are ceremoniously given out and then life is spent labouring away at whatever “very important” job you’ve been given. There is little in the way of joy, but if you keep toiling away then your life is well-spent. BUT then there’s always some young upstart who questions the system. Sound familiar? City of Ember is basically Subterranean Divergent, although really I should say it the other way around since City of Ember came first.
The adventuring is pretty tame, the action mild, and the denouement predictable. This is post-apocalyptic-lite. Martin Landau gives a small performance worth seeing, and Tim Robbins isn’t half bad either. Bill Murray is, of course, always fun to watch, but otherwise this film is blander than you might think possible, though of course that was also Matt’s verdict on Insurgent.
Stardust came out in 2007, just a year before City of Ember, and it also passed me by. I haven’t been a “young adult” in at least a decade and haven’t been a typical consumer of this genre ever, so I guess it’s not so surprising.
I’m not remotely sure that I or alone else can really distill this story, but here’s my attempt:
Tristan is the young adult in question, a lad living in a quiet English village, madly in love with the town’s most beautiful girl who doesn’t give him the time of day because of course she’s way out of his league. Throwing him a bone, she agrees to consider him if only he will catch her a star, and so of course he follows a fallen star over the breach in the wall surrounding his village and into a fantasy kingdom called Stormhold where the star turns out to be Claire Danes. Everyone following? Fallen stars that look remarkably like Claire Danes are quite popular – she’s also being pursued by a witch (Michelle Pfieffer) who wants to eat her heart to make her young, and a bunch of princes (let by Rupert Everett) who believe a ruby she carries will inherit them the throne. So now poor Tristan’s saddled with this star who’s pretty high maintenance, and the only help he gets is from his mother, who’s unfortunately bound by a spell, and a transvestite pirate (played with MUCH enthusiasm by Robert DeNiro- and no, I’m not kidding).
The story didn’t speak to me whatsoever (sorry Neil Gaiman, I’m still you’re girl!), but hello, with a great pop-up role by De Niro and another by Ricky Gervais, it’s pretty much worth watching on that basis alone, and those moments felt more like the trademark oddball Gaiman humour I’m used to. The special effects are pretty awesome (Michelle Pfieffer uses a sword designed for but never used by Magneto in Matthew Vaughn’s 2006 X-Men movie) but the action-adventure really gets bogged down by a sluggish pace. This movie drags on. It’s a string of fun moments but didn’t quite work for me as a cohesive whole.
Wow did this suck balls. Like, no redeeming factors to report at all. The effects are brazenly shoddy. Embarrassing. Was this movie shot entirely in front of a green screen? Is there even a museum in New York?
My problem is, I don’t like Ben Stiller. My other problem is, Ben Stiller likes Ben Stiller. So much so that he conferred upon himself another character, just so he can have the pleasure of interacting with himself, green screen on green screen on green screen. Is nothing sacred?
I love Rebel Wilson but she’s falling into the Melissa McCarthy trap here – genuinely funny women that are reduced to one-note obnoxious roles that wear thin quickly. Not quite as thin as Ben Stiller as a caveman (haven’t we seen that before?), but still. She was wasted. But this movie wasted actors like it was going out of style (and if this is indeed the third and final chapter, then I guess it is) – Ben Kingsley! Hugh Jackman! Ricky Gervais! And y’all know that I love Steve Coogan but for the love of monkeys, throw the man a bone. He and Owen Wilson and floundering with oodles of screen time but nary a point. I felt bad for them.
There was a single workable joke in the whole entire thing:
Ben Kingsley (as an Egyptian pharaoh) to Ben Stiller, half-Jewish: “I love Jews! We owned 40 000 of them. They were very happy. Always singing with the candles.”
Ben Stiller: “Yeah, they really weren’t happy. They left. Spent 40 years in the desert trying to escape. We have dinner once a year to talk about it.”
So now that I’ve ruined the one funny bit for you, you don’t have to watch it.
I’m a complete and total sucker when life pairs two of my favourite things – movies and music – in an ungodly goodly way. I love being moved by a score, I love a soundtrack I can relate to, but nothing arrests me like the perfect pairing of a movie scene and a pop song.
You Make My Dreams, Hall & Oates from 500 Days of Summer
This? This is genius. Have you seen this movie? SEE THIS MOVIE! It’s about this guy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who falls for a fanciful, quirky woman, and for a time at least, it’s totally magical and transformative and the best thing about it? She lets him have sex with her! This scene is the morning after – the world is just different. In fact, it’s 10% better. Or 50% better! He literally wakes up with a song in his heart and a bounce in his step. The world is smiling back at him! His own reflection is proud. It’s crazy but it’s relatable. I feel like this too often probably, but if a good song comes on my MP3 (and a good song is always coming on!) and the sun is shining and life is good, then yeah, I’m the girl shaking my bootie down the street. Rarely do other people join in, let alone the bird from Cinderella, but I think it’s only a matter of time. My life is 10% better just knowing this exists in the world.
Stuck in The Middle With You, Stealers Wheel from Reservoir Dogs
This one has possibly made life just a little bit worse. In fact, I have not, since watching this, been able to hear this song and not feel a slight stinging in my ear. But I loved it. Quentin Tarantino is kind of a superstar when it comes to his ingenious pairing of image and sound. Here, Michael Madsen’s Mr. Blonde boogies down to his favourite oldies radio station while severely torturing a cop. The image is graphic and horrible but the song is light and catchy. Your eyes and your ears are experiencing two different realities, which makes your belly do a queasy thing and it’s fucking brilliant, man. I mean, I hate it, but I love it. And Mr. Blonde? He just loves it. He’s having a party. Gives you a lot of insight into just what kind of guy we’re dealing with. Watch at your own risk.
Where Is My Mind, Pixies from Fight Club
The perfect song for the perfect scene – the music is haunting and kind of apocalyptic, the lyrics vague and dream-like. The song is asking Where Is My Mind? when it’s entirely possible that Edward Norton’s protagonist is only just finding it for the first time in the whole movie. The ending is meant to be ambiguous but David Fincher leaves us with a beautiful moment, giving us time to digest the blows we’ve just been dealt.
Wise Up, Aimee Mann from Magnolia
If you’ve seen this movie, and you totally should, you can’t ever forget it. It rains frogs, goddammit. It’s way too complex to explain the various interconnecting characters and stories, but it’s a whole group of people who are in bad situations – the movie tackles regret, loneliness, family violence and exploitation. In the middle of a whole heck of a lot of hard times, every major character takes a turn singing Aimee Mann’s beautiful but unforgiving song, Wise Up.
You’re sure there’s a cure
And you have finally found it
You think one drink
Will shrink you till you’re underground
And living down
But it’s not going to stop
Till you wise up
No it’s not going to stop
Till you wise up
No, it’s not going to stop So just give up
These lyrics prepare us for the fact that Paul Thomas Anderson isn’t giving out absolution. Mistakes can’t always be erased. There are limits to forgiveness. If you’re looking for a happy ending, look elsewhere. Hard truths, softened by an ethereal melody.
The Blower’s Daughter, Damien Rice from Closer
This movie just kills me and this end shot with the song layered over top really hammers home the wrist-slitting qualities of heart break and loss. Like, if you weren’t quite depressed enough, Mike Nichols finishes you off with this song just so you can be sure that there’s no happiness to be had here, only pain and confusion. Ouch.
Then He kissed Me, The Crystals from GoodFellas
Martin Scorsese might be the king of pop songs and movies so it’s hard to pick just one – hell, it’s hard to pick just one from GoodFellas. But I’m going with this one because it’s a classic Marty shot, a famous minutes-long steadi-cam single take that follows Henry as he leads Karen into the bowels of the Copacabana, passing out twenties like nobody’s business and basically impressing the panties off her. The song mimics this with its carefree feeling and sweep-her-off-her-feet lyrics. You feel and see and hear things from her perspective; it’s a whirlwindy pop song power trip that shows how much privilege he has while also reminding us that he came in the back door. One of my favourite three minutes of film ever.
Tiny Dancer, Elton John from Almost Famous
Who but Elton John could unite a bus full of cranky, burnt out super-egos? In a movie chock-full of songs, this one is particularly well chosen, but we wouldn’t expect any less from Cameron Crowe, would we?
Old Time Rock N Roll, Bob Seger from Risky Business
I resisted including this one for as long as I could, but rarely does a scene rival this one in our collective audience consciousness. It has transcended the movie and belongs now to pop culture’s hereafter. I have never dated a man who hasn’t at least partially recreated this scene for me unbidden and I have never seen this song fail to pack a dance floor. Tom Cruise dances around in his underpants (apparently unchoreographed) and a star is born.
I’m Kissing you, Des’Ree from Romeo + Juliet
Now to cleanse your palette and possibly enrage you, I present to you for your consideration: Baz Luhrmann. It’s nearly criminal to leave him off a list like this, but people have mixed feelings about anachronistic music in period films. This movie was released the exact year I was reading Romeo + Juliet in high school and our English class boarded a bus and drove an hour and a half so the girls could all sob as we watched the movie in a dark, dark theatre. Oh, Leo! Remember when you were briefly a teen heartthrob? Baz Luhrmann does, and this movie serves as a shrine to that era. But it’s also William Shakespeare doing a teen drama, and this song reminds us that in this moment, forget the flowery language and the hundreds of years of veneration – this is about adolescent love at first sight. Meanwhile, Baz Luhrmann is famous for inserting crazy music where you wouldn’t think it belongs – Prince into Shakespeare, Nirvana into the can-can, and Jay-Z into The Great Gatsby. Does Baz Luhrmann get a pass for being inventive or is it just as jarring as when somebody thought to use Queen’s We Will Rock You in A Knight’s Tale or David Bowie in Inglorious Basterds?
It turns out that I could geek out for hours on this subject, so I’ll cut myself off here – for now. Meanwhile, please tell me YOUR favourite musical moment in a movie! Matt, I know you just wrote about Somewhere Over the Rainbow in Face\Off last week, and Sean, I’m guessing yours is probably from Top Gun. 🙂
Last night we watched an unintentional doubled feature we would come to dub “Stupid Criminals” – but that doesn’t quite do it justice.
Suicide Kings is a movie you’ve almost certainly skipped over for a couple of decades now. It was released in 1997 and was so bad that Christopher Walken would have to resort to music videos to revive his career. He plays a former(ish) mob boss who gets kidnapped by a bumbling quartet of friends because he’ll have the money and the connections to help find a (girl)friend of theirs who also happens to have been kidnapped. The boys (including Jeremy Sisto, Jay Mohr, Johnny Galecki, and the kid from E.T.) are a mixture of over and under prepared – they bring a bone saw and an IV full of pain killers to better saw off appendages, but haven’t quite sorted out whose beeper the kidnappers will use for ransom arrangements. Thank Christ for Denis Leary, the competent gun for hire who will surely track down Walken and bring this movie to an end. He’s the only one who makes this whole thing bearable, and he actually improvised his whole part, which is no doubt why it stinks a whole lot less than the rest. Although, come to think of it, Walken’s shoe-polish-black hair is quite arresting. But the young criminals are quite brainless, although not quite as brainless as the actual criminals (Brad Garrett!), and the plan was absurd even if it had gone right, which of course it didn’t.
Faults you may be more familiar with – it’s a little film that gained a certain amount of traction because it’s an interesting directorial debut (Riley Stearns) with a concept that seemed ripe for mining. Ansel (Leland Orser) is about as sad-sack as they come. A “foremost” expert on cults, his expertise is so 2008 and he’s barely scraping by giving sparsely-attended talks to reluctant hotel guests and hawking a book nobody wants to read and that he’s gone into debt to his manager in order to self-publish. Orser does a great job with this, and the first 20 minutes during which his character is established are the best. You may want to stop watching here.
If you continue, you’ll find that a couple of desperate parents hire Orser in order to kidnap and deprogram their daughter (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) from a mysterious cult called Faults. This goes about as well as you’d expect with creepy-possibly-molesty dad butting in with crop tops and short shorts, and the manager’s goons breathing down Ansel’s neck with threats aplenty, and Ansel basically being bought for the rice of a hot breakfast. The whole affair is less dramatic and more sad than you might imagine, with a few moments or real dark comedic gems that are unfortunately too few to make the enterprise worthwhile. You can almost taste the ambition of this movie. It wants to serve you this brilliant treatise on mind control but doesn’t quite know how to do it. So it’s a worthy first effort but not quite satisfying in a meaningful way.
I’ve seen quite a few Indian movies over the years and I always struggle with them. I want to like them, I want to embrace the spirit, and I certainly love the brightly coloured saris and the beautiful dance. But. There’s just something about them that rubs me the wrong way.
Cinema Axis recently inspired me to give it another go, having recommended 3 idiots in quite glowing terms. If you’re looking for a straight up review of the movie, please read his. He’s able to be fair and he judges from a more knowledgeable and even-handed place.
Me, I’m still confused. I’m confused as to whether I feel condescension toward the movie, or if it’s condescending to me. The silliness of Bollywood just grates on me. Even when the story is dead-serious, like soap opera serious, there’s always a comedic character bumbling around, literally doing prat-falls and practically honking horns. Even in this movie, there was that slide-whistle sound alerting us to a good joke – a joke that wasn’t good enough to be served up without some sort of signal, but a joke nonetheless. The actors will be smouldering away, negotiating yet another impossible love scenario when someone cracks large – and then puts his hand over his lips like a little Hello Kitty fan on a Japanese game show. While they are quite capable of moving, stirring acting, they often eschew it in favour of the kind subscribed to by the hosts of children’s morning TV.
This movie is called 3 Idiots, and is about a class of engineers trying to make it through an esteemed trade school to make their parents proud. There are teen-comedy-like antics, but there are also suicides left and right due to the enormous pressure. It seems to be trying to say something very serious about the education system in India, and about the importance of following your own dreams and passions versus those of your parents, but every time they get too close to having a serious moment, they break out into an absurd song and dance that dissolves anything they might have earned before it.
I’m trying extra hard to be generous here. I want to respect their culture and their ways of story-telling, but it all just feels very juvenile to me. Perhaps it’s a case of wanting to appeal to the lowest common denominator, but it just feels like an extremely extended episode of Yo Gabba Gabba, particularly with nonsensical lyrics like “zoobi doobi” which went on for far too long. Granted, this from a website that just reviewed a movie where a car flies from one building to another not once, but twice, pretty favourably. Bollywood movies clearly exist to make money, not art, but that’s true of every studio over here as well, and the net result isn’t a product that assumes the complete idiocy, incomprehension and nonexistent attention span of its entire audience.
I kind of wanted to like this one, particularly near the end, but the slapstick got in the way – not to mention the abhorrent sound effects, the fart gags, and the about-face plot changes. Is this is a screwball romance? College hijinks movie? Social commentary? Buddy roadtrip movie? If Three Idiots doesn’t know the answer in 2 hours and 44 minutes, how should we?
So, looks like I still have a problem with Bollywood, and I’m not the only one. The Indian film industry is the second largest in the world, producing over 300 films every year, but they’ve only garnered 3 Oscar nominations for best foreign film since 1956. Canada, by comparison, which has only a skeleton movie production, and has only been submitting since 1971, has still managed 7 nominations and 1 win. Domestically, Bollywood films do incredibly well. There’s a huge audience looking for some escapism, and the movie industry keeps churning them out. But those movies have no traction with box office overseas. Maybe with time, Indian audiences will come to demand more from their film industry, but until then, I’ll be a very reluctant audience member.
Does Bollywood appeal at all to you? What’s your favourite Indian film?
It’s impossible not to encounter an AWFUL lot of John Cusack when you’re perusing teen comedies. He practically had right of first refusal back in the 80s.
Say Anything
This one seems to lose a lot of sparkle the more I see it, and I’m not sure if it’s because it’s not aging well, or I’m not. Either way, the things that used to get me – the Peter Gabriel on the boom box, the post-virginity snail mail, it all starts to feel like not quite enough. Like, is this really the gold standard? I’m not sure if it used to impress me, but nowadays I just can’t shake the feeling that Lloyd Dobler is a loser. “Noble underachiever” is a phrase that can only be used by someone with the word teen at the end of their age. Unemployed, unambitious lazybones is more like it. Does that make me sound like my mother? Sure he’s sweet, but I like my sweet with a steady paycheque and some hobbies that go beyond stalking.
Better Off Dead
This movie is so bad I can’t even. Hadn’t seen this before, and should have kept it that way. The effects are terrible, although not quite as terrible as the wigs on the stunt doubles, but nothing holds a candle to the terribleness of the sentient hamburger animation. I can’t believe this didn’t derail Cusack’s career then and there. This comedy, which deals repeatedly with Lane (Cusack) wanting (and attempting) to kill himself because his girlfriend dumped him, should be much too dark for a burger playing an Eddie Van Halen song. And yet!
Turns out, no one hates this movie more than John Cusack. He walked out of the movie after 20 minutes of the screening and accused writer-director Savage Steve Holland of tricking him. “Better Off Dead was the worst thing I have ever seen. I will never trust you as a director ever again, so don’t speak to me.” He felt used and foolish and finished working with Holland only out of contractual obligation. Too bad they don’t mention any of this on the back of the DVD.
Sixteen Candles
Poor Molly Ringwald. She’s trying to turn 16 and it’s all going horribly wrong. John Cusack is only in this peripherally, as a skinny little nerd, but even he’s not enough to keep the nostalgic glow alive. Matt recently re-watched this and couldn’t get over the overt racism – a gong literally sounds every time not-at-all-racistly-named Long Duk Dong comes on-screen. For me, it was the rape that was unbearable. There’s sexism throughout the movie, of course, but rape is rape. This isn’t creepy or questionable. It’s legally, certifiably, conviction-worthy rape, but the movie plays it like it’s just par for the course. John Hughes died in 2009, recently enough that a look back should have been painful, but we’ll never know what he thought because he all but retired from the spotlight in 1991 after John Candy died suddenly of a heart attack. He wrote a few terrible scripts – Maid In Manhattan, Drillbit Taylor – under a pseudonym but kept his privacy well-guarded. He was nevertheless a genius of his generation and I wish we could have heard him say he knew now that it was wrong. Because this movie does get it very, very wrong.
What can these two movies possibly have in common, other than me miraculously sitting through both?
Matt wrote all you need to know about the new Will Ferrell\Kevin Hart movie Get Hard. If you’re wondering if you should see it, talk to Matt. If you did see it and you’re wondering what the hell, read on: (spoilers ahead!)
Get Hard has all the nuts and bolts of a smart social farce but never really puts it together. The first 15 minutes have a lot of potential in their view of the haves vs the have nots, but the movie devolves into all of the racial stereotypes it’s supposed to be making fun of. I thought it was super damaging and sad that they made the Kevin Hart character so uneducated. Will Ferrell is the dumb one, the one who got framed and never noticed, who is terrified of black people but isn’t afraid to offend them by misappropriating their culture, who treats any person of colour so indifferently he subjects them unthinkingly to his nudity because they might as well be just another fixture in his palatial home. And yet the script goes out of its way (3 times that I noticed) to have Will Ferrell make a literary reference that Kevin Hart just doesn’t get.
The whole premise of the movie relies on Will Ferrell’s (incorrect) assumption that like most black men, Kevin Hart is an ex-convict. Actually, he’s spotless…although it turns out that he does have a cousin who’s a gang banger. So there’s that. You know, because even the non-criminal black men roll with thugs. Is that the worst of it? Hardly? One scene that goes on way too long has Kevin Hart pretending to be prison characters – a scary black dude, and an angry Hispanic one. He throws out every stereotype he knows but we never once talk about why prisoners are overwhelmingly one minority or another when we have verifiable proof of white guilt right in front of us. I came out of this movie thinking a lot about what it failed to do or say. It had every opportunity to talk about race, and about economic disparity, and white privilege, but it didn’t. Instead it was a tired, two-hour long repetitive rape joke, and what does that say about our culture that we feel better laughing about rape than we do about confronting racial bias? Yeah, I know this was a comedy that exists to make us laugh, not to be a teachable moment. But Trading Places managed to be both. There’s a lot of great satire out there, funny as heck, and while this one has the veneer of social commentary, underneath it’s just cheap particle board.
Furious 7 manages to tell us more about race without even trying. It’s hard to believe we’re seven movies into this franchise – you may think that’s seven too many, or you may already be eagerly awaiting number eight. But have you ever noticed how ethnically diverse the cast is, and has been since day one?
It feels a little tacky for me to sit here and list all the non-white people, but there are lots, and not just side kicks and bit parts – real marquee characters with back stories and dimensions, and they’re not necessarily the first to get killed off! The series has also visited a lot of non-English speaking countries along the way – trips to Brazil, Japan, and Mexico have only expanded the diversity of the cast, proving it doesn’t matter what colour you are so long as you’re buff and can drive a stick.
And that’s a great thing, actually. 54% of North American movie goers are white, but the actual population is actually a little over 60%, which means minorities, and Hispanics in particular, are the fastest-growing ticket buyers. If audiences are multi-cultural, so should be the movies they watch. And whatever else The Fast and Furious franchise has been, it has consistently delivered a varied group of people capable of interracial relationships. And this inclusive trend exists behind the camera as well. The second one was directed by black filmmaker John Singleton, movies 3 through 6 were done by Justin Lin, and the most recent two were directed by Malaysian-born James Wan.
But the most impressive part (aside from y ability to start so many sentences with the word But) is that race is just a fact of li fe in these movies. It just is. Your boss might be Asian, your girlfriend could be Iranian, your best friend could be The Rock, your own step-kid could be Hispanic, but nobody need mention any of it, let alone pat themselves on the back for it. Generally, when Hollywood makes a movie starring a white guy and a black guy, the movie is about a white guy and a black guy: the culture clash! the misunderstandings! they’re so different but maybe also kinda the same! It can never just be a guy and his friend, who happens to be black. Get Hard is dripping with exactly this kind of guilt, which is sad because Ferrell and Hart are both funny guys and (I’m guessing that) in real life, Ferrell doesn’t talk down to Hart, isn’t afraid he’ll steal his car, and has maybe even shared a bowl of popcorn with him while watching Boyz N The Hood (directed by John Singleton, by the way! — coincidence? Yeah, probably).
Movies are the one place in America where segregation is still allowed to exist. There are tiny pockets of all-black Tyler Perry movies to counter the enormity of Hollywood’s white washing, but that misses the point. We don’t need more segregation, we need integration. And I’m not talking about movies “about race”, I’m talking about movies that have people in them, stupidly beautiful versions of people from all backgrounds standing around in tight tank tops talking about what really matters to America: fast cars and freedom.
Somewhere along the way I accidentally fell in love with Miles Teller. Is that creepy? Yeah, it’s creepy.
Wait. Just checked IMDB and in fact, it’s not illegal! He’s not a high school student, he just plays one on TV. So it’s totally okay that I want to club him over the head, drag him back to my apartment and put my scarred body directly on top of his scarred body and make scarred little babies until he sprains his penis or I get thirsty, whichever comes first.
I just watched Two Night Stand, a not very good movie made so much better by Teller’s great on-screen presence. Actually, the first part of that sentence probably sells it short because in fact I didn’t dislike it. It’s not ground breaking material, it’s a pretty predictable plot, but it’s got charm. A guy and a girl hook up, supposedly for a one night stand, but stupid mother nature has other plans and snows them in, forcing them into a slightly awkward and prolonged encounter. Not the worst thing I’ve watched this week, not even the worst Miles Teller film, in fact
Because I also caught 21 & Over, the poor man’s version of The Hangover. Three best friends from high school reunite in their senior year of college to celebrate the last of them turning 21. Though he has an important med school interview the next morning, he’s dragged out to a bar, and then another and another until all 3 are in such terrible shape that none can remember where the birthday boy lives. Adventure and panic ensue. Teller and Skylar Astin have a lot of charming chemistry, but that only gets them so far. Actually, I just looked it up and it turns out this one was written and directed by the guys who brought us The Hangover, so that explains a lot. Unfortunately, it feels like they prioritized cashing in over story, or good sense. Not that I blame them. I like money too, and I’m super glad I didn’t waste mine seeing this movie in theatres.
At any rate, even in a bad movie, Miles Teller shows us he’s got range. He can do anything. He can be a lovesick puppy or a functional adolescent alcoholic. I enjoy watching him, and I have a feeling, after great performances in The Spectacular Now and Whiplash, that I won’t have to wait too long before turning my gaze upon him once more.
Danny Collins (Al Pacino) is a tired and aged pop singer, still swiveling his arthritic hips in the direction of the slutty octogenarians in the front row of his sold-out concerts. But in the quiet moments backstage it’s just him and his girdle, and it’s taking more and more coke to get him to sing the saccharine lyrics of his greatest hits.
His best friend and manager (Christopher Plummer) is delighted to present him with a birthday gift – a letter to him from John Lennon that went undelivered for 40 years. The letter’s a great find but ultimately it makes Danny feel like shit. He knows he’s sold out. Now he also feels like he’s wasted his life, and his talent. So like any elderly rock star having a lightbulb moment, the takes off to New Jersey, where the grown son he never met lives (Bobby Canavale) and the hotel managers are oh-so-fine (Annette Bening).
The first trailer I saw for this movie made me want to give it a miss, but a second look caught my attention. The quips sounded smart. They had good patter. Turns out, it’s written and directed by Dan Fogelman, who wrote Crazy, Stupid Love, which wasn’t half bad. And neither is this.
The problem is, you know what’s going to happen. You know exactly what’s going to happen. You know not only the outcome, but the probable trajectory. But thanks to a surprisingly stirring performance by Al Pacino, who’s backed up by a really solid supporting cast. This movie just worked for me. Al Pacino was ON. For years now he’s thrived on doing a bad SNL-type impersonation of himself, and it turned me off, and away. But he IS Danny Collins. This movie isn’t as good as The Wrestler, or Birdman, but the casting reminded me of those movies, hooking up the perfect actor for a role that feels tailor-made for them. It was fun to watch him embrace the dirty old man. He lays it on thick and Annette Bening keeps scraping it off and flinging it back at him. But it’s earnest. It’s fun. Pacino and Bening charm each other, and us in the process. They are relaxed and easy. And so is the movie. It’s not fluff, exactly, but nor does it have the gravitas of The Wrestler. It’s just a really likeable film, and i think it may have just made Al Pacino a movie star again.
unaided, and she can’t use her hands. Her husband (Josh Duhamel) feeds her, bathes her, and puts her to bed at night. She has become his patient rather than his wife. She fires her day time caregiver because she too tries to treat her like a patient while Kate is still struggling to hold on to the last of her dignity, still trying to deny the severity of her illness. So when Bec (Emmy Rossum) breezes in, unqualified and inattentive, it seems like the perfect pairing. Kate won’t get babied, and Bec won’t get evicted. And she arrives just in time to help Kate uncover her husband’s infidelity. Kate seems to absorb it as almost deserved at first, but Bec is a show of strength (if nothing else) and gives her the courage to throw her husband out, even after everything he’s done for her.
now?
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 