Author Archives: Jay

The Last Kiss

In a (seemingly) other lifetime, I was married to someone else. Someone not Sean. If that’s strange for you, believe me, it’s way weirder for me! I was in love the way only a 19 year can be. And maybe I still would be had bipolar disorder not reared its ugly head. My background in psychology came back to bite me: my rational brain thought, it’s fine, bipolar can be treated and managed. Don’t panic. I should have listened to the irrational part that said: run! Because while bipolar disorder IS highly manageable, the person has to WANT to manage it. The person has to TRY. The person has to not concoct elaborate lies in order to fool his wife, not buy generic over the counter drugs, file off the stamped logos, and pretend to be taking doctor-prescribed meds. You know, that kind of thing. Anyway, somewhere in the dramatic and volatile end of our marriage, I watched a movie called The Last Kiss. I cried my eyes out until they literally swelled shut. It was an emotional time.

I have never forgotten the emotional trauma of watching this movie, but I recently threw caution and hankies to the wind and gave it a rewatch, and here’s what I found out:

Other than a kick-ass sound track, this movie is a worthless pile of shit. There’s a fair bit of fat shaming nearly right off the top. I was rolling my eyes so hard at the shamelessly cheesy lines that an eyeball almost popped right out of the socket.

The premise: Michael (Zach Braff) is having the slimiest of crises – a quarter-life one. He has everything he wants – a nice home, a good job, a beautiful girlfriend, Jenna, and a baby on the way. So of course his complaint is that life is too perfect and he’s such a basic bitch that he’s worried life holds no more surprises for him. So while celebrating a MV5BNTUzODg0ODk5NV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMjU0NTgxMDI@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,1535,1000_AL_ friend’s wedding, he naturally flirts with another woman – er, girl. The wedding guests are all in pastel but Kim (Rachel Bilson) saunters saucily up to the bar in a flaming red dress. She is leaking manic pixie dream girl out of every pore. No one pretends that she’s a real person, just the embodiment of the very young woman that a man about to start a family really wants to fuck. They go on dates, they kiss. They are rudely interrupted by the inconvenient death of his best friend’s father, which blows his cover story to shreds. His (pregnant) girlfriend throws him out, devastated.

Theirs is not the only relationship in tatters. Michael’s friend Chris (Casey Affleck) is on the verge of a nervous breakdown – since the birth of his son, his wife can’t stop finding fault with him and all they do is fight and try to keep the baby alive. Meanwhile, Jenna’s parents (Blythe Danner, Tom Wilkinson), o ye of the 30 year marriage, are also on the outs, also due in part to infidelity, but also, it seems, to a lifetime of happiness.

Michael, a dope and a natural born idiot, invokes double jeopardy: since he’s already in the dog house for kissing Ms. Manic Pixie, he figures he may as well fuck her. Because men are scum. But then he’s filled with regret and decides to stage a sit-in, or a vigil for his relationship, and it’s this whole sordid deal.

I must have been really messed up to find anything worthwhile in this mess. My marriage suffered from no mere infidelity – that seems a far smaller betrayal than the ones we suffered at the hands of mental illness. I’m not even sure which parts I related to, and today, all these years later, I want to slap Jenna across the face just to remind her that this sack of shit doesn’t even deserve to sit on her front porch. So yeah, things change. I’ve changed. The world has changed. Zach Braff is still a fuck knuckle.

Shark Tale

7 Replies

You know how movies always come in pairs? White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen: same basic film. Dante’s Peak and Volcano: twins! Armaggeddon and Deep Impact: same damn thing. Antz and A Bug’s Life: why the hell not. Infamous and Capote: nominally two different films. Turner & Hooch\K-9. Platoon\Full Metal Jacket. The Truman Show\Ed TV. The Prestige\The Illusionist. No Strings Attached\Friends With Benefits. I could go on and likely so could you. Are the movie studios hoping you’ll see one instead of the other, or are they banking that if you liked one, you’ll like the other?

Or did Jeffrey Katzenberg steal an idea and take it with him when he left Disney? He’s been shark-tale accused of that more than once, and that’s the theory behind Shark Tale conveniently riding on Finding Nemo’s coat tails. Both are animated movies dealing with outcast sharks befriending fish. Doesn’t that seem like quite the coincidence?

DreamWorks Animation has often been a step behind animation powerhouse Pixar, and in this case, Shark Tale isn’t exactly a bad movie, but it is the inferior one.

Oscar (voiced by Will Smith) is a small fish who dreams big. When a shark turns up dead at his feet (fin?) of course he takes the credit, and then the money and the fame that come along with being The Sharkslayer – everything he’s always wanted. Until some real sharks start threatening his reef and he’s the one that’s supposed to stop them.

There’s a tonne of voice talent on hand: Renee Zellweger, Angelina Jolie, Jack Black – but my favourites were Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro, who recorded their lines together, and if you look carefully at their characters, you’ll see some tell-tale eyebrows and a distinguishing mole.

So why is it that this movie fails? Story, mostly. Pixar has this magical formula for making a children’s movie that still appeals to adults, and I think in striving for it, Dreamworks failed to hit either target. It’s fast and it’s colourful but it doesn’t seem to captivate kids the way that Finding Nemo did. And there’s no underlying truth and sweetness, so no reason for adults to really watch, except for the sharks-as-mafia bit that’s kind of a tired joke, and got the Italic Institute of America all riled up. But that’s not the only organization they pissed off: the Christian wackos over at the American Family Association (a nice euphemism for spouting pure hatred) decided that Lenny the Shark was a bad example to kids because his VEGETARIANISM was an allegory for HOMOSEXUALITY. Um, no comment.

The one thing this movie does get right is its soundtrack. But everything in between is forgettable and derivative. Even the animation doesn’t live up to the standard they set with Shrek. There’s no charm, and no whimsy. Would this movie be as ugly if it wasn’t always being compared to the pretty twin, Finding Nemo? Who knows. But it’s just not interesting enough for me to care.

Defending Your Life

3 Replies

Daniel gives a thank you speech to his colleagues that would be welcome at any stand-up club. Then he goes to pick up his pretty new car, a gift to himself on his birthday. Driving around with the top down, he’s singing his heart out to Barbra Streisand on the radio when – blammo – a truck hits him and he’s dead.

Just like that.

He winds up in Judgment City, a resort-like version of afterlife limbo where the recently deceased must defend their lives in a courtroom setting – they’ll either move on to whatever’s bigger and better, or they’ll be sent back to Earth to live another life and try to be more worthy.

Daniel (Albert Brooks) feels he’s lived a good life, been a good person. But as his ‘trial’ unfolds he’s surprised to learn what we’re actually judged upon – not our good deeds or charitable contributions, but on the risks we took (whether they panned out or not), and the fearlessness with which we’ve lived our lives.

Uh oh. Suddenly Daniel’s not so confident. And the prosecutor has hundreds of instances in his life queued up to illustrate the many times he had bad judgement. To make things simultaneously better and worse, he meets the beautiful Julia (Meryl Streep), whose life seems to have been meritorious in every way imaginable. It seems certain that she will move on to the better place while he is likely to be sent back, their newfound love cut short.

I can’t believe I never saw this movie before – these are two of my top five people. Albert Brooks wrote and directed it too, so you better believe it’s funny. But it’s also surprisingly warm and thoughtful. Brooks makes the best of his platform, and treats it like his vehicle. Streep therefore appears in it much less that you might expect, but she makes a lot of her scenes, and it’s a great reminder of he excellent comedic timing. Plus she just has this glow about her – a glow that totally justifies a man falling with her during the 5 most important days of his (after)life.

Defending Your Life is wise and witty and a whole lot of fun. Worth digging into the back catalogue for.

Welcome To The Men’s Group

Harold And Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay

5 Replies

Canada legalized weed last month so I bet Netflix has noted a marked increase in the streaming of dumb comedies like this one.

Dumb doesn’t begin to cover it though. Harold And Kumar Go To White Castle came out in 2004. Its sequel came out 4 years later but only about 5 minutes later in movie time. Harold and Kumar have just had the craziest, drug-fueled adventure of their lives, followed by the greasy binging of dozens of weird little burgers that apparently exist in real life. Then Harold triumphantly kisses the girl next door and the sequel finds him MV5BMjE2MzU4NzM4Nl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNzQ1NDk2MQ@@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,1453,1000_AL_ gloating over his moment of elevator glory when Kumar reminds him that in the previous movie, they’d booked plane tickets to Amsterdam so they could creepily follow the girl next door overseas for some intercontinental stalking.

It’s on this plane ride where things go awry. Incorrigible stoners, one of them can’t help but smoke up in the bathroom, which leads to a kerfuffle with the air marshals, which results in our illustrious heroes getting summarily locked up in Guantanamo, subject to a whole buffet of cockmeat sandwiches. The title sort of gives away the fact that they escape, only so they can get into yet more shenanigans.

If there was anything funny about the first movie, and I find myself doubting it now, there is nothing redeeming about the second. If only the jokes were just juvenile, but these babies teeter and flail way over the edge of downright racist. I’m exhausted by unfunniness. It’s very draining to watch a comedy and not laugh once. Like, you just strain so hard, trying to do your part, hold up your end of the joke equation, ready to laugh at the merest flicker, merest hint that something funny this way comes. I think my blood pressure got dangerously low there for a while. But don’t worry, I’ve recovered, and I put Harold and Kumar back on the dusty Netflix shelf. I hid it behind Shakespeare In Love, so I’m pretty sure no one’s going to find it for a long, long time.

All Hallow’s Eve

Chloe

2 Replies

Catherine is a gynecologist, successful and assured. Her home is beautiful, her teenage son accomplished, and her husband, David, a respected professor. But there’s a crack in all this perfection, one that gets exposed when David (Liam Neeson) misses his flight home, and thus, the perfectly executed surprise party thrown by his wife (Julianne Moore). Catherine quickly suspects there’s more at fault than just bad timing – can her husband, an incorrigible flirt, be having an affair?

Paranoid, Catherine hires Chloe, an escort, to get to the truth. She asks Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) to approach her husband and see what happens. Already we’re all groaning. Such a bad idea, a terrifically bad idea. The minute you start deriving tests of loyalty or MV5BYmFhZGQ2ODYtNTg0NC00NzQwLWE0MjYtMTY1OThlZWMwNThlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNDY2NzgwOTE@._V1_ faithfulness for your loved one, you have a problem, and – spoiler alert! – it’s you. Although, guess what? The minute you start hiring prostitutes, you have a problem. Now Julianne Moore has two problems, and they’re multiplying like rabbits at a problem convention.

Atom Egoyan made Chloe in 2009: it was a good year to be Amanda Seyfriend, a bad year to be Liam Neeson (his real-life wife died during while this was being filmed – he took 2 days off), and a confusing time to be Julianne Moore, a woman at the top of her game, apparently reduced to making Fatal Attraction knock-offs. Chloe is supposed to be a psycho-sexual thriller, but there are at least 2 problems with that. One: it ain’t sexy. I mean, Moore’s character tries her very best to convince you that it is. She has Chloe describe her encounters in every lascivious detail, then rushes home, nipples taut, to masturbate in the shower. But the chemistry, which must have dripped off the page for these actors to consider it, is not evident on screen. Two: neither are the thrills. We see Egoyan’s twists from a mile away, because they’ve had their blinker on the whole time. Not only do I know where we’re going, I know exactly how we’ll get there. So yeah, both the sexual and the thriller in the psycho-sexual thriller are lacking. But at least there’s the psycho! Oh man, the manipulation is firing on all cylinders. It’s so forthright you might not even find it believable, or remotely plausible. I’m so glad that a movie veering off into left field doesn’t spoil its watchability for me AT ALL.

Moore and Neeson are very good actors, and they’re very good in this. Sometimes you even forget you’re watching a piece of shit. But not for long!

Lost In Translation

13 Replies

Two Americans in Tokyo. Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is there for work – her husband’s work. Neglected, she spends er time gazing down upon the city from the cloisters of her hotel room. Elsewhere in said hotel, Bob (Bill Murray) is suffering the indignity of doing foreign commercials ow that his movie work has dried up. It’s a nice pay day but a blow to his ego. His wife nags him long-distance, via middle of the night faxes.

When Charlotte and Bob meet, they are immediate kindred spirits. Lonely and American, they form a bond that mimics intimacy. In their glowy little bubble, they experience the quirks and sights of Japan; its foreign-ness feels less daunting and more adventurous when they’re together. When they’re apart, it emphasizes their aloneness. But they always revert to the comfort and familiarity of their luxurious but non-descript hotel. In he hotel, they could be anywhere. They develop such a strong sense of we vs. them that even other Americans seem wrong to them, are laughable. Of course, their friendship is a little dangerous: it won’t be good for either of their marriages.

Bill Murray is good – Oscar-nominated good. His improvisations are so good you can literally see extras cracking up in some scenes. Scarlett Johansson was only 17 when this was filmed, so she’s more of a blank slate, having not yet picked up a lot of the acting crutches and mannerisms upon which she’s come to rely. Actually, in 2018, Lost in Translation is 15 years old, which is almost as old as she was when she made it. That’s something to think about, isn’t it?

Writer-director Sofia Coppola probably made her biggest splash with this film. It pulses with life because she threw so much of herself, her own insecurities and worries, into it. Both of these characters travel to an alien land to truly realize how isolated they’ve become. They are disconnected from their spouses, and communication back home is sporadic and brief. There’s a longing for connection that’s an evident, live thread woven into the tapestry of this film. So many small details add up as proof of their passionate friendship, which is far more effective in this context than a sexual relationship would have been.

The film’s sparsity of dialogue speaks volumes to language not being the greatest barrier between people. Communication happens on all levels, and Coppola signals this in her final scene, with that elusive yet beautiful ending in which Murray whispers something unintelligible to Johansson, and they share a tender kiss. What did he say to her? We may never know the words, but ew unddertand the meaning.

The Social Network

7 Replies

Mark Zuckerberg is a big, fat, shit-eating dick and Jesse Eisenberg is the man who was born to play him (if only he had retired right afterward – he is seriously the most one-note motherfucker in Hollywood today).

Once upon a time, a pretty girl (Rooney Mara) broke a nerd’s heart. Mark (Eisenberg) is an asshole and deserves it, but he’s also a pretentious prick at Harvard so in his privileged, entitled little head, he thinks this gives him the right to declare war on women everywhere. He has an all-night coding sessions with his buddies (has anyone EVER written on a window with marker in real life, I wonder?) and by the next morning MV5BMjI2NzQ4MDMyM15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMDA1NTUxNA@@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,642,1000_AL_ he’s got the most misogynistic piece of programming he can muster, and he shares it like wildfire. It attracts the attention of a couple of conceited, ambitious BMOCs – The Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer), who have an idea of their own for an exclusive social network.

Famously, Mark Zuckerberg accepted the job offer but then strung them along, stealing the idea for himself. He talked his friend Eduardo (Andrew Garfield) into bankrolling their fledgling company but then pushed him out just as Facebook hit the big time, in favour of the snake Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake). And he didn’t just push him out, he FUCKED HIM OVER. Royally. Shares that were nearly invaluable the day before were rendered almost worthless overnight. And Eduardo was his friend! His only friend, really. This movie is about the ensuing lawsuits but mostly it’s about a young guy with a brilliant mind and a cold heart who pursued his dream single-mindedly until he was a billionaire with no friends.

Mark Zuckerberg, as he is portrayed in the film, seems to be a young man on the verge of becoming on of those woman-hating incels before he finds salvation in programming and intellectual property theft. In real life, he may not be quite so villainous, but the truth would have made a far more boring movie, and with David Fincher in the director’s seat and Aaron Sorkin writing furiously, The Social Network was never going to be hindered by the truth.

Ms. Matched

4 Replies

The opening credits weren’t quite finished but I already felt offended and degraded as a woman. Is that a record?

Netflix has bought all these (I’m assuming) made-for-TV monstrosities and I keep wondering who the hell they’re meant for, but now I know. Epiphany! The women who watch Hallmark movies are the same women who vote for Trump. In fact, Hallmark may even be complicit in brainwashing these women into buying into the patriarchy, and by extension Trump, even though it goes against their own interests!

Hallmark teaches us that a woman’s greatest achievement is landing (and keeping!) a husband, even if he’s a workaholic and a bully. It doesn’t matter as long as he can support a family; a woman’s second greatest achievement is pushing lookalikes out her vagina and immediately indoctrinating them in her ignorant, meatloaf-eating ways. Hallmark essentials: a courtship that looks a lot like hateship, because the couple is incompatible; a baking montage (a woman’s place is in the kitchen, flour on nose not optional!); a stark-white cast at all times. And if you end on the big, floofy wedding, there’s no responsibility to show the inevitable divorce in roughly 7 months time.

In this particular movie, and yes, it’s hard to tell them apart: Libby is a wedding planner hoping (urgently needing) to drum up business at a bridal convention. Ben is a financial planner and author; he’s just written a book encouraging affianced couples to dump the big event and think small. This is very bad for business – Libby’s included, but Ben makes enemies out of all the vendors at the wedding event.

Anyway, Ben is so gorgeous (this is Libby’s assessment, not mine) that she keeps pushing down those pesky feelings about being undermined and disrespected in order to be swept off her feet by the sheer romance of…hot dogs? But then she’s continuously brought back to Earth with reminders of things like bills, eviction, and penury. Will these two crazy kids ever compromise?

Nope! But they get married anyway. On a boat. The end.