Tag Archives: Casey Affleck

The Finest Hours

You’ve already seen this movie. If it differs much from The Perfect Storm, I can’t remember how. But The Perfect Storm was a much better movie, and I’ll tell you why: it’s because you cared whether the characters lived or died. The Finest Hours does not care to imbue you with any such worry. The men on the sinking ship are hardly known to us. Their leader, played by Casey Affleck, is so poorly drawn that all we know about his life off the boat is that he doesn’t have one. And yet we still like this guy more than Chris Pine, a grunt at the coast guard with a chip on his shoulder. What we know about him: he rejects his girlfriend’s proposal for an unknown reason and then accepts in order to avoid a fight, but then neglects to mention\get permission from his commanding officer (Eric Bana), and won’t pick up the phone to tell her goodbye (won’t even answer the phone when SHE calls HIM) even though he’s about to go on a suicide mission. Helluva guy.

But you know. He’s broody. He’s let men die before and he’s not going to imagesdo it this time, even if it kills him and everyone he knows. His crew is pretty nervous about this plan but it’s either meet their fate in the ocean or go home and marry a pretty girl, so of course he sallies forth. And don’t worry, they’re successful.I do not believe I am spoiling anything in telling you this because you know exactly what kind of movie this is going in: man vs. nature. Man must triumph (and then return home to be cowed by a 22 year old woman with red lips).

Chris Pine is no George Clooney and though I wouldn’t call The Perfect Storm an altogether perfect movie, The Finest Hours does pale in comparison, and compare you must. And I don’t mean a Canadian’s legs after a long, hard winter pale. I mean an anemic, Irish zombie who’s locked in a closet and is starving for brains pale. A couple of reviews ago I asked what’s blacker than black, and I got my answer. So today I’m wondering: what’s the whitest shade of pale? And disappointingly, it’s white. White is the lightest possible colour on the spectrum, so even if we found something whiter than white, that would just become the new white and we’d have to come up with a new shade name for old white that’s not ghost white or snow white or white smoke, since those are already taken (And are all darker than white, and don’t tell me you can’t tell!).

Should you watch it? No one’s stopping you. It’s a perfectly serviceable rescue drama where you know exactly how things will play out based on the title alone. It won’t impress you much, but maybe after a hard week of work and a large bowl of popcorn at your disposal, that’s all you need.

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.