Tag Archives: Netflix and chill

Odds & Ends – Netflix Edition

The Longest Week – Jason Bateman plays a dependently wealthy man-child chronically working on (or at least thinking about) the great American novel until one day his parents cut him off, he gets evicted, and he shows up on his best friend’s (Billy Crudup) doorstep, begging for a place to stay. And this might have gone well if he didn’t immediately start crushing on and sleeping with his best friend’s girl (Olivia Wilde). Likeable leads. Aiming for quirky but falls into been there, done that.

Touchy Feely – Rosemarie DeWitt plays a massage therapist suddenly stricken with a complete aversion to touch. She can’t do her job anymore but that’s the least of it: all of her personal relationships start to suffer too. Luckily her brother the dentist starts to do really well healing his patients thanks to his daughter (Ellen Page) breeching protocol. The uptight family does some X and wander around and just like this movie, they never really go anywhere.

Life of Crime – Tim Robbins is a rich old white guy with a young, hot wife (Jennifer Aniston) but leaves his wife for a younger, hott life-of-crime er mistress (Isla Fisher). Too bad some dumb criminals pick this exact moment to kidnap the wife and demand a hefty ransom. Sure he has the money, but now that he thinks about, he wouldn’t mind if his wife just disappeared – in fact, it would save him on alimony. Not the best Elmore Leonard adaptation but solid, and sometimes charming.

The Giant Mechanical Man – Jenna Fischer plays a woman who’s a little too old to still not know what she wants to be when she grows up. Temping isn’t paying what it used to and she has to move in with her uppity little sister. She feels comforted by the giant mechanical man (Chris Messina) when she spots him around the city – one of those street performers who dress up like a metal statue and never move. Turns out the mechanical man is going through a transition period himself. His girlfriend’s left him because he spends his day wearing silver paint rather than being gainfully employed. The two finally meet when they both take jobs far below their stations, and bond over their common loserdom. It’s quietly sweet, but it’s hard not to think that Pam belongs with Jim, and Danny with Mindy. Call me crazy.

Take Care

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What is it about a movie that makes it utterly, utterly forgettable? I watched this last night on Netflix and had to scrounge around for the title this morning because hello – forgot it.

Leslie Bibb plays the victim of a recent car accident. She’s laid up with broken bones and such and isn’t crazy about convalescing in the New Jersey home of her overbearing older sister. But it turns out that there’s no one in New York chomping at the bit to take care of her, especially not her blandly good-looking neighbour who makes weird guttural noises through the shared walls of their apartments and isn’t keen on doing favours. So instead of doing any logical thing, she instead calls up an old boyfriend who owes her (according to her) because she nursed him through cancer and then he promptly dumped her, and got rich.

Guess who’s not crazy about the idea? Well, the ex-boyfriend, naturally, but also: his current girlfriend, who’s already got jealousy issues.

The dialogue is as limp as cheap balloon the day after a party. There’s no real chemistry between the two leads. Bibb’s character is so needy and entitled it’s hard to really cut her a break, and the overacting doesn’t help. It isn’t terrible, it’s just never good. Occasionally serviceable as a time water I suppose, but little more than that.

Gideon’s Army

They Came Together

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Okay…. Whaaatttt???

A lot of funny people came together to make an all-out spoof of Hollywood date movies and, mostly because of the cast, it works better than it really deserves to.

I can’t decide if they weren’t trying hard enough or if they were trying way too hard but the jokes are constant and usually way too obvious, with rom com cliches being called attention to as directly as possible. (The waiter literally has a pole up his ass). There’s a lot here that really doesn’t work. Some jokes go on way too long practically daring you to yell at the screen. But at the rate that they’re spitting out jokes and gags, some are bound to stick and the ones that did had me laughing through the ones that didn’t.

Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler play the two leads and they’re likeability go a long way in selling some pretty lazy writing, a lot of which would probably not make it past dress on an average week at Saturday Night Live. Bill Hader, Ellie Kemper, Ed Helms, Jason Mantzoukas, Cobie Smulders, and New York City are just the tip of the iceberg in a supporting cast that should really know better. Too many funny people worked on this movie for it not to be funnier and I’m almost embarassed that I laughed at all.

I blame Jay a little. I watched it with her and when she laughs I laugh. Don’t watch it alone.

In a World…

The One I Love

Shrek the Halls

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Shrek, Fiona, Donkey, and all the friends we’re accustomed to finding down in the swamp gather round the ogre’s hearth for a heartwarming Christmas celebration.

Okay, not quite. First off, Shrek is no fan of Christmas. Generally speaking, ogres aren’t, apparently. So this first Christmas with Fiona and the triplets is also Shrek’s first Christmas period. It has caught him unawares. But Shrek is nothing if not a good dad and devoted husband, so he sets about creating the perfect holiday for his little family. Look closely and you may notice his decor consists of eyeballs shrek and his roast goose is not, in fact, a goose, or fowl of any kind. He’s an ogre and he’s doing his best.

Of course, Shrek gets more than he bargained for when his whole extended family shows up uninvited – Donkey, Puss In Boots, the blind mice, the three little pigs, the whole gang’s assembled, and in true Shrek fashion, the first they do is throw a dance party, because no Shrek movie is complete without a montage or two set to high-energy, kid-friendly music.

Shrek The Halls is a short, 30 minute holiday special that you can find on Netflix. It’s got nothing new to add to the Shrek cannon, it’s just a happy holiday happening, and it can be happening right now, in your bedroom, in your living room, anywhere you need some holiday cheer that’s fun for the whole family.

Once Upon A Holiday

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A princess from a small country is visiting NYC when she goes AWOL. Sick of having every moment planned and choreograph, with no time at all for her own pursuits and passions, she evades her crack security team (literally just ducking), and hits the streets, totally unprepared. Within minutes she’s robbed, her purse and heirloom camera stolen. A good samaritan tries to give her cash to get home (not that a princess carries cash anyway…I’m guessing the purse had nothing but lipgloss and loose diamonds) but instead she adopts the name Kate Holiday and resolves to spend as much time with him, learning to be “normal.”

Jack doesn’t know she’s a princess of course, which means to him she looks a lot like a random homeless person. She needs food and shelter and clothes. And for some reason she falls dead asleep at a party. And yet Jack just adopts this strange homeless woman who appears to have zero common sense and who won’t give a straight answer to a question for all the loose diamonds in the world. Not only does Jack take her under his wing, he falls in love with her.

Meanwhile, selfish little Katie doesn’t give one fig for her security team nor her loved ones, who are equally concerned about her safety and well-being. She’s just vanished and they’re left making excuses to all of her commitments while they scramble to find her.

Briana Evigan and Paul Campbell are pretty unremarkable in their individual roles and their chemistry can only be measured in negative numbers. But it makes sense that there’s no heat in their romance; there’s also very little Christmas in this Christmas movie. It’s set “during the holidays” but this is really just a movie about a princess who’d rather not be. This is a very missable, skippable movie, and luckily, Netflix has a million more where this came from. Choose again.

You Can’t Fight Christmas

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Here’s a surprise: this movie belongs to a Christmas cinematic universe centered around the Chesterton hotel. We’ve seen the hotel and in fact been introduced to these characters in a previous film – Miss Me This Christmas.

You Can’t Fight Christmas is about the hotel’s decorator, Leslie Major (Brely Evans). She’s the self-proclaimed Queen of Christmas, and every year she turns the hotel into a Christmas wonderland to which hotel guests flock. But their robust Christmas season can’t sustain the hotel during the rest of the year, and elderly owner Mr. James (Richard Gant) is ready to pass the torch to grandson Edmond (Andra Fuller). The only problem is Edmond’s business partner, Millicent (Persia White), a stark raving bitch with a power point presentation to win his heart. So that’s a complicating factor when Leslie and Edmund have a meet-cute that literally has her falling into his arms. But can she really afford to fall for the enemy, the man who may be responsible for the loss of her job?

Rebel Wilson recently declared that she was the first plus-sized woman to star in a romantic comedy. She conveniently that black women, like Queen Latifah and Mo’Nique have been doing it for years. Even this throw-away Christmas movie manages to make it work. Our leading lady is charismatic and holds her own on the screen. But make no mistake, this is still formulaic and predictable. It goes how every lousy romantic Christmas movie goes. So if you have time to burn and low-key cheer to achieve, this movie is just about tolerable. Which is just about the nicest thing I’ve said about one of these movies in a long, long time.

Beverly Hills Christmas

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Oh dear. It seems they’ve taken the title of this movie a little too seriously. Most of the characters in the film are silicone-injected, filler-enhanced, bee-stung, liposucked to hell and back. It’s so bad that it feels like a parody. It is not.

Angelina gets into a car accident, and the angel Gabriel (Dean Cain) tells her that she can’t get into heaven until she fixes something she broke. The broken object is her daughter Ravin, a spoiled, materialistic rich kid who may be broken beyond repair. It doesn’t help that Angelina can’t be seen by her daughter, nor can she touch her. She can, however, speak to her, in the form of an inner voice, like a conscience, although that concept is rather spottily treated throughout the movie.

But wait: what is Dean Cain doing in this monstrosity? I mean, 90s television Superman is not exactly a great height from which to fall, but still. And then I knew. Compared to everyone else in the film, Dean Cain looks like an acting god. And while I’m not trying to knock the Cainer, I am definitely, most 100% assuredly knocking damn hard, walloping with all my might, thudding with Thor’s unpronounceable hammer the others in the cast. They’re not acting school rejects, they’re tremendously bad acting hall of famers.

Anyway, Angelina has until Christmas Eve to turn her bratty daughter into a decent human being. Meanwhile, Angelina’s friend and Ravin’s new mommy, Carol, has similar intentions, but thinks shipping her off to boarding school may be the best answer. But for the holidays anyway, it’s the soup kitchen for Ravin, who cannot roll her eyes and say “Ew” enough. But would you believe that a fellow soup kitchen volunteer is young, handsome, and has a congenitally bad heart? Perhaps what Ravin needs is to fall in love, and then have another person drop dead in front of her. It’s a weird turn to take.

Anyway, what can I say beyond: it’s bad. I don’t even know which is worse, the acting or the effects. Well okay, it’s definitely the acting. But truly there are no redeeming qualities to this film. It’s just puckered and pickled from one end to the other, and I know with a literal plethora of holiday films out there, you can’t do worse, and you might do better, so by no means debase yourself with this.