Archive for April 2008
If this poster doesn’t deter you, probably nothing will.
Beware the grandma. Nearly as ubiquitous as a head-cocking canine in bad romantic comedies, the clueless-elder cameo is almost always a sure sign that the filmmakers either a) ran out of ideas or b) didn’t have any good ones in the first place.
Throw—with great force—Made of Honor into the latter category. And worry about Patrick Dempsey, who has used his mid-career makeover on Grey’s Anatomy to star in exactly one winning film (last year’s Enchanted) before boomeranging back to Can’t Buy Me Love territory, apparently forgetting that while such late-’80s swill launched his career, it also threatened to box him into formulaic roles forever.
Dempsey literally grows young again in Made of Honor’s opening scene, his face creepily covered in what looks like flesh-colored fondant as his character, Tom, is shown partying in college and meeting cute his future best friend, Hannah (Michelle Monaghan). Ten years later, the two have no romantic relationship yet a standing Sunday date in which they go out to dinner, play guess-which-dessert-I’m-getting, and generally giggle and act adorable together.
Their conversation consists of one topic: Tom may be a cad whose personal version of The Rules prevents his gaggle of girlfriends from getting too close, but at least he’s honest with them. (This guy is so friggin’ honest, in fact, he or another character will mention the trait approximately a dozen more times.)
You’ll be ready to retch even before the story, written by a trio of scripters, reaches Act 2. Hannah travels to Scotland for a six-week business trip (she’s an art restorer) and after a series of missed phone calls, soul-bearing basketball games with the guys (Tom, who invented the coffee collar, is comfortably unemployed), and a frowny-faced solo dessert outing (the lovelorn wretch is forced to order two pieces of cake because Hannah’s not there to offer him a bite of hers), Tom decides that she’s the One.
And he’s just bursting to tell her when they meet for a welcome-back dinner. Except Hannah has made it a party of three, introducing Tom to Colin (Kevin McKidd), her perfect Scottish fiancé. Cue Tom crashing into a waiter. Twice.
Unfathomably, Made of Honor gets worse from there. This isn’t a he-said-she-said comedy, yet the dialogue can be summarized thusly: Hannah’s female friends go, “Awww!” “Eeeeee!” and “Oooooh!” whenever any topic from Colin to the weather is mentioned. (Except for Hannah’s grandma, who just grins idiotically as she wears a sex toy as a necklace.) And Tom’s friends say things such as, “Any time is the right time to say I love you!” They also quiz him on maid-of-honor duties.
Oh, did I forget to mention this crucial and most absurd plot point? Hannah wants Tom to be her best gal. Which in itself is fine, except no one will refer to him as anything but “maid” of honor, seemingly for no other reason than it’s allegedly funny. Tom’s friends encourage him to accept the responsibility and prep him like drill sergeants, the better for Tom to sabotage the wedding under the radar.
Among the movie’s many other sins is Weiland’s occasionally awful camera work, including blurred shots through a revolving door and a nauseating dinner-table spin when Hannah’s telling Tom the news. (Though maybe we shouldn’t expect much from the director of City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly’s Gold.)
There’s a cruel undercurrent of an ugly-people-are-funny mentality that will make some viewers flash back to high school: On several occasions, Tom and his other good-looking friends stare incredulously at a “nerd” who likes to play ball with them at the gym, and Hannah’s friends, none model-perfect yet far from unattractive, are first shot as a trio with music that suggests the freaks have arrived.
Dempsey can’t do anything to save the paper-thin Tom, and the minor characters are so generic the actors aren’t worth mentioning (except for Sydney Pollack, embarrassing as Tom’s father, a compulsive marrier who negotiates sex in his prenups). Monaghan comes close to emerging with her dignity semi-intact. But Hannah is dumb as a bouquet of rocks when it comes to her newfound love, and unbelievable in her knee-jerk reactions to Tom the very few times he screws something up. Nobody survives Made of Honor unscathed.
Hey, this is how I start writing, too!
Fans of 30 Rock and devotees of Tina Fey should know an important detail before buying a ticket for Baby Mama: The comedy, co-starring Fey and Saturday Night Live’s Amy Poehler, was not written by the current It Scribe. Expectedly, then, it’s rarely as laugh-out-loud funny as Fey’s TV series or even the duo’s previous big-screen pairing, 2004’s Mean Girls (which Fey did write). But compared to the usual SNL-goes-to-the-movies train wrecks—or, say, Made of Honor—this pleasant, relatively original film is a comedy master class.
And surely writer-director Michael McCullers (a screenwriter for the Austin Powers series) let his stars have some fun with his odd-couple story about surrogacy. Kate (Fey) is a 37-year-old executive of an organic-foods market who wants to have a child “now.” With no man in her life, low odds of getting approved to adopt, and an oddly shaped uterus that her fertility doctor “just doesn’t like,” Kate decides that her only option is to find what her doorman, Oscar (The 40-Year-Old Virgin’s Romany Malco), has a ready slang term for: “You pay the bills, she has the baby—that’s called a baby mama. Ask any man in Philadelphia.”
After a meeting with an ironically fertile surrogacy agent (Sigourney Weaver, gamely making herself the target of age jokes), Kate is introduced to Angie (Poehler), a trashy junk-food inhaler whose only motivation in carrying someone else’s kid is the paycheck. When Angie leaves her deadbeat boyfriend (Dax Shepard), Kate takes her in, and both of the women’s prenatal glow dims as they get to know each other. (Angie, for instance, declares she’d “rather get hit in the face” than indulge in Kate’s stockpile of healthy food.)
Fey mostly plays it straight here, though her Kate is not above translating a birthing coach’s instructions to “pwep your perwanium with EVOO”—yes, she’s got a Baba Wawa speech impediment, and it’s childish but still kinda amusing—as, “I think she wants me to rub olive oil on your taint.” But Poehler, who’s often grating in her SNL skits, pulls off the funniest bits here: Angie’s fake-out offer of gas money to Kate is brilliant, and Poehler spits—food, vitamins, more food—like a pro. And Juno MacGuff, for all her logorrheic wisecrackery, could never yell out a more believable labor line than “It feels like I’m shittin’ a knife!”
Even Kate’s requisite budding relationship (the suitor played by Greg Kinnear) is sharply drawn, particularly a terrific scene that highlights the universal moment when a casual remark can make a person previously blushing with puppy love suddenly want to run for the door. Like most of Baby Mama, it’s not gut-busting. But after a parade of romantic comedies that shoot one-liners with machine guns or twist circumstances to contrivance, it’s a relief to enjoy a story that just feels natural.
…but I do have to comment on the travesty that was Brooke before elimination tonight.
Girl, what is this?
Shiny pants? Flouncy shirt? I’m sorry to say that the above picture doesn’t do Brooke’s affront to fashion justice, but it’s the best I could do.
And on top of the bad look was all that bouncing and weird perma-grin during her godawful “I’m a Believer.” (Simon, as usual, summed it up best: Nightmare.)
Not sure it’s enough to send her home, though. I’m thinking she’s got a pretty loyal cult…er, fan base.
Iron Man, that is. (Please, people — Movie Babe often likes to reminisce about her virginal youth, but those days have gone the way of John Hughes movies and analog sound.)
Alas, there’s a screening of the sure-to-be-kickass movie tonight, but since it’s too late for my paper’s deadline, I’m not writing about it. And therefore don’t have to see it tonight. And therefore have the rare opportunity to wait and see a giant opening when it actually opens with my dear hubby, who understandably gets a little bummed watching something I’ve already seen.
Must be love.
Yes, our affair will have to wait.
Weekend of April 27, 2008
Box Office
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Source: Rotten Tomatoes
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I got a fiver with your name on it if you kill me next
Dead bodies may rot, but fake boobs are forever. That’s the gist of Zombie Strippers, a schlockfest whose title pretty much says it all. Lovers of such camp no doubt believe that brilliant ideas were bouncing around like so many pussy-launched pingpong balls when Jenna Jameson’s latest foray into nonspank cinema was conceived. Alas, writer-director Jay Lee instead delivers a B movie that barely rates a double-D.
One of Zombie Strippers’ most egregious sins is that, for all its moments of titillation, it’s simply a bore. (That’s not surprising: What Jameson vehicle was intended to be watched in its entirety?) Perhaps worst, though, is that Lee seems to think it’s all very smart. Every zombie flick must have its message, I suppose, and this film has a couple.
In an unspecified time in the future, the strip club where Kat (Jameson) is the star and Robert Englund is the very weird boss is infested with a virus created by the government, a strategy to reanimate dead soldiers now that George Bush is on his fourth term and the United States is at war with half the world. The president and his veep have also self-branded the companies W Industries and CheneyCo. Burn! (It didn’t seem possible that filmic foreign-policy criticism could be lamer than Southland Tales’, but there you go.)
Also, there’s a lot of philosophical talk going on. You heard that right: Kat, the club’s main attraction, reads Nietzsche in the dressing room. Fellow dancers discuss the meaning of life. It’s all ridiculous, especially considering the terrible, terrible acting by no-names such as Jennifer Holland, Jeannette Sousa, Roxy Saint, and Carmit Levité, who plays a Vampira-accented madame.
Somewhat mercifully, however, there’s not as much acting as there is stripping. Before and after an undead military man stumbles into the place, the girls work the pole. And when Kat and a couple of others turn into flesh-eaters themselves, their jobs are hardly at risk. Instead, they become super-strippers, giving the performances of their, uh, lives and lathering the patrons into ultimately fatal frenzies.
The idea is easy enough to go along with when the dancers are merely blood-covered Energizer Barbies. But then they start to decay. And the crowd still goes wild. And now the film’s sole point of interest—flagrant nakedness, to be clear—goes the way of the truly live nude girls’ tips as the visuals become gross and the logic faulty even by horror-movie standards.
Lee attempts humor, too, in a kind of equal-opportunity-offender kind of way, but instead he just offends. A Mexican janitor played by Joey Medina is a particularly unfortunate victim of this, ending up in scenes with sombreros and mules. At one point, when he asks if he has to clean up a blood-soaked room, Englund’s character points to the custodian’s skin and asks, “What color is that?” Englund—better known as A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger—is embarrassing here as well, his club owner partly flamboyant, partly asshole, and entirely unlikable either way.
The special effects, at least, are decent (though a few dancers’ warp-speed spins on the pole add a level of cartoonishness this movie certainly doesn’t need), and there is one funny scene in which the story’s villain is shown in flashbacks as he describes stealing the virus. But Zombie Strippers’ badness is so pervasive it will irritate you instead of making you laugh, and there are zero scares—unless you count close-ups of Jameson’s surgery-mutated face.
Life sucks and then you see this movie
Flowers shouldn’t make you angry. But by the time the 100th blossom appears in The Life Before Her Eyes, you may start to get a little tetchy. Vadim Perelman offers a warning of the flora to come in his drama’s languid opening credits, with the camera going in and out of focus as it oh-so-sensitively pans across dew-kissed bulbs. For a while afterward, similar shots of blooms and water and distorted views repeat themselves here and there. Then the director makes like a poet on Provigil and starts dumping symbolism by the bucket until you can’t help but sit there, Beavis & Butt-Head-like, thinking, “This means something.”
A more appropriate response would be to call bullshit. For a while, though, you can go along with Perelman’s follow-up to 2003’s well-received House of Sand and Fog, certain that its time-jumping story (adapted from Laura Kasischke’s novel) about a high-school shooting and its effect on the survivors does, in fact, mean something.
First-time scripter Emil Stern begins by showing a day in the lives of wild-child Diana (Evan Rachel Wood) and her more conservative best friend, Maureen (Eva Amurri). The two giggle about drugs and boys and admire themselves in their suburban school’s bathroom mirror when they hear screams and gunshots out in the hall. Diana knows instantly who the killer is—the classmate told her his plans the day before, but she took it as a joke—and soon they’re facing the kid (John Magaro) and a very big gun.
Outside, there’s chaos, and a yell from Diana’s mother propels us 15 years into the future, though the grown Diana (Uma Thurman) looks as gape-mouthed and freaked as if the incident did indeed happen only seconds before. (In the book, the leap is a full two decades; the idea that Thurman is instead 32 here is nearly as ridiculous as her character’s hyperfragility.)
Diana is an art teacher with a devoted husband (Brett Cullen) and a daughter, Emma (Gabrielle Brennan), who despite her pretty hair bows and parochial-school education is allegedly a “handful” like her mom. But Diana is more concerned about the anniversary of the massacre than her little girl’s misbehavior. She stares at old photos. She stares at the wall. She’s unsettled when Emma asks her what “conscience” means, as if the child unleashed a string of expletives. She is Damaged.
Flashbacks—which become increasingly abrupt—show more of what happened on that day and a brief time beforehand, capturing Diana’s concern about being branded a slut and thoughts about what the future holds. The film is best when it stays in school: Wood’s and Amurri’s characters aren’t 17 going on 40 but believably fumbling toward adulthood in Gap wear that would make a Gossip Girl Twitter her thumbs off. Even when facing death, the young actresses communicate terror without resorting to Thurman’s theatricality. Perelman is similarly understated: A few quiet glimpses throughout the school, slain students and teachers throughout, is enough to convey devastation.
The story’s sudden anti-abortion message, however, is not so subtle, though that and the rest of the film’s intended thoughtfulness about lives cut short, etc., becomes absolutely meaningless when the plot makes a hard turn into potboiler territory.
It could be argued that it’s best to know as little as possible about The Life Before Her Eyes before going in; its final chapters are relatively clever if you haven’t read the book and you’re not expecting them. Then again, a surprise has to be more than just well-executed to be impressive. More likely, you’ll feel frustration, and by the final reel it’ll have nothing to do with daffodils.
Well, maybe not cry, exactly, but at least mist up. A few times. And even after watching one performance again. (What did we do before DVRs?) OK, OK, a full tear ran down my cheek more than once. Which forces me to an even more embarrassing disclosure:
I love Andrew Lloyd Webber.
There. I said it. (Though let me add an asterisk: I draw the line at Cats.)
I didn’t, however, think that Webber week on Idol was a terribly good idea. Idolettes singing show tunes? But last night’s episode proved me wrong. And wussy: Every year there are usually a couple of moments that get me a little choked up, times when a contestant really kicks ass and clearly is having a lot of fun doing it.
Exhibit 1: Syesha. Who knew that girl should be on Broadway? Her version of “One Rock ‘n’ Roll Too Many” oozed personality and sass and reminded me of how much I love this stuff. She looked great and — besides an early start and a pitchy spot or two — sounded great. I could watch this performance again and again.
Which is exactly what I did with
Exhibit 2: David Cook. The other half of my wussiness stems from my Phantom of the Opera obsession, and out of the two songs picked from that show, David’s was unsurprisingly the best. “Music of the Night” is one of my favorite ballads — the lyrics kill me every time — and I loved that “the rocker” sang it relatively straight and still wowed. Then again, it’s such a great song it’d be difficult to ruin, wouldn’t it?
Oh wait: Here’s Archuleta turning the extraordinarily lovely “Think of Me” into an adult-contemporary snore. I stand corrected.
As for the other contestants, I didn’t mind Jason’s “Memory” (again, gorgeous song) or Carly’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” (not so pretty, but I suppose she belted it properly). I love “You Must Love Me” but couldn’t stand Brooke’s unrelenting Look of Serious Concern throughout the entire song. Not a good week for Nanny.
(I was happy, though, when Simon and Randy backed her decision to start over after Paula severely reprimanded her. I mean, come on…she barely got a line out, it wasn’t like she decided to reboot in the middle of the song.)
And now for something completely different — the best lines of the night:
“I didn’t think that girl had a clue what that song was about.” — Andrew Lloyd Webber
“It was a little strange having to stare longingly into Lord Andrew’s eyes.” — David Cook
And, my favorite:
“I didn’t know a cat was singing it.” — Jason Castro
Overall, probably my favorite episode of the season.
Jason Castro
But, mercifully, the presence of Al Pacino doesn’t fool anybody:
Weekend of April 20, 2008
Box Office
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| 1 | new | Forbidden Kingdom | 1 | $20.9M | $20.9M | $6.6k | 3151 |  62% |
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| 2 | new | Forgetting Sarah Marshall | 1 | $17.3M | $17.3M | $6.2k | 2798 | 86% |
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| 3 | 1 | Prom Night | 2 | $9.1M | $32.6M | $3.4k | 2700 |  9% |
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| 4 | new | 88 Minutes | 1 | $6.8M | $6.8M | $3.1k | 2168 | 5% |
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| 5 | 4 | Nim’s Island | 3 | $5.7M | $32.9M | $1.7k | 3277 | 48% |
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| 6 | 3 | 21 | 4 | $5.5M | $70M | $1.9k | 2903 | 31% |
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| 7 | 2 | Street Kings | 2 | $4M | $19.9M | $1.6k | 2469 | 34% |
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| 8 | 6 | Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! | 6 | $3.5M | $144.4M | $1.3k | 2670 | 78% |
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| 9 | new | Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed | 1 | $3.2M | $3.2M | $3k | 1052 | 9% |
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| 10 | 5 | Leatherheads | 3 | $3M | $26.6M | $1.1k | 2798 | 53% |
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| 11 | 7 | Smart People | 2 | $1.6M | $6.8M | $1.4k | 1119 | 51% |
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| 12 | 9 | Superhero Movie! | 4 | $1.5M | $23.5M | $0.8k | 1880 | 15% |
Source: Rotten Tomatoes
My apologies for this mere blurb, hope to expand on it shortly:
Much, much more to love
Breaking up is hard to do when you’re wearing nothing but a pout and were just regaling your soon-to-be-ex with a celebratory wang-flapping to welcome her home.
Yes, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is another Apatowian romance, and once again the It producer and his crew have conjured fresh, dirty ways to make rom-com mush tolerable. Jason Segel earns the bulk of the credit here, though, not only starring as Peter, the musician dumped by his titular actress girlfriend (Kristen Bell), but also penning a debut script that doesn’t completely shun genre contrivances but feels believable nonetheless.
More important, it’s funny: Segel’s melancholic, genial Peter out-Everymans Seth Rogen with quips that are quick without seeming crack-fueled, and a supporting cast including Jack McBrayer, Jonah Hill, Bill Hader, Mila Kunis, Paul Rudd, and Russell Brand help ease/exacerbate Peter’s misery when he arrives at a Hawaiian resort to lick his wounds, only to run into Sarah and her new beau.
