The Other Woman review

                I get it, I’m a guy and this movie wasn’t made for me.  I am nowhere near the target demo for this kind of comedy, so if I tell you that “The Other Woman” is a rancid, misogynist, unstructured, belly-ache of a mess it can only mean that I just didn’t ‘get’ it, right? Wrong! These kinds of high-concept rom-coms come out every year between the weeks that are programmed full of comic-book action movies, and I sympathize with the girlfriend audience who can’t bear to see another chase scene, another mid-flight battle or another building explode, but girls, I promise, you deserve better than this.

                Carly (Cameron Diaz) has finally met ‘the one’ in Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a handsome, successful CEO who seems ready to commit but whose scheduling is a little erratic. After bailing on a dinner to meet the father, Carly decides to surprise her new lover in sexy plumber garb but is surprised to meet his wife Kate (Leslie Mann) when she answers the door.  Instead of instant hysteria or angry phone calls made, Kate decides to slowly gain the trust and friendship of her husband’s mistress and together they decide to travel the scenic route to his eventual takedown.

                Like many other pandering romantic comedies, aiming to lull the lowest common denominator into submission with poop jokes and slapsticky sit-com gags, this movie wants women to believe that the message of this retaliation plot is empowering, when in actuality it is doing very much the opposite.  Mann and Diaz are putting it all out there for the jokes and Mann especially sacrifices all sympathy for every contrivance this movie puts her pathetic character through. Despite knowing that her husband is a cheating with multiple women, embezzling from other companies with her signature, and even spreading STD’s, she still has to be convinced and reminded of his horribleness up to the very last 10 minutes. All the while, Diaz’s strong lawyer character gets over the heartbreak of losing Kate’s husband by eventually seducing her impossibly attractive brother.  But hey, it’s okay, because girl power!

                Essentially, “The Other Woman” plays like an evenly-lit, wealth-obsessed, PG-13 version of a rape-revenge exploitation film like “I Spit on Your Grave.”  And like those kinds of reprehensible movies, the women in this story have to be humiliated throughout the picture to finally earn their moment of payback, while at the same time furthering the beliefs that liberated or not, they still need men for sex, money and social position. Never mind the fact that whatever tension exists in the plot, only exists because we’re supposed to believe that everyone involved in this silly caper, including the brothers and fathers of the interested parties, agree to not spill the beans to this clueless dope of a husband. To fill time between this nonsense, director Nick Cassavetes—oh how far the acorn falls—lets the movie drift into baggy montages of bikini-beach partying and lazy, girl-bonding time-lapses. 

                Is it funny? Sometimes Mann’s physical performance and Diaz’s straightly delivered pep-talks generate a giggle or a desperate-for-anything chuckle, but the organic chemistry between these women is undercut by headache inducing, comedy set-piece clichés involving laxatives, spying in bushes with binoculars, and people falling out of windows. And of course, when we finally arrive at the overhyped moment of comeuppance, it’s treated with as much grace and as much plausibility as a Scooby Doo unmasking with Roadrunner violence. Make no mistake about it ladies; this toxic, cynical movie hates you.

Grade: D -

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/May-2014

The Counselor review

             It’s a shame about Ridley Scott. He is, without a doubt, a very talented filmmaker and you can’t deny his skill as a stylist. In fact, I dare say that as far as visual aesthetics go, film for film, he is almost unparalleled.  Unfortunately, within the last 10 years or so, his work has been marred by bad screenplays and theatrical assemblies that edit his films to the point of incoherence.  “The Counselor”, another south-west noir penned by novelist Cormack McCarthy, suffers greatly from an overwritten screenplay and campy performances that overshadow the obvious talent that Scott tries to bring to the film.

                It’s hard not to watch this and compare it to Cormack’s near-perfect adaptation in the Coen Brother’s Oscar winning “No Country for Old Men”.  The set-up is similar and the pay off—though not effectively delivered in “The Counselor”—aims to please and depress the audience in the same way. But whereas the Coens were able to reduce the source novel to its essentials and tell the story in hauntingly sparse visual terms—choosing only key scenes to include McCarthy’s elusive prose—in this film, with Cormack now in charge of his first screenplay, a power imbalance muddles the storytelling, where his words and murky themes dominate the screen.

                The unnamed Counselor, played by the always watchable Michael Fassbender, is a lawyer who has recently become engaged to his dutiful girlfriend Laura (Penelope Cruz). To help fulfill her fantasies of wealth, the counselor decides to aid in an across-the-border drug deal with a flamboyant dealer (Javier Bardem) and his lethal cat-like lover (Cameron Diaz). In doing so, the lawyer gets lost  in a shadowy maze of deceit and murder and--as is usually the case--learns that crime never pays. Somewhere in all of this, Brad Pitt stops by to recite pages of uninteresting metaphors, Rosie Perez has a psychic link with her motorcycling drug-mule son and Cameron Diaz does an X-rated reenactment of Tawny Kitaen’s hood-of-the-car dance from Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” music video.

                In trying to fit a novel's worth of information in a two hour film, though not based on any of his previous work, McCarthy fills this script with endless dialogue set-pieces that weigh the movie down so much that it never seems to budge from scene to scene. The actors are all there to present their best work and it's clear in every scene that everyone is certainly trying. However, with Cameron as the vampy femme fatale—complete with pet cheetahs and silver claw-like fingernails—and with Bardem turning in another one of his crazy hair-cut performances, these pulpy elements jarringly clang against the dower moralizing of the plot and Scott's vista-laden visual design.

                I really wanted to like this film and I don’t fault it for being too weird or arty, but, in the end, this well-intentioned thriller is an insufferable snooze.  Michael Fassbender and Brad Pit, two of Hollywood’s most interesting actors, share several scenes together and yet here they couldn’t be more boring. The dialogue is stylized to the point of droning into a fuzzy static and McCarthy’s themes are somehow clumsily obvious and frustrating unclear at the same time. 

                Ridley Scott directs the hell out of this film and successfully makes a junky B-movie look and feel like a portentous A-picture. But even with a few creative decapitations and soft-core sex scenes sprinkled in, he still couldn’t save this inert, convoluted, lukewarm mess of a movie.

Grade: D+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2013