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

That Awkward Moment review

             In HBO’s hit television series “Girls”, when Lena Dunham writes about self-absorbed twenty-somethings who live in New York, but who spend most of their time complaining about the nuisance of acting in common consideration for others, it’s funny and full of interesting  contradictions. When “That Awkward Moment”—the debut feature from writer/director Tom Gormican—explores similar themes and characters, but with no trace of self-reflective irony and with an insidious, people-pleasing sense of lazy satisfaction, it only registers as sophomoric and gratingly cynical.

                Unlike Dunham’s “Girls”, crucially “That Awkward Moment” is a celebration of the post-college manosphere, and as the beer-soaked-Ping-Pong-ball adage suggests, Gormican puts the bros in distractingly misogynistic priority before the aforementioned hoes.

                The story centers around three young males who bond over their recent singleness. After Mikey (Michael B. Jordon) finds out that his wife (Jessica Lucas) is cheating on him with a lawyer, his friends Daniel (Miles Teller) and Jason (Zac Efron) decide to support him by staying single and happy along his side. This nonsensical and unwarranted pact begins to complicate when Jason falls in love with a girl that he meets in a bar named Ellie (Imogen Poots) that he first mistakes as a hooker because she dares to wear tall boots and keeps her prophylactics in stock, and with whom he eventually begins to work with professionally.  Daniel also falls for his friend with benefits named Chelsea (Mackenzie Davis) and begins dating her on the sly, all while Mikey is secretly still carrying on a physical relationship with his emotionally estranged wife. 

                The premise of this tale, I guess, is that these man-children are too proud to admit that they have found compatibility with someone of the opposite gender and they somehow feel the need to keep their relationships a secret, lest they be accused of betraying their brotherhood. What results in this manufactured plot tension is a series of inexplicable contrivances where characters lie to cover-up what shouldn’t even be a problem for normal thinking, rational adults over the age of 15.

                The other result of this set-up is an overwhelming wave of forced machismo and sexism that makes these protagonists impossible to like, even though the plot, as it is shoddily constructed, is designed in such way for these men to realize their behaviors are misguided. However, with this conceit in consideration, the movie forces the women to settle into passive roles, in which we are supposed to accept when they do inane things like date men who call them hookers the second time they ever meet, or when they show forgiveness when they have been lied about and hidden like a dirty affair, and when they let their boyfriends meet their parents with large prosthetics hanging out of their zippers—a scene that isn’t entirely played for laughs.

                Besides the outdated gender politics that hobbles this movie, what makes “That Awkward Moment” all the worse is that it is painfully unfunny and poorly paced. Many scenes begin as a visual gag or a conversation piece, but then devolve into wispy montages when Gormican can’t figure out how to cut the scene into a natural transition.  As evidenced by the blooper reel played during the credits, a lot of the dialogue between these actors is improvised or reworked on set, and as a consequence of bad scripting and direction the comedic tune of each character is pitched too similarly when left to the actors to devices.  Michael B. Jordon tries his best to keep his thankless nice-guy role understated and Efron and Teller know how to command a scene, but this sinking boat of a film only allows these talented actors to drown in its misconceived mediocrity.

               

Grade: D+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2014
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Her review

               Director Spike Jonze is an immensely talented dude but through his body of work his talent has always been obscured by his collaborations. Once known as a music video guy, he helped Weezer and The Beastie Boys (among others) rise to prominence in the Mtv 90’s. His filmography is just as eclectic, directing “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation” for the avant-surrealist writer Charlie Kaufman, and on the other end of the cultural spectrum, he has produced and been closely involved with Mtv’s ”Jackass”, as well as its feature-length fratsploitation mondo-comedies. Before his most recently released film “Her”, he also adapted Maurice Sendak’s children’s book “Where the Wild’s Things Are”.

                  What I mean to point out in all of this is that Spike Jonze, as a filmmaking auteur, despite the overall quality of his work, has rarely been given the credit he deserves as a singular talent unto himself because of the power of his industry associations. However, with “Her”, Jonze captures his own ideas about love, technology and the future and what comes out is not only a spectacularly realized, wholly original sci-fi milieu, but also a tender story about human relationships.

                Joaquin Phoenix is a somewhat elusive and distant actor and has spent his latter years widening the gap between himself and the audience; first with his ill-conceived mockumentary and then to much better effect in last year’s “The Master.” Here he brings us in significantly closer as Theodore Twombly, a lonely love-letter and greeting card copywriter living in the not-so-distant, but distant-enough-to-be-relatively-advanced Los Angeles. In an attempt to get over the somewhat recent separation from his ex-wife (Rooney Mara) and the early rumblings of inevitable divorce, Theordore decides to upgrade his operating system to a new, fully functioning and autonomous artificial intelligence named Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Unlike his command functioned OS before, Samantha not only checks his emails and organize his work papers, but she also learns his sense of humor, gives him useful guidance about his personal life and eventually she even begins to develop real and reciprocated feelings towards her owner.

                This story deals in a high-concept that is easy to scoff at or dismiss as a wispy, digital “I Dream of Genie” male fantasy. But Jonze approaches the idiosyncratic plot details and his genre conceits with heart-breaking sincerity, a complete lack of judgment to or from his characters, and within the world he builds he displays an enviable hope for the future. Skynett paranoia or the fear of robo-fascism is never even hinted at. In fact, when Theodor’s office co-worker played by Chris Pratt, or his old college buddies played by Amy Adams and Matt Letscher learn of his fully dimensional romance with Samantha, they show happiness and support for their friend.

                This foundation of warmth and humanity is thoroughly embraced as it sets the stage for an emotionally complex and thoughtful final act that expands the parameters of science fiction and satisfies its character’s arc; a feat not easily achieved by even the simplest of movie structures, let alone a wacky genre-blending narrative like this.

                  “Her” is techo-centric, visually concerned piece of metaphor that also has a recognizable beating heart. The film’s environments are beautifully portrayed with a production design and cinematography so handsome and atmospheric that it has immediately been added to my short-list of movie-worlds I wish I could live in.  But even more remarkable is that it bothers to tackle big ideas, such as the loss of humanity and conenctiveness in our modern technological era and deeper existential themes about what it is that makes a person a person, but it never does so in an intellectually pushy or posturing way. Instead, Jonze holds our hand and relays these human truths like a bittersweet bedtime story.

Grade: A

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/ Jan-2014

About Time review

                Richard Curtis has the ability to spin high-concept romantic comedy conceits into something that’s casual, breezy, and most of the time funny. A large part of this comes from the fact that he has  spent much of his earlier career working on British television. Films like “Four Weddings and a Funeral”, “Notting Hill” and “Love Actually” are modest and friendly enough to keep us from faulting their middling intentions. However, what’s remarkable about these pictures is that they contain ideas that would be cringe-worthy eye-rollers had they been produced in the states. But with Curtis’ charm and whit these films manage to float by suitably as long as everything stays light and breezy. Where things fall apart for Curtis is when he feels the need to sink into dreary, melancholic waters, as is the case with his most recent fantasy rom-com “About Time”.

                Domhnall Gleeson plays Tim, a young timid Brit who rarely has the guts to make bold choices when it comes to his love life. This all changes the day his father (Bill Nighy) lets him in on an old family secret: all of the men in his bloodline are able to time travel, no machine required. Tim then decides to go back and make all the right choices he should have made the first time around, using his newly found talent to engineer a relationship with an American dream girl named Mary (Rachel McAdams). Years after, Tim realizes that this rewriting of his life has unintentionally created some dangerous and heartbreaking outcomes.

                This movie knows what it’s doing when it’s more concerned with how to use its ridiculous premise in the service making you laugh. The matter-of-fact father-son exchanges between Gleeson and Nighy are giggle-worthy, in that dry Richard Curtis-y way, and side characters like Tom Hollander as the grouchy, foul-mouthed playwright and Joshua McGuier as Tim’s nerdy co-worker often steal the scenes they are in. Likewise, McAdams and Gleeson have decent screen chemistry, and as a couple their love is easy to root for.

                What’s not as easy to swallow is when this film switches its tracks and tries to become a tear-jerker. In taking huge leaps with its characters and the time-line, the movie asks us to drift along well past the logical climax of the story, from a clipped second act into the an extended third and an unnecessary fourth act that feels like it’s making itself up as it goes. During this stretch the screenplay stacks up tragedy after tragedy, gradually dimming the bright tone previously established in the much funnier opening half.

                “About Time” managed to make me laugh and care enough about the characters to ignore the fact the plot doesn’t make any sense and that a lot of it is very stupid. In turn, it’s because of it’s pleasant stupidity that I felt somewhat betrayed by the film when it transformed from an amiable British farce, into a soppy, weepy mess, mining the Lifetime Channel’s worst kind of emotional manipulation tactics.

Grade: C-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2013