Dark Shadows and 21 Jump Street

Question:

What two things do the two movies Dark Shadows and 21 Jump Street have in common?

Answer:

Both were taken from old TV shows and Johnny Depp was in both.

From that point on, these movies are totally different.  One is good, and one is bad.  21 Jump Street is trite and predictable and fortunately that cute Johnny Depp only plays a cameo role and is promptly killed.  He probably made killing the character as part of the contract so he would never have to appear in 21 Jump Street under any circumstance again.

Dark Shadows — okay wait — three things in common.  Dark Shadows is also predictable, but redeems itself by being hilariously funny.  Johnny Depp plays a vampire, but not a scary one, who was buried alive in the 1700’s to be unburied and returns to the 1960’s hippie era.  So the movie was a period piece within a period piece, cool huh.  The catch is that Johnny Depp has been in time capsule of sorts, i.e. his coffin, and his reaction to modernity which is old-fashioned to us viewers, was laugh out-loud funny.  Really.

I was watching Dark Shadows on a trans-Atlantic flight on one of those teeny screens behind the seat in front of me.  Usually, when I travel the person who sits next to me is pretty nice and we chat.  It’s always fun meeting fellow travelers and finding out where they’re from and where they’re going and blah, blah, blah.  Well, this last flight, I’m sitting next to a cold fish.  I tried to start a conversation and she basically snubbed me.

What’s more, I’m in the aisle seat, and she just holds it in until I get up to go to the bathroom and then uses it too.  I always want the aisle seat so I don’t have to crawl over people to use the toilet, and certainly understand when people have to crawl over me to go.  But anyway, the person next to me was not the friendly sort and didn’t like it when I laughed out loud at the laugh out-loud funny Dark Shadows; but I didn’t care, she needed to lighten up.  Finally, at the end of the flight, she started talking and was actually very nice, but it took her long enough:  9 hours and 18 minutes to be exact.

She watched the stupid movie Brave, it’s a children’s film and not funny at all; but she did find it amusing.  So here goes:

Skip 21 Jump Street unless you love Johnny Depp and want to see him die.

Watch Brave only if you have children and are desperate for a movie.

Yes on Dark Shadows — only for the humor…and Johnny Depp…because he is adorable.

Review of the Dictator

The Dictator was much better than Bruno, and on par with Borat.  Borat was probably the better film because of the originality, but…

What do you call a man holding a baked potato between his legs?

A dictator.  Get it.  A dick/tater.

Stupid joke, and the movie The Dictator was also full of stupid jokes with a stupid premise and a predictable plot and yet…it was funny.  I liked it.  What’s more I saw it in Israel and have learned something important.  Israeli’s and American’s find different things funny.

For instance, no one in the audience — except for me and my fiance — thought it was funny when the dictator of a fictional country enemy of Israel, claimed its nuclear program was for peaceful purposes only and not for the destruction of Israel (snicker, giggle, snicker).  Maybe that joke hit a little too close to home.

Perhaps the Israeli audience didn’t understand most of the jokes which required intimate knowledge with Americana.

Americans who want a fun movie, or want a light-hearted date movie this is it.  Those of you in the 51st state, unless you’ve visited some of the other 50, save your money.

Movie Review: Horrible Bosses

Horrible Bosses wasn’t horrible.  I heard horrible things about the movie, but it wasn’t that bad.  It’s one of those movies you watch all the way through and think:  Hmm, that wasn’t so bad.  It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad.

Horrible Bosses was definitely watchable.  Half-way through the film you ask you didn’t have to ask the fateful question every movie director hates to hear:  When is this movie going to end?!

Unfortunately, Horrible Bosses is one of those movies you can watch and enjoy and then two days (hours?) later completely forget what the entire move was about.  Of course, the title tells almost all.  It’s one of those guy-type movies where the three good old buds decide to kill their bosses.  Since it’s a comedy and not a thriller, you — the viewer —  already know the men/boys don’t succeed.

The biggest problem with Horrible Bosses was every character was one-dimensional.  It is really hard to understand why a babe like Jennifer Anniston would risk her license and career by sexually harassing one of the goof-ball main characters who was such a loser and wasn’t even cute.  That just didn’t make sense, except of course the script was a male fantasy and not based on anything near reality.

See, a lot of us work for horrible bosses, supervisors and co-workers, and we would enjoy watching something that reflects closer to the reality of our own miserable jobs.  Horrible bosses is a real problem in real life, so a script that gives us a believable solution instead of a joke would have been appreciated. Let one of the good-guys be a woman, give us a strong woman thwarted in her career by an evil boss who goes just short of sexual harassment. Instead of cartoon stereotypes, make the bosses realistic and give us jerks we really love to hate, I mean really, really hate.  Doing this would turn the movie from slap-stick to darkly comedic and create a movie people would remember the next day, and maybe even want to watch again.

Movie Review: Arthur vs. Arthur

Do you sometimes have movies on your Netflix queue that you have no idea why you put it there or what it is about?  For some reason I had Arthur on the queue  thinking it was about Camelot and King Arthur’s Court — stuff like that.  It turns out Arthur is a remake of another movie with the same title starring Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli that came out in the 80’s.  Once I realized Arthur was a stupid romance I tried putting it at the bottom of my list, but it didn’t take and the next day — here comes Arthur.

My boyfriend and I didn’t want to watch it — he wants me to call him fiance and not boyfriend, but I don’t see a diamond on my finger, so he’s my boyfriend.  But he always says in his deep, gruff voice:  I bought you a ring and you don’t wear it.  I reply:  It’s too small it doesn’t fit on my finger! (Translation:  I’m too damn fat to wear the ring).  Besides what he bought me wasn’t a real diamond it was a synthetically made Alexandrite.  I want a real Alexandrite not a synthetic one, and if I can’t have a real Alexandrite I’ll settle for a real diamond but it better be a big one.  Anyway, since Arthur was the only CD “at home,” we watched it just so we could send it back and get something we could actually enjoy.

To our amazement we really liked the movie.  Arthur is a definite yes!  It was so good, I had to immediately netstream the original Arthur and compare.

It turns out the 21st Century remake Arthur is much, much better than the 20th Century original Arthur.  The premise in both is the same: spoiled drunk adult rich kid falls in love with poor white trash.  A few changes — besides the ones you would change to account for cell phones, computers, interior design and fashion, etc. — make the new Arthur a really fun movie. In the remake, Arthur he has a nanny instead of a butler, and his mother is alive running the company.

In the original you do not understand at all why he has to marry Susan, nor is it clear why Susan would want to marry him.  That whole scenario was a little hard to believe.  In the remake everyone’s motives are crystal clear, as in: I get it!  And it’s believable.

What’s more, in the original, the love of Arthur’s life is a shoplifter and not terribly likable and it’s hard to see the attraction.  The remake changes Arthur’s true love to a young woman who is not a shoplifter but still breaks the law in a cute, quirky sort of way that the viewer can definitely understand Arthur’s attraction.  The new Arthur allows for character development and the viewer sees Arthur’s drinking as a real problem, rather than in the original Arthur where Dudley Moore seems to be able to quit whenever he wants.

The new Arthur allows the viewer to better understand the spoiled drunk’s relationship with his mother and his nanny.  You also understand the nanny’s motives and when that relationship ends the viewer can empathize with what Arthur is going through and also better understands his drinking.

So, if you’re in the mood for a stupid romance, watch the new, improved Arthur.  Only if you are a movie nerd do you need to bother watching the original.  But if you are a movie nerd much like myself, it is kind of fun to contrast and compare old movie versus new.  One of my favorite classics is Harold and Maude:  I wonder how Hollywood would handle a remake of that?

Movies: The Tourist and The Switch

Here’s the thing about Johnny Depp, when he’s Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean, he’s a doll.  I mean, I just want to take him home.  In his other movies he’s like, “Yuck.”  But he’s a such good actor, and the characters he creates — with the help of the script and director — are interesting and fun to watch.  Yeah, I like Johnny Depp. Sometimes I just want to take him home, regardless, which would really, really upset my boyfriend.  Not because he would be jealous.  No, he absolutely hates Depp because of his politics.  However, since I review movies and blog about them, my boyfriend has no choice but to watch movies with actors he despises because they dare voice opinions different than his own.  But boy do I hear about it! Sometimes we have big fights and…

Oh, the movie review.   The Tourist disappoints.  Here’s why, the director had the wrong vision.  The director’s vision was to show off Angelina Jolie in all her bony- shouldered, thick-lipped beautiful perfection.  What the director missed was that The Tourist needed to have more humor, more camp, for it to work. Depp can be camp, ala Pirates; but although Angelina may be beautiful,  funny she is not. In fact it is hard to believe she is even nice.  She looks like the kind of person if you were to see her in public and want an autograph or something horrendous like that, she would act all hoity-toity: why is this person breathing my air.  I don’t know, mind you, but she really doesn’t seem the friendly sort.  Angelina’s role in The Tourist would probably been better played by Jennifer Aniston…wouldn’t that be a bit of irony?

Yeah, I think Depp and Aniston in The Tourist with a humorist twist would have created a fun thriller — I mean a nerdy guy running across those roofs in his pajamas — that could have been hilarious.  But no, it was neither hilarious or exciting.  Besides, Jennifer Aniston seems nice.  She seems like the type if you’re an adoring fan asking for an autograph, she would be really gracious about it and chit-chat for a moment.  Then when you were gone talk to her bodyguard or boyfriend or someone in her entourage, “Why didn’t you make that person go away!”  She’d be like that, nice to your face and then slam you behind your back.  But who knows, I haven’t met either woman.  Maybe they should do a film together, the script could be awful, but people would see the movie hoping for the cat fight.

Which brings me to The Switch.  For some reason this was billed as a comedy, and I guess technically since it had a happy ending made it a comedy, although I starting to cry a little bit in the middle.  I hate movies that make me cry, especially if it is a stupid romance…blah!  The Switch was not fun and upbeat.  If you are wanting something fun and upbeat with Jennifer Aniston, watch that Adam Sandler film Just Go With It, which is the best film he’s done since 50 First Dates.

But anyway, in The Switch, the real story is about the bonding of father and son.  Because it is about their bonding and not so much a stupid romance, the movie is tolerable. You start to understand the father, whoever played that role (it wasn’t Jennifer Aniston), through the strange personality of the brown eyed kid of two blue-eyed parents.  Geneticists say that can happen, but it is rare — in fact I think that’s known as a mutation.  Nevertheless,  the casting director or somebody on that film crew should have caught that and made one of the parents wear brown contacts.  That’s all that was needed, or change out the kid, but he was adorable, so keep the kid and go with the brown contacts so you have  one parent with brown eyes.  It could have been Jennifer, that way both fathers could have blue eyes lending to the confusion.  Brown eyes on Jennifer might be pretty remarkable.

So here’s the verdict on The Tourist and The Switch.  If you happen to love one of the actors starring in either film, you’ll see the movie regardless.  If you are like me, and you watch movies just so you can trash them later, then both these movies are a must see.  If however, you are a little picky about which movies you invest two or more hours of your time, pass on The Tourist.  I mean it’s okay in a flat isn’t Angelina beautiful sort of way.  I can only offer a big maybe for The Switch depending on your taste and mood, because although it’s more sad than funny it does offer some character development and doesn’t have a lot dumb romantic drama.

Movies: Just Go With It and Inside Job

If you like Adam Sandler and Jennifer Anniston — who doesn’t — and you want a comedic movie where you can relax and just go with it.  Ha, ha! I used just go with it and that’s the name of the movie Just Go With It.  So anyway, the movie is predictable — no surprise there — and fun.  Anniston and Sandler have good chemistry just like Sandler and Drew Barrymore had good chemistry in 50 First Dates.  That’s not my favorite movie or anything, but it has the best ending of any movie I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen a lot of movies.  A lot.

It’s like all I ever do is watch movies.  Most of them are so UNremarkable I forgot what they were about before I even review them.  That’s how many movies I watch.

Oh yeah, Just Go With It is a fun movie, a few laughs, and is one of those feel good movies where everything is right with the world.  So if you want that kind of movie just go with Just Go With It.

On the other hand, if you’re not in the mood for frivolity, Inside Job could explain why you don’t have a job, why you lost your home in foreclosure, and above all else keep you awake worrying about what those damn bankers are going to do next to further F*#! up the economy.  The good thing about Inside Job is it wasn’t terribly political:  it didn’t blame the Democrats, it didn’t blame Bush and the rest of the party.  Although, according to the film, the Republican demi-god Reagan was the one who started us on the path toward economic collapse.  However Clinton kept it going and Obama is doing very little.

There was one telling line in the movie and I paraphrase badly:  Wall Street controls our economic policy.  Take heed all of you who want to blame the other party, it is both parties’ ignorance of basic economics and of course their own greed that makes them submit to the whims of Wall Street.

There was another little factoid in the film that was especially troublesome.  These guys who brought us down the primrose path of economic ruin are the ones writing the economic textbooks that our children will be studying.

I will tell you something.  Our nation has gone through economic disaster before and we as a nation have weathered other storms and we’ll get through this — but only if we teach our kids how to think.  One of my jobs is a private tutor, which because of the economy jobs are harder to find and I had to lower my rates.  I see first hand how kids are being taught to regurgitate information to pass a test.  They are not being taught or allowed to think.  I have actually gotten in trouble for encouraging children to think.  Probing questions are highly discouraged.  When these kids go to college and read the pablum in the texts pushed off by the Wall Street Elite, if they don’t have the capacity to dig deeper and put two and two together this country is doomed.

Sorry for the rant.

Movie: Dinner for Schmucks

Based on the title, Dinner for Schmucks sounded like it would be a really bad movie.  The movie didn’t quite live up to expectations in that we were able to watch the entire thing — unlike Inception — which we gave up on after 30 minutes.  Actually my boyfriend only gives a movie 10 minutes to get interesting — it doesn’t have to be good just interesting enough to want to keep watching.  I’m much more kind, I gave Inception over 30 minutes to redeem itself, then looked and found out the movie was a two and half hour fiasco. There was no way I could do two more hours of meandering, meaningless film footage —  it was time to switch over to Dinner for Schmucks, which was better than Inception and we both watched it all the way through to the bitter end.

Dinner for Schmucks was about corporate backstabbing, sort of. A movie has to be really bad for me to stop watching, because I’ll watch about anything, and Inception just didn’t go anywhere.  It was confusing, you didn’t know who was dreaming and when and what for; plus the characters weren’t likable. We viewers need two things somebody to root for and somebody or something to hate.  Inception gave us boredom.

So in the movie Dinner for Schmucks, the boss of the firm would have this dinner in his fancy mansion and all of his main managers or VP’s or whatever they were would have to bring a special guest.  The guest would have to be someone with a special talent and unique personality.  The guests would perform their talent like waving a sword around, talking to dead animals, showing off mind control stuff like that.  The winner  — whoever had the weirdest display —  would receive a trophy.  What the guests didn’t understand was they were there to be ridiculed.

The main character who wants a promotion has to go along with this, but his girlfriend tells him no.  So he’s not going to go until he meets Steve Carell who plays a peculiar guy with a strange talent.  Once Steve Carell comes into the main character’s life, everything goes wrong, thanks to Carell’s bumbling.  I think his antics were supposed to be funny, but mostly they were irritating.  Ha, ha, I forgot to laugh.

All About Steve was another movie about a peculiar person, and this movie worked.  Even though Sandra Bullock playing an odd, socially inept sort of person who could also grate on people’s nerves, you still liked her.  I’m convinced the only reason critics panned the movie was because Sandra Bullock went out of her normal role to play an odd, socially inept sort of person.  Back to Dinner for Schmucks. Steve Carell, although fun to watch and looked pretty good in that hair color, didn’t elicit much sympathy.  All the other characters in the movie were bland and fairly one-dimensional.

Steve Carell with his series Office and some of his other movies seems to be interested in corporate dynamics among the rank and file workers.  There’s a good movie in there, but Dinner for Schmucks wasn’t it.

Movie: Easy A

Somehow from the the promos, I got the mistaken idea that this was a film about seducing a teacher to improve one’s grade.  That concept would probably be better served in a college context rather than high school especially if one wanted to make it a comedy.

The film had an interesting premise about how reputations can be made or lost, and at least didn’t put anyone in the house asleep while we watched.

Unfortunately, there were some things in the film that just didn’t ring true.  For instance, I had a very hard time believing the main character was really 17 or 18, she looked to be mid-twenties and sounded like a dirty, filthy smoker.  In fact, according to my internet sources Emma Stone was born in ’88 and is indeed a smoker.  It’s ruining her voice and aging her fast.  Anyway, I spent the entire movie thinking:  Okay, this is pretend…Pretend she’s in high school…Pretend she looks like a teenager…Pretend that’s how 18 year olds behave…But because I had to tell myself to pretend, it took away some of the fun one would otherwise have watching a movie.

Plus, Easy A’s end had no punch.  (Or as they would say in High School — it was anti-climatic).

But good endings for movies are hard to come by.  The best movie ending the world for a comedy film would be the ending of 50 First Dates.  Wow — absolutely great ending!

What’s really weird is that whenever we’re channel surfing we always come upon 50 First Dates and it’s always at the same spot…you know the part where Lucy is back in the institution and Adam Sandler comes to see her, and she’s been dreaming about him and painting his picture.  At that point, the movie’s about over, so we have watch the rest because I really love that perfect ending.  And then I get a little teary-eyed and always say: that movie has the best ending in the world for a comedy film — ooohhhh.

Other than that Easy A was okay.  Just okay.

Movie: Grown-Ups

My boyfriend said it best, “How could the greatest comedians from that era of Saturday Night Live come together for such a disappointment?

I wasn’t disappointed at all, but then I fell asleep mid-way through and woke up in time for the end of the big basketball game.  And I said, “Am I correct in assuming I didn’t miss anything?”

And he said, “You are correct.”  And that’s when he made the comment about how could the greatest comedians from that era of Saturday Night Live come together for such a disappointment.

To tell the truth, I never watched or watch Saturday Night Live.  Before my boyfriend and I became stay at home slugs every night of the year, thanks to living in a town that has absolutely nothing going on in the evenings unless you like smokey bars, I was out and about Saturday nights.  I didn’t know what it was to be home on a Saturday night, I wouldn’t even know the show existed except sometimes at work people would talk about Saturday Night Live, and act like I was out of it because I didn’t watch the show because I was actually doing something.  But now, even though I could watch the show, I do much more important things like watch Grown-Ups — except it was Wednesday and not Saturday, but, you get the idea,  a movie or something — and fall asleep and blog about it the next morning.

Unfortunately, if you are looking for a movie to cure your insomnia, Grown-Ups isn’t it — too much noise at the end.  I will be giving you a list of the top ten movies guaranteed to put you to sleep in no time.  Preview: My Dinner with Andre is on the list.

Movie: Killers

Katherine Heigl is beautiful and she lights up the screen, but she should beg Grey’s Anatomy to take her back full time.  As my boyfriend says, she’s not a strong enough actress to carry a movie.  Or perhaps it’s just the lame movies she’s agreeing to star in.

Killers doesn’t work.  It starts out with the premise of of a hired killer spy who leaves it all to marry Heigl and live in the suburbs, but his past comes back to haunt him.  The movie is okay until the suburban demolition derby and goes flat and predictable from there.  Arguing couples in the face of danger can be funny, but when there is as much carnage as in Killers, well, it’s just not funny anymore. Death, murder, mayhem is serious stuff and I watch as much violence (maybe more) as the next guy, but putting it in the context of a humorous marriage in crisis just doesn’t play well.

The movie would have been better if the writers had used their talents to craft a real mystery the couple needed to solve in order for the ex-spy to win his “retirement” in the suburbs rather than having neighbors emerge with uzis — or whatever type of guns those were — putting bullet holes in doors, walls, cars and each other.