Movie: Place of Execution

Not a movie really, Place of Execution was a two-parter from Masterpiece Theatre and also a book.  Irony of ironies, I’m reading the book Place of Execution and going through my Netflix queue, and low and behold there’s a movie on the list by the same name.  After reading the synopsis, I realized they were one in the same.  Is that a coincidence or what! Anyway, I had a major decision. What to do?  What to do?  Do I read the book or watch the movie, or do both and pretend like I’m an intellectual and compare how well the movie followed the book?

Originally, that’s what I decided.  Read the book, watch the movie and compare.  Except there was one little problem, 100 pages into the book it was a laborious and tedious read.  But I wanted to know what happened and began reading in diligence for another few pages and then, “Ugh, I can’t take this anymore,”  decided screw it and watched the movie.  The movie was quite good and not boring or tedious like the book,  even though I figured out the gist of what happened early in the film.  I’m pretty good at figuring out who-dunnits or who didn’t.

I’ll give you a hint.  They never found the body.  Usually the book is better than the movie, because reading gives you more details and you can get inside the character’s head.  But in the case of Place of Execution, skip the book, watch the movie.

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.