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.
Cheesy Movie Reviews and TV too 