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.

Movies: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and also Guess Who

Besides starting with the letter “G,” these movies have something else in common:  they are classics reworked with a twist.  Guess Who is a take on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.  This time instead of a white chick in the 60’s bringing home her black fiance to meet her parents, it is reversed, now she is black and bringing home her white guy to meet the folks.  Even with Bernie Mac, Guess lacks laughs.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is a remake of a Christmas Carol but instead of Scrooge learning about the Xmas Spirit, it is Matthew McConaughey who learns about love and commitment and crap like that and gets kind-of sappy at the end.

You can’t go wrong with a classic, can you?

Both movies are extremely predictable, although since they are classics that is to be expected.  I did manage to stay awake throughout each of them.  But I liked Ghosts and Guess left me kind of flat.  Naturally, I have to torment myself as to why?  Why did I prefer Ghosts over Guess?  Why? Why? Why?

Was is that Matthew McConaughey is just so sexy and good to watch?   No, but he is just yummy.

Was Guess lacking in heart?  No, it had a little heart.

I had to think about this until I came up with an answer, even though there are so many more important things in the world that I should be thinking about instead:  poverty, pollution, politics, tornadoes.  Real issues.  I live in the tornado belt and those things are scary. I mean SCARY! Especially in the middle of the night when the tornado siren goes off and wakes you out of a sound sleep.  You wake up and it takes you about 15 minutes to figure out what that noise is:  why is my alarm going off in the middle of the night,?  Did I set it wrong?  How come it won’t go off when I hit the snooze button?  And then:  OH, NO, Tornado! Bolt to the basement and huddle down there wondering what’s going on.   Nothing happens, but the siren is still going, so I always go back upstairs to see if anything is coming.  And one time, there was a tornado coming but it was up in the purply sky, and there was this weird noise and I was spellbound.  My boyfriend was screaming at me:  GET IN THE HOUSE, DO YOU WANT TO DIE!  So we ran to the basement, stared at each other.  Now what?  Went back upstairs and watched the tornado.  But by then it had passed over our house, thankfully without damage.

So I finally figured out why I like Ghosts and not so much Guess.  In Ghosts the main character — that good looking hunk of a man — Matthrew McConaughey, gains some insight into his own self.  He gets to see himself how others see him.  While he thinks he’s being sophisticated and funny, others see him as a jerk.   He sees how his actions that he considered inconsequential, hurts others.  Ah-ha — characters that are less than perfect and are able to grow, make for interesting watching.