I have ambiguous feelings about this movie. It bears the message that even women who look fantastic in bikinis well into their 30s and 40s can have problems with their marriages, and that those problems don't stem from the sexual insecurities that afflict their lustful but aging and paunching husbands. So, while the subject of marital problems is a poignant one, exploring it in a tropical setting and foisting those problems onto girthing, balding men as well as the fantasies to whom they're married seems in poor taste. Because who is the audience for this movie? Men who can go dream about porking Kristn Davis, Malin Akermann and Kristen Bell because their schlubby hubbies are too old and stressed to deliver? Married couples who will recognize some of the domestic issues that plague the couples retreating from each other? People who laugh at everything Vince Vaughan gurbles? In the pitch meeting, I'm sure the answer was ALL OF THE ABOVE, BABY! But then what happens when married couples can't identify with the retreating couples' problems because they're too cartoonish? Or when the problems are so recognizable that they're more uncomfortable than funny? Or when you feel guilty for mistaking the big roly poly black dude included in the gang for that guy who goes around revoking various establishments' Miller High Life vending privileges?
There are 25 years between Jason Bateman and Kristen Bell's starmaking small screen turns as Derek on Silver Spoons and Veronica Mars. So maybe in the same pitch meeting that sold a mixed audience of the horny and the emo to the money guys, they decided to grab for the clever too by making a meta-statement by making this couple make their chief argument about who makes who watch what on the television? I mean, if you're gonna go there, why not make Jason Bateman a scientist who makes his own televisions? And then make the sky have a storm that makes them afraid that they'll be made to stay on the island until somebody makes a signal that gets a rescue or maybe even a nautical craft of some sort? Because that's the kinda situation that really puts a couple under stress!
Other smallscreen star Kristin Davis, finally away from those shoppy hags she ran with in New York, tries to imbue her character with a dignity that screws up the whole tone. Who directed this thing? I'll look it up later, but my guess is somebody who has done considerable work with Gore Verbinski. Blogging of directing, the urban myth that has sprung up about key plot points to Iron Man II being drizzled in the sand by Jon Favreau's pee is patently false. I honestly don't know who starts these rumors, but it really just looks like sandy splatter.
Evaluating each individual performance or even the level of chemistry achieved by each couple is a waste of your time, dear reader. They took hot girls married to stand-ins for Harvey Weinstein and put them somewhere hot and sunny and did terrible things to them. If you're jealous, you'll think it's funny. If you aren't, you won't. And if you don't think it's funny, and you don't plan on wearing a heavy raincoat to the theater, then you really have no reason to see this movie.
One and a half stars.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs
In this sequel to the classic Ratatouille, the red-headed human character has learned all he can from Remy the Rat and now it's time to strike out on his own. I'm surprised by the sophistication of the early plot twist that the filmmakers employed whereby the red-headed would be culinary-genius decides to study molecular gastronomy, the province of blackbelt chefs like Wylie Dufresne or Richard Blaze, but the movie wouldn't work without the whole experiment-gone-haywire trope.
So sure enough, after one too many bad plates of pasta and a running joke about that On Top of Spaghetti song that stales quickly for adults but sends children a'gigglin' every time somebody sneezes, the main dude goes into a lab to perfect his recipe. This being a children's film, the guy has neither genitals nor libido, but what he does have is friendship. Intimate male friendship. In another convention, the friend is slovenly and I suspect that the filmmakers preferred the best friend character to the main dude, but they had to keep the main dude heroic, so they leeched him of quirks and attributed all of the weirdness with which children's authors really identify to the more interesting character- best friend, who could technically be called the protagonist since it's his excitement about the spaghetti that knocks the gamma-leone ray over and it bounces off a mirror that was laying around on their coffee table and hits the sky just as thunderheads are gathering. Now I feel rather strongly that the filmmakers had a grand opportunity to make a Richard Pryor joke in this lab mishap scene, but I don't believe they took it.
In order for this movie to work, you have to be excited about the fact that food begins falling out of the sky. But neither I, nor anyone I know, ever needed such divine intercession to eat. More than a billion people do, of course, but does this film address them? Well, yes. In one of the poorer examples of taste in recent memory, we meet a character named Kookyboo. Kookyboo is an apprentice goatherder, but due to drought and famine, his family has no goats so he practices by herding tumbleweeds along the Serenghetti. I appreciate the film's attempts at dark humor, but the gag where a dog goes after the bone in Kookyboo's nose is not funny and all of the children who laughed at it need punishments, if not serious reeducation.
Anyway, Kookyboo's Uncle Wenstrom tries to take credit for the miracle that has befallen their village. He puts on this surprisingly terrifying witch doctor mask and dances around as if his rattle shaking and general Thoth-like behavior was what brought down the deluge of food, when of course it was the Ratatouille guy's invention ricocheting off a coffee table mirror after his slovenly friend gets too excited about how good the spaghetti is. Duh! Kookyboo doesn't exactly know this, but he's still suspicious of Uncle Wenstrom, and anyway, the goats have come back, but they're so fat from all of the sweet Italian sausage falling from the sky (and if you listen closely, you can hear one tribeswoman chant Oh Oh Oh- Rocco Siffredi! Oh Oh Oh- Rocco Siffredi!) that the goatherder's job is rendered obsolete. With thousands of years of tradition down the African bush version of the toilet, AKA the African bush, Kookyboo and Flakety Flak look for something else to do. As Kookyboo and Flakety Flak the world's leading herder of goats begin their search for a new purpose in life, the village gets hip to Uncle Wenstrom's jive and prepare a giant catapult for him.
Strangely, the film leaves this plot thread dangling until the very end and goes back to our main red-headed guy who is now friends with the President, which is pretty much exactly as it should be. And kudos to the filmmakers for creating a President who is A) Absolutely brilliant! and B) Incredibly fat! So Redhead and the Chunky POTUS realize that this accident is a boon to humanity and now they can worry about stuff other than starvation (and in this movie, President Candy really was concerned about this)- like making sure that at least 20 states elect gay governors, inventing an invention that turns Hot Wheels into real cars, and finding jobs for out of work defense contractors now that food-related wars are a thing of the past.
And here is where it all ties together! You see, Kookyboo gets falsely accused of one of those 419 scams because he actually is a Nigerian Prince. And because he wasn't trying to hide his real identity in the emails he was sending out on something that the filmmakers kinda blurred, but looked an awful lot like Nerve.com, his picture gets circulated and some real scam artists hack into Kookyboo's Hotmail account (looky.kooky.boo.ya@hotmail.com) and blame hundreds of their 419's on him until he becomes an internationally wanted criminal. But Redhead's sloppy roommate is watching the news report on his party-yacht and realizes that he had been Kookyboo's penpal when he was young, but he slacked off because it was back in the days of paper mail, and the postage was too expensive and Kookyboo's English was better than his, which made him ashamed. "KOOKYBOO!" the sloppy friend shouts, knocking his butler into the ocean.
Next thing we know, Kookyboo is herding regular sized goats on the Washington Mall and then we see the butler, still trying to get out of the water, and then SPLASH, Uncle Wenstrom lands right next to him. It was so funny!
Two stars.
So sure enough, after one too many bad plates of pasta and a running joke about that On Top of Spaghetti song that stales quickly for adults but sends children a'gigglin' every time somebody sneezes, the main dude goes into a lab to perfect his recipe. This being a children's film, the guy has neither genitals nor libido, but what he does have is friendship. Intimate male friendship. In another convention, the friend is slovenly and I suspect that the filmmakers preferred the best friend character to the main dude, but they had to keep the main dude heroic, so they leeched him of quirks and attributed all of the weirdness with which children's authors really identify to the more interesting character- best friend, who could technically be called the protagonist since it's his excitement about the spaghetti that knocks the gamma-leone ray over and it bounces off a mirror that was laying around on their coffee table and hits the sky just as thunderheads are gathering. Now I feel rather strongly that the filmmakers had a grand opportunity to make a Richard Pryor joke in this lab mishap scene, but I don't believe they took it.
In order for this movie to work, you have to be excited about the fact that food begins falling out of the sky. But neither I, nor anyone I know, ever needed such divine intercession to eat. More than a billion people do, of course, but does this film address them? Well, yes. In one of the poorer examples of taste in recent memory, we meet a character named Kookyboo. Kookyboo is an apprentice goatherder, but due to drought and famine, his family has no goats so he practices by herding tumbleweeds along the Serenghetti. I appreciate the film's attempts at dark humor, but the gag where a dog goes after the bone in Kookyboo's nose is not funny and all of the children who laughed at it need punishments, if not serious reeducation.
Anyway, Kookyboo's Uncle Wenstrom tries to take credit for the miracle that has befallen their village. He puts on this surprisingly terrifying witch doctor mask and dances around as if his rattle shaking and general Thoth-like behavior was what brought down the deluge of food, when of course it was the Ratatouille guy's invention ricocheting off a coffee table mirror after his slovenly friend gets too excited about how good the spaghetti is. Duh! Kookyboo doesn't exactly know this, but he's still suspicious of Uncle Wenstrom, and anyway, the goats have come back, but they're so fat from all of the sweet Italian sausage falling from the sky (and if you listen closely, you can hear one tribeswoman chant Oh Oh Oh- Rocco Siffredi! Oh Oh Oh- Rocco Siffredi!) that the goatherder's job is rendered obsolete. With thousands of years of tradition down the African bush version of the toilet, AKA the African bush, Kookyboo and Flakety Flak look for something else to do. As Kookyboo and Flakety Flak the world's leading herder of goats begin their search for a new purpose in life, the village gets hip to Uncle Wenstrom's jive and prepare a giant catapult for him.
Strangely, the film leaves this plot thread dangling until the very end and goes back to our main red-headed guy who is now friends with the President, which is pretty much exactly as it should be. And kudos to the filmmakers for creating a President who is A) Absolutely brilliant! and B) Incredibly fat! So Redhead and the Chunky POTUS realize that this accident is a boon to humanity and now they can worry about stuff other than starvation (and in this movie, President Candy really was concerned about this)- like making sure that at least 20 states elect gay governors, inventing an invention that turns Hot Wheels into real cars, and finding jobs for out of work defense contractors now that food-related wars are a thing of the past.
And here is where it all ties together! You see, Kookyboo gets falsely accused of one of those 419 scams because he actually is a Nigerian Prince. And because he wasn't trying to hide his real identity in the emails he was sending out on something that the filmmakers kinda blurred, but looked an awful lot like Nerve.com, his picture gets circulated and some real scam artists hack into Kookyboo's Hotmail account (looky.kooky.boo.ya@hotmail.com) and blame hundreds of their 419's on him until he becomes an internationally wanted criminal. But Redhead's sloppy roommate is watching the news report on his party-yacht and realizes that he had been Kookyboo's penpal when he was young, but he slacked off because it was back in the days of paper mail, and the postage was too expensive and Kookyboo's English was better than his, which made him ashamed. "KOOKYBOO!" the sloppy friend shouts, knocking his butler into the ocean.
Next thing we know, Kookyboo is herding regular sized goats on the Washington Mall and then we see the butler, still trying to get out of the water, and then SPLASH, Uncle Wenstrom lands right next to him. It was so funny!
Two stars.
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