Life As We Know It - Film #14

So...apparently, the key to blogging success is to somehow incorporate the words "blue lagoon," "awakening," "pregnant," "sex scene" and "sand" into any blog post from here on out.

See what I did there?

I'll get more creative about that.

Maybe not palm frond and rustic tree branch creative, but definitely less overt.

In other news...today sort of sucked. By which I mean I learned exactly what noise a dragged muffler makes two small children in the backseat of your car make. 

Like a fisher cat on a rollercoaster. That's broken.

Anyways, I wasn't in the mood to be cheered. I was in the mood to feel condescended and pandered to by a female protagonist who wants us to think she's strong and independent but who really just needs a man to love her.

That's right, I worshiped at the altar of Katherine Heigl. 

In case you missed it, Katherine Heigl has one character. That character is:

1. always female

2. always a little too pretty to be the girl next door (but she tries hard to be anyways)

3. entitled, but in a down-to-earth, relatable sort of way. if you're in a high-powered, wealthy lifestyle.

4. part-bitch, part-emotional wreck

5. kind of an insufferable know-it-all

6. a bad drunk

Heigl is at her most convincing when she taps into her character's OCD. She is less convincing as a baker and homemaker.

I'm pretty sure her idea of "baker" was "Martha Stewart" here.

Pre-prison, more uptight Martha Stewart.

Then, there's Josh Duhamel, aka Fergie's husband. 

He looks like the love-child of Bill Hader and Timothy Olyphant.

Only with faker looking hair.

He is the yin to her yang, the acid to her base, the oil to her vinegar...

the penis to her vagina.

and what a penis he is.

First, I'm pretty sure he has an undiagnosed sex-disorder in this film. Second, he says wonderful things like "Hey, baby, at your age, you're not single, you're 'complicated!'"

It's almost like the filmmakers were unaware of the age and gender demographics of their target audience...

I mean, I don't know many under 25 year olds who clamor for the new Katherine Heigl flick.

You know?

The plot from here is pretty much the plot of Baby Boom, except they don't buy a money pit and learn to make organic applesauce (Heigl's character already knows how to do that!), and, instead of falling in love with the cute doctor, she ends up realizing her loins burn for the philandering television sports director guy. 

And Heigl is no Diane Keaton, although she certainly is trying!

Don't get me wrong, it had some cute moments here and there, but overall it was sort of a mixed bag over cliched whining as the two leads figure out how to change a poopy diaper and fall in love at the same time.

Duhamel's shit-eating grin is the best part of this scene which involves Heigl's uptight lady protag getting feces on her too-well-kempt to really "not be sleeping" face.

I did love Melissa McCarthy as one of the neighbors. And whoever the lady playing the caseworker was. She's got a gift.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie flounders hopelessly around the forced chemistry of its two leads. By the very end, I was sort of rooting for the hot doctor.

But even he gives up on Heigl in the end.

Not my favorite film to date and certainly no Blue Lagoon: The Awakening, but not a bad way to pass an afternoon if the earlier part of the day was spending listening to the dulcet tones of 150 dollars worth of automobile grinding along the 99 degree highway.

Plus the baby was wicked cute. 

Thor - Film #12

Remember when Natalie Portman won an Oscar???



Yeah, it wasn't for this movie.

In fact, I spent the better part of the movie wondering exactly what Natalie Portman did with her Oscar during principle filming...you know, because of the shame and phoning-it-in. But then I figured she probably filmed it before she won the Oscar and I felt much better.

Also, Chris Hemsworth's abs helped ease any lingering anxiety I felt over Portman's dearth of talent manifesting itself so blatantly in the role of an..ahem...astrophysicist.



There, don't we all feel better now?

I figure that Kenneth Branagh's Thor (yeah, I just typed that) is a Faustian attempt to reconcile human understanding through science to its dirty skank mistress mythology. Of course, in that reading, Branagh is Faust, which makes TOTAL sense because of the ego and necromancy and the cheating on Emma Thompson, which I still haven't forgiven him for even if she did totally marry up but then lose major points for naming her child "Gaia" or "MoonGoddess" or something.

Wait, what was I talking about?

Oh, right...Thor.

Anyways, Thor is your average, overblown superhero movie, except instead of a wimpy, anemic vegan in a spidey-suit, we get, you know, Abs Hemsworth who actually looks like he actually could be a superhero.

I mean, I thought Vincent D'Onofrio did a pretty good impression in Adventures in Babysitting, but that barely holds a candle to this effort.

See:



Vs.



I mean, come on! In comparison, poor D'Onofrio comes across like a butch trucker named Barbie who pumps steroids and eats sixteen eggs a day for breakfast so she can't taste the hormone supplements.

And that's with Hemworth's shirt on!

Look, I'm a sucker for Norse mythology, I really am, but this film misses the boat on several accounts.

First, Loki, who is reduced to a sniveling second child here (and, yeah, I can say that because I too am a sniveling second child, and someday, I too want to ruin the best day of my sister's life by inviting frosty blue gatecrashers to her big girl hammer party).

Loki was one of my favorites in the myths...you know, the oft-tortured demi-god jotunn halfbreed trickster of fun, but, here, well, he's like the obnoxious genetics experiment of Nicholas Cage, Alan Cumming, and Robert Smith.

Gone horribly, horribly wrong.




He should be off menacing Baldar with some mistletoe, not scheming to exile his brother so that he can save his father's life from the more sinister Frost Giants while Daddy-Odin catches some supernaturally-induced Z's in his Rainbow Brite-star-sprinkled-generated hyperbaric chamber sanctioned solely for the exclusive use of Norse Gods during their inconvenient nap cycles.

And he certainly shouldn't be off writing quasi-erotic elegiac poems of mourning to some pretty little Goth jotunn, which is what he looks like he's doing through 79% of the film.

GAH!

And what about the other Big Bad, the not-so-elusive Frost Giants, who emerge like a creepy combination of Jack Frost and any random Na'vi Avatar. I can't believe at no point in the film did ANYONE, not even pre-Portman-love-spelled Thor, yell, "Stay Frosty!" to anyone about anything at any point!

Oh, the injustice!




Oh, and then, there's the Rainbow Bridge. Now, I've already thrown in my gratuitous Rainbow Brite reference, but, damn. I know the Rainbow Bridge is actually authentic to the mythology, but, whenever anyone mentioned having to traverse it, all I could think of was this:



And that does not inspire world-ending fear.

Or, maybe more accurately, it does, but not in the desired way.

I took it as a bad sign when, within moments of Abs Hemsworth's Asgardian entrance, I could safely predict the entire plot of the film (which, in case you missed it, is basically "Hubris-addled Muscle-Man needs to learn a lesson in humility by being banished to Earth where he can learn how to order coffee effectively AND the true value of love, friendship, and honor, sometimes while shirtless") - and, as my sister warned, if you don't pay attention to the first segment in Asgard, you might as well go home and reread 50 Shades of Grey or something because it's probably not going to happen for you.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a BAD film (it wasn't a GOOD film, either, I'm not saying that, but it could have been so much worse than it was and I actually kind of liked that cute Thor fella). I just didn't see anything particularly new or interesting therein.

You feel me?

And what's up with the cast?

I mean, aside from Portman, because you already know my feelings about that one. We also have Sir Anthony "One-Eye" Hopkins as Odin, Rene Russo as Frigga, and Stellan Skarsgard as "The Beave."

What's up with that???

I mean, don't get me wrong, if I were Rene Russo, I'd love to get paid to wear gold lame and have Chris Hemsworth shoot me dirty winks for an afternoon, but what's Hopkins's excuse? Was it the pirate patch?



Because you know when the director yelled "Cut!" that Sir Anthony was bitching his little British mouth off about the hunk of spray-painted gold metal lodged in his eye hole.

And don't even get me started on Skarsgard, whose greatest contributions here are three-fold:

1. The drinking scene (which is the funniest bit in the movie)

2. To lend a sense of Nordic authenticity to a Marvel Comic hero whose backstory is so deeply entrenched in the myths of his people

and, of course...

3. Alexander Skarsgard, who, in case you don't read my reviews often, looks like this:


Of course, he's not in this movie, so there is that.

I'll be honest, I didn't pay what I would call particularly close attention to this film. In fact, I couldn't tell you any of these characters' names:


As far as I'm concerned, their names are Gimli, Xena, Tiny Thor Beard Jr., and Jet Li.

But, hey, you don't read my reviews for their accuracy.

And, look, I didn't even make one crude phallic joke about the Hammer...because it goes totally without saying...



the hammer is his penis.

(You Sunk My) Battleship - "Film" #11

Everyone has a birthday tradition. Some people go out to dinner, some people eat cake...me? I go to see a movie. A bad one. Oddly, usually of the action-y variety. And I make my sister come with me.

Because that's love.

I've been eagerly anticipating "Battleship" for MONTHS now (or weeks, or years, or decades - I'm really not sure which)...and, man, did it not disappoint!

I am so going to spoil the shit out of this one. Consider that your only warning.

So...shall we get down to brass tacks?

Or, should I say, plastic red pegs???



First, let there be no pretense here. My motives for seeing this film were pretty obvious, in a lanky Nordic kind of way:


(world, meet Alexander Skarsgard. If you are not familiar with his work, by which I mean abs, you should amend that)

There is so much wrong with Skarsgard's casting here, I can't even begin to explain it all. Besides the fact that he and Taylor Kitsch are supposed to be brothers despite some pretty heavily apparent ethnic dissimilarities in their genetic compositions or the fact that there is NO way that their "parents" named one child "Stone" and the other "Alex," I'm also fairly certain that Mr. Skarsgard has never played Battleship (the game) ever. Do they even have Battleship in Sweden?


(Eric dons Navy whites because he heard a rumor that Sookie loves a man in uniform)

Poor Alex Skarsgard, nobody told him the film was going to be a rehash of Contact, Titanic, Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, Forrest Gump, Independence Day, and Die Hard. And that he would be serving the same role that Josh Hartnett and Harry Connick, Jr. do in their respective films.

Mainly die.

Only here, in the first act of the film, which was totally unfair considering they gave him second billing in the movie.

Seriously, his whole function is to serve as the most perfect example of a human being ever so that his brother can feel like a total asshat in comparison, and thus, by the older brother's death, creating some sort of impetus for change in his wayward brother's naval life.

Stone also had to die because according to the naval bro code, in order for his brother to become captain, he had to be the person on board with the most stripes. I'm pretty sure with his impeccable understanding of what a colossal screwup his brother is that Stone would have battled through any flesh wound to ensure that travesty wouldn't happen.


(people in glass battleships shouldn't throw Stone)

After Stone's demise, the movie's plot held considerable less interest for me. Here's what I gleaned:

1. Aliens respond to a signal sent up by some too-smart-for-our-own-good earthlings by sending their own version of battleships and attempt to eradicate all our metal-based appliances and structures but preserve our organic integrity thus ensuring that no children were harmed during the fictional rendering of this movie.

2. Stone's little brother - who I shall call Gunny Riggins even though that is neither his name nor his rank - must assume control of the embattered fleet of shippery left after the aliens establish a kickass force field and his brother goes to the big Naval Yard in the sky.

3. The Navy apparently employs people whose sole purpose is to yell things like "Miss!" whenever one of our missiles refuses to hit its designated target. That person looks an awful lot like "Landry" from "Friday Night Lights".

4. In times of crisis, veterans apparently have nothing else to do but wander around Battleship museums in desperate hopes that they will be able to once more sacrifice their lives for the greater good. Or get an opportunity to use some of that salty sailor sea jargon you know their spouses do not permit at home.

5. The state of Japanese-American relations is really, really not fucking good.

6. Soccer is the kickassiest (or kissfaciest) sport that ever kickassed. And the Navy apparently sponsors something called "RIMPAC" which is not nearly as controversially scandalous as the name implies.

7. Women in these movies always suck.


(Rihanna is as comfortable in a Navy uniform as we would be watching her in a Chris Brown video)

First, Rihanna, who is the gratuitous female on the boat, appears like an androgynous waif whose sole function here is to remind us all that the navy is VERY open-minded when it comes to allowing people to serve someone else's country (although her accent is better than Skarsgard, who starts off southern and then switches to...something else...).

Of course, Peter Berg's most questionable scene regarding the aforementioned songstress is not when Rihanna sings quietly to herself on a boat ("Show me the way to go home / I'm tired and I want to go to bed..."), nor is it when she shoots something scary and otherworldly and shouts (and I shit you not) "Ma halo Mother-Fu-" (it gets cut off to spare the rating, I guess). No, no, it is when he gives us a scene where a big bruiser of a humanoid alien beats the shit out of her face.

Too soon, Peter Berg. TOO SOON!

No wonder she later does this:
 

Of course, the only other female of note (besides the mysterious female in a picture with Alexander Skarsgard who is NEVER IN THE FILM EVER) is the love interest of Gunny Riggins and the daughter of Admiral Liam Neeson, who could not have been more bored. She has a name, but I don't really remember it, so let's call her "Chicken Burrito".


(Reese Witherspoon? Never heard of her)

Chicken Burrito is a physical therapist who wants to be eternally bonded to loserboy Gunny Riggins before he saves the world (so it really must be love). She adopts a new pet amputee named Mick and together they roam the mountains of Hawaii, oblivious to the impending extinction level doom surrounding them both.

Then, they help save the world, too.

It's pathetic.

Come on, people, it cannot be that hard to have a female character who does not need to get saved at the last minute by a man with no legs, a science nerd with an indestructible metal suitcase, or her navy boyfriend!

But still, the movie was epic,

And I'm torn on the whole stance of war the movie has. The end credits roll to the tune of "Fortunate Son" - an anti-war protest song...so either the filmmakers are incredibly obtuse (which is possible) or this whole blockbuster is a masterful subversive lesson in the power of humility.

And The Art of War.