Time for a Little Comedy

So both the weekend before and the weekend after I watched Snakes on a Plane I managed to catch a screwball comedy. The movie that I saw before was the PG-13 teen comedy Accepted. The movie I saw the weekend after was the R-rated Broken Lizard comedy Beerfest. Both movies had some similarities, and some obvious differences. I want to discuss both movies, and then my views on these sorts of comedies in general. Let’s get started with Accepted. I liked this movie. It was just fun. It wasn’t a spectacular movie (it wasn’t nearly as good as Wedding Crashers or Dodgeball, for example), but if you like that sort of goofy comedy, it’s certainly worth taking the time to see. I have to say, though, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie more blatantly filmed as an R-rated movie and then edited down to PG-13 for the theatrical release. One scene in particular really jumped out at me. Everyone at the college is hanging out at the pool having a big pool party. You see three hotties in bikinis painting their bodies, and then one of them starts to remove her top. Just as she’s got it untied in front, the camera cuts to a different scene and we move on. As soon as I saw how the scene was edited, I immediately thought, “What do you want to bet we get to see her tits when the unrated version comes out on DVD.” I mean, you pretty much expect them to do that sort of thing nowadays with this kind of comedy (especially after The Dukes of Hazzard came out on DVD with the big disclaimer on the front of the unrated version stating boldly that it included nudity and drug use), but still, when it’s that blatant you just have to laugh.

Accepted is basically you standard slacker makes good movie. We see a guy who’s pretty much coasted through high school who ends up being turned down by every college he applies to. Since Mommy & Daddy are dead set on him going to college, he does what any scheming slacker would do – he makes up a college. However, when his best friend sets up the website for the college for the guy to show to his parents, he makes it too well, and suddenly all sorts of other slackers and misfits who couldn’t get into any real colleges start showing up at the fake college that the slacker and his friends put together. Hilarity ensues from there, including the standard battle with the snooty elitists from the real college nearby that of course ends up with the evil frat boys exposing the slacker's scheme to everyone. I won’t give away the ending, but suffice it to say, it will hardly come as a surprise when you see it. But let’s face it, you’re not looking to be surprised when you go to see a movie like this. These sorts of comedies stick to a tried-and-true formula for a reason – because the formula works.

Accepted has a number of great laughs, and is risqué without getting raunchy like most of your R-rated comedies do these days. I’ll be really interested to see what sort of DVD release we see for this one. I’m seriously expecting an unrated version, but the big question will be how unrated it actually is, and how much additional footage gets put back in for the unrated release.

And on the subject of more uncensored comedies, we have the other comedy that I saw at the theater recently, the R-rated comedy Beerfest. As far as humor goes, I think I liked Accepted better, but this was still a pretty funny movie (and it has a fair amount of nudity, which is always a plus). Sadly like most R-rated comedies these days, it has a few gross out scenes that I could have done without (some of which were admittedly mildly amusing, but were still more gross than they were funny). This is one of the reasons I so loved Wedding Crashers, because it was the rare modern sex comedy that was R-rated but did NOT have any truly disgusting scenes in it meant to be funny. For fans of Broken Lizard, this movie is probably right up your alley. I actually liked it more than I liked Super Troopers, their first movie (of course, I didn’t like Super Troopers nearly as much as a lot of people I know did, so maybe that’s just me).

So this brings me to my discussion of comedies, most specifically your juvenile teen comedies. With the success of such R-rated comedies as Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, I’m wondering if we’ll be seeing more movies that are outright R-rated from the start when they hit theaters, or movies that are edited down to be PG-13 and then very quickly returned to their R-rated version (but left “unrated” because that’s such a popular buzz word with DVDs these days) when they’re released on DVD, such as what they did with The Dukes of Hazzard. Being something of a fan of R-rated comedies (for the most part), I certainly wouldn’t complain about this at all. One thing I do have to say, though, is that it’s nice to see that R-rated comedies seem to be getting back to the style of the classics of the 80s, when it was all about a healthy dose of T & A combined with some light-hearted fun, as opposed to the numerous R-rated comedies of the 90s where nudity was suddenly at a minimum, but gross out “humor” as they liked to call it was all the rage (I’m sorry, but while I did enjoy American Pie, I really don’t consider seeing a guy jerk off into a glass of beer only to have some other guy unknowingly drink it afterwards to really be that funny. Call me old fashioned). It will be interesting to see what the comedies of the next few years have to offer us.

Snakes on a Mother F*$@ing Plane, Baby!!

Okay, so this entry is way, way overdue. But in my defense I spent most of last week out of town at my grandmother’s funeral, and this week's just been crazy, so my schedule has seriously been thrown off of late. Since my last entry I think I’ve seen SEVEN movies, so I’ve definitely got a lot of catching up to do. So without further ado, let me jump right into it.

So after all the hype, I just couldn’t resist. Yep, I had to do it – I just had to go see Snakes on a Plane! And you know what, it actually wasn’t half bad. Now admittedly, it is very much a B-movie, and if you’re expecting more than that, you’re going to be disappointed (more to the point, if you’re expecting more than that, you seriously need to get your head examined). Which is not to say that it’s necessarily a dumb, cheesy movie. On the contrary, the director obviously made an effort to make the movie scary and intense, and if you’re afraid of snakes this movie is NOT for you. Hell, I actually like snakes and parts of this movie creeped me out (however, I actually recognized a number of the snakes in the film, and knew just how deadly venomous they really were, so seeing them crawl around people’s feet certainly made my skin crawl just BECAUSE I knew how deadly they were). Of course, there were a few over-the-top scenes that made me shake my head (like the scene where the guy’s taking a leak and the snake comes out of the toilet and bites the end of penis – he then starts thrashing around trying to pull the snake off. Needless to say I wouldn’t exactly call it a scary scene), but sadly you have to expect at least a little of that sort of thing in this kind of movie.

Overall, the movie actually made me think of 70s cinema, as it is a solid combination of killer animal horror movie and airplane disaster movie (both of which are movie sub-genres that haven’t really been popular since the 70s, when you could find all manner of movies in both categories). Many of the common clichés of both types of movies are present (although I don’t want to say more than that, as I don’t want to give away any plot points of the movie). As I’m a fan of both genres of film (especially disaster movies – not necessarily airplane disaster movies specifically, mind you, but I’ve always really enjoyed a good disaster picture), putting them together in a way that worked made for a movie right up my alley. Yes, the idea of releasing deadly snakes on an airplane as a way to kill someone is incredibly hokey and hard-to-believe, I know, but if you look at some of the old 70s animal horror films, it’s far, far from the dumbest idea anyone’s ever come up with. And to be honest, the filmmakers actually did a surprising job of giving you a halfway believable explanation for the whole thing.

There is one thing that I was pretty disappointed with. As I’m sure anyone who’s heard anything about the movie knows, there was a bunch of Internet hype about this movie from the minute the title was announced. The bloggers and Internet movie geeks had enough of an impact on the studio that they even got them to add additional language and nudity in order to make the movie R-rated (although to be honest, I think even without that the movie was violent enough they’d have been pushing the limits of PG-13 regardless). One of the reasons for this change was to get Samuel L. Jackson to show a little more attitude, and to introduce the one-liner that became famous before the movie was ever released – “I’m sick of these mother-f*$^@ing snakes on this mother-f*$^@ing plane!” Now I have to admit this is a great Samuel L. Jackson line, and I can see it becoming a classic because it so has his attitude and his personality in it. But here’s where my disappointment comes in. In the scene in which he utters the line, it feels completely forced and out of place. It was so sadly obvious that this line was inserted after the fact that it almost ruins it. After you watch him say it, you almost wish they’d left it out.

It goes without saying that this movie’s not going to win any awards (okay, I’m sure it’s likely to win something at the MTV Movie Awards, but does anyone REALLY count those?), but if you keep in mind what you’re getting into when you go see it, it’s a pretty enjoyable movie. Sadly it didn’t do the numbers at the box office that the studios were hoping for, but I hate it say it – the only people actually surprised by this are the studios. Let’s face it, all the Internet buzz in the world isn’t going to give you a $30-$40 million opening weekend. It just isn’t. The sad truth of the matter is that people chatting online about movies make up a very small percentage of the movie-going public, and if they’re the only ones that go see a movie, it’s not going to have a very big opening (and sad to day, Snakes on a Plane probably didn’t have all that many people interested in seeing it outside of the movie bloggers who rushed to see it opening weekend. Hell, I certainly didn’t rush out to see it right away).

This brings me to a related topic I’ve been wanting to discuss for awhile (I may have mentioned it in a past entry, I’m not sure. If I did, well, you’ll just have to listen to me rant about it again). And that is selling a movie to a too-narrow audience, then being surprised when it fails to meet expectations. Now sometimes, such as with fan-driven movies like Snakes on a Plane, there’s not much you can do about this but put it out there and hope you can sell it to a broader audience than the core fans. A perfect example of this (and one very close to my heart) is Joss Whedon’s Serenity. Here’s a movie that was completely fan-motivated. After the series was cancelled by those morons over at Fox (a subject I know I’ve covered in the past, so we’ll leave it alone), fans got online and made all kinds of noise about wanting the show back. Well, Fox was impressed enough that when they released the DVD box set, it wasn’t some plain Jane, no frills, here’s your show box set. No, it had all the bells and whistles – behind-the-scenes featurettes, audio commentary, all the un-aired episodes (and the episodes were actually in the correct order, shock of shocks). And the fans responded. The DVD box sets sold like crazy. There was enough success with the DVD sales that Universal bought the movie rights from Fox and greenlit the movie. So now comes our dilemma – if only the people who watched the show and/or bought the DVD set go to see the movie, that’s hardly enough of an audience to make for box office success. But what do you do? Joss made the best movie he could, one that appealed to fans of the show but at the same time was accessible to people who’d never watched an episode. And then he released it and hoped for the best. Sadly, not that many people other than the core fans bothered to go see it (which is why there’s not likely to be a sequel).

Now, as I stated above, with movies like Snakes on a Plane or Serenity, you know that by default you’re going to have a narrow core audience, so you just have to hope for the best. However, there are other movies that have the potential for a much broader audience, and lose it because the filmmakers foolishly are focused only on their small core audience, and it’s these movies that I want to talk about here. The most common category that falls into this trap is the video game movie. I’m sure you’ve all seen them – movie flops such as Double Dragon, Street Fighter, and Super Mario Bros. For every solid, top notch video game movie like Mortal Kombat or Resident Evil, there are a dozen horrible B-movies that give video game movies their bad reputation. And naturally the worse the genre’s reputation gets, the harder it is to get people to take these movies seriously. And by and large I blame this problem on the narrow-minded focus of the creators of the movies.

I see two things that cause this problem. The first is a simple problem with math and economics. A movie studio sees that a video game has just hit $100 million in sales (or however much popular video games tend to make these days – I’ll admit that I don’t really keep track) and they suddenly think, “Hell, that’s a lot of money. If we can get all those game geeks to go see a movie version of that hit game, we’re talking box office gold!” Now I don’t imagine they expect the movie to make $100 million by any means, but they’re still expecting to make huge numbers based on that $100 million. Here’s the problem, though: a brand new, just hit the shelves video game costs $50. So you divide that $100 million by $50 (we’re going to assume for the sake of simplicity that everyone paid full initial price for the game, and not deal with people who bought it down the road once the price had dropped), you’ve got 2 million people who bought the game. Now some of those people probably aren’t going to really like the game, regardless of how popular it is. And quite a few of them are not movie people (why go see a movie of the game when they can just sit at home PLAYING the game), so not all 2 million of them are going to automatically go see the movie. But even if they do, a movie ticket only costs $5-$10 (depending on where you live and whether or not you’re going to a matinee). For the sake of argument, lets use $7 as our median movie ticket price. Even if all 2 million of those game buyers go to see the movie, that’s still only $14 million, which isn’t that bad for a low budget movie (but hardly great), but it's not what you'd call a huge success, and absolutely not what you want to see if you spent any real money making the movie.

So what’s the lesson of all this math? Well, firstly, just because the video game made hundreds of millions of dollars, does NOT mean that a movie version of the game will do the same. Secondly, and more importantly, if you do decide to go ahead and make the movie, you’re GOT to expand your audience beyond that core group of gamers, because they alone will not make your movie successful. And here’s where we run into our second and much bigger problem. And that’s with the directors of these movies. In way too many cases they fall into one of two categories: either they’re way too focused on making the movies specifically for the fans of the game (a mistake, as we’ve already established that there’s not enough of them to make the movie a success), or they’ve decided that since the movie they’re stuck making is ONLY a video game movie, they don’t take it seriously or put any real effort into trying to make a good movie, which is how we get garbage like Street Fighter, which was a complete joke of a movie. It was pretty obvious from beginning to end that the filmmakers didn't take the story they were telling seriously at all. This is why Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie (which I recently picked up and watched on DVD – it so rocks!!) is a great, kick ass movie, whereas the live action version is crap. The creators of the animated version obviously took the story and the characters seriously, and wanted to make a serious movie that was true to the story behind the game. The idiots who made the live action version obviously decided there was no reason to make a serious, dramatic movie that was based on a kung fu video game, and well, the results speak for themselves.

Of course, some video games just weren’t meant to be made into movies. I’m sorry, but while the various incarnations of the Mario Bros games have all been a lot of fun to play (and very popular as well), there’s just not enough story there to make a movie out of. I don’t care how popular the games are; whoever thought it was a good concept for a movie was kidding themselves. A children’s Saturday morning cartoon, maybe, but it’s just not major motion picture material. But there are a number of video games out there (yes, even your simple fighting games) that do have the back story to make a great movie, even if the back story isn’t really a big part of the actual game. And luckily as games become more involved and have a more complex story, it becomes much easier to develop a decent movie script based on them, so hopefully we'll start to see better video game movies in the future. But that doesn’t change the fact that as a filmmaker you have to take the material seriously and look at it as more than just a “video game” movie, and you have to be able to look past your core game geek audience and find a way to develop the movie with a broader appeal.

If you look at the movies that were very successful films that were based on video games, the big thing they have in common is that the filmmakers were able to find a genre within the story beyond just “based on a video game” and use that to target a broader audience for the movie. Mortal Kombat was a great fantasy martial arts movie, and Resident Evil is a wonderful example of the zombie horror genre. And because they fit these broader genres, and were marketed accordingly, they were able to draw people who were fans of this type of movie, whether they’d ever played the video games or not (I, for example, have never played any of the Resident Evil games, and am generally not much of a fan of that sort of game, but I generally enjoy zombie movies, and I loved Resident Evil as a zombie movie, and not as a movie version of a video game). This is what the filmmakers need to keep in mind when they make these movies.

There’s one more video game movie that I’d like to rant about a bit before I end this discussion, and that’s the mediocre Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and it’s abysmal sequel. Yes, I realize these movies were actually both pretty successful and I know a number of people who really enjoyed them. But I was highly disappointed in both movies for the very reasons I’ve been discussing above – the writer/director was so obviously aiming strictly for the adolescent male fans of the video game that he completely lost sight of the movie's broader potential as an action/adventure movie. Hence Angelina Jolie’s big, bouncing fake boobs. I’m sorry, while I enjoy women’s breasts just as much as the next heterosexual male, the scene at the end of Tomb Raider where we see Lara Croft running through the ice cave, her big boobs bouncing wildly up and down as she goes was just stupid and inane and sad. The worst of it, from my perspective, is that this is a movie with a lot of potential, and Angelina Jolie was the PERFECT actress for the role. Not only did she have the looks for the part, but she had the accent down pat, and so brought absolutely the right attitude for this character.

This movie character should have been the female equivalent of Indiana Jones, and the movie should have been what National Treasure was. But it wasn’t. Not even close. And all because the director was too focused on sticking to the video game, and those elements of the game that stood out in the minds of the gamers (namely the character’s over-developed bust). I never really played the games, but I’m a serious comic book geek, and there was a comic book series based on the game that I loved that ran for quite a while that was everything that movie should have been, but wasn’t. The comic took the character seriously, it got away from the game’s Junior High schoolboy fantasy elements and presented a kick ass heroine who was smart and daring and beautiful and was involved in numerous exciting adventures. I think if the movies would have taken this route, if the filmmakers would have focused on a broader audience, and had not been so concerned about keeping the teenage game geeks happy, that they could have easily had a 3 or 4 movie (or more) franchise of great movies, as opposed to the two mediocre films that they cranked out. But hey, that’s just my opinion; what do I know?

So there ends my long, meandering rant for the day. In summation, here’s what we learned today. One, video game movies can be wonderful, enjoyable movies to watch, if only the filmmakers take the source material seriously and try to develop a movie that goes beyond the game and the gamers when looking for its audience. And two, Hollywood needs to do a better job of finding an audience outside of core fans when developing a movie adaptation (whether it be an adaptation of a video game, a comic book, a book, a TV show, whatever). And that's my two cents for today.

Wow, that ran longer than I’d expected it to. I was going to add a quick review of the comedy I saw the weekend before I saw Snakes on a Plane (which I actually watched on a Wednesday, when I took a mental health day during the middle of the week). But since this entry has run on, and since the weekend AFTER I watched Snakes on the Plane I saw another comedy, I figure I'll do them both together in my next entry (which will also give me an excuse to do an entry about comedies in general and my feelings on them, so look forward to potentially another long, rambling entry). So, until then, this is Evil Ryan, signing off.

Just a Quickie

So just a quick entry for this weekend. Went to see the Japanese horror movie remake Pulse, which features a screenplay by Wes Craven and TV stars Kristen Bell (from Veronica Mars) and Ian Somerhalder (formally of Lost). While not as creepy/scary as the best films of the Japanese horror remake genre (such as The Ring or The Grudge), it was still a pretty enjoyable movie. It was lit such that even during the daytime scenes everything was grey and subdued and almost washed out, which gave it a look and feel that perfectly set the tone of the movie. The undead beings (or whatever they were; the movie doesn’t really say for sure) are very creepy and there are a few scenes that make you jump a bit.

This is so my type of horror movie. I’ll take creepy and suspenseful and atmospheric over violent and gory and over-the-top any day of the week. And while Pulse isn’t the best example of this genre, it does a good enough job to be worth the $5 I spent to see it. Now I suppose I’ll have to track down the original and see how it compares (of course, there are numerous other Japanese horror movies I need to see first, so it’s going to be down the list a ways).

And since my Pulse review was so short, let me fill this entry out a bit with a quick write-up on another movie I watched this weekend (this one recorded off of one of my satellite movie channels). This one was also a mystery/suspense movie, but was more of a thriller than a horror film. The name of the film is The Machinist (listed on imdb as El Maquinista), and it stars Christian Bale weighing in at a frightening 120 pounds (he looks like a concentration camp survivor, he’s so skinny – check out some of the pics on the imdb page for the movie). He plays a lathe operator who hasn’t been able to sleep in a year, which is a big part of the reason for his continuing weight loss. It is also beginning to cause him to hallucinate, and he quickly becomes lost as reality and hallucination blur, until it becomes obvious that much of what he’s experiencing isn’t actually real.

The movie starts out with Christian Bale pulling a body wrapped in a rug out of the trunk of his car. He appears to be at a pier or something like that, and he throws the body over a guard rail onto a cement slab that angles down to the water. Of course the body hits with a thud and doesn’t roll down into the water. And at the same time someone with a flashlight is walking towards him. But before he has a chance to roll the body into the water, and before the mystery person reaches him, we jump back in time (as tends to happen in these sorts of movies). The rest of the movie unfolds in such a way that we almost forget we’re trying to find out about the body he’s going to dump in the water; we’re instead trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not, and just what the hell is going on with this guy.

As the movie plays out and the audience starts to get a grasp on what’s reality and what is hallucination, it’s fairly easy to figure out who we’re going to find wrapped in the rug, as well as some of the movie’s other mysteries, but there are still a couple of surprises at the end, and the movie has a very satisfying and well thought out conclusion (at least, in my not so humble opinion). All in all, this was a very enjoyable and engaging suspense/mystery, and I highly recommend it.

Miami Vice

Okay, so I meant to have this done days ago, but things have been crazy this week. We had our annual meeting at work so there was a lot of prep for that, and of course my boss was out of state for training all week so I was on my own (as a side note, since the meeting ran all day Friday and all day Saturday (including all evening for a formal dinner), I’m probably not going to get to a movie this weekend, so no review next week). But, I promised a Miami Vice review (and I did get to the theater to see it last weekend), so here we go.

Sadly, I was fairly disappointed when I walked out of the theater on this one, and after thinking it over and discussing it with one of my co-workers the following Monday (who caught the show right after the one I did), I was actually even more disappointed (which is partly why I had a hard time getting motivated to make time to write this review). This one really did not live up to the hype (of course, I'm sure that there are numerous fans of the film out there that will tell me I'm full of it, but hey, I never claimed this was anyone's opinion other than my own). Of course, considering that I heard rumors that they re-edited it at the last minute because test audiences didn’t respond favorably to it, I shouldn’t have been too surprised. I mean, let’s be honest, if you’re trying to make changes/corrections in the last hour because it didn’t come together right, it’s probably already too late.

So what didn’t I like about this movie? Well, I think the biggest problem with it was the story, and to a lesser extent, the direction (which is really too bad, as I’m a big fan of most of Michael Mann’s previous films). The movie just felt way too disjointed, and just never really came together for me. I tried to get into the story, and just couldn’t. For one thing, they just jump right into things, which is fine up to a point, since I think you can assume most of the audience are at least familiar with (if not fans of) the original show, so it’s not like you need to introduce the characters or establish backgrounds or anything. But it would still have been nice to be eased into the storyline a little bit as opposed to being dropped right into it. It would also have been nice if the movie had actually taken place in Miami (since it’s in the title, after all). Instead, large parts of it take place in Central America and Cuba.

One of the reasons I heard for why they re-edited the movie was that test audiences didn’t feel it captured the spirit of the original show, and I have to say that the final product didn’t, either. For one thing, the music just wasn’t there, which I think is a big deal considering just how much an integral part of the TV show the music always was. Also, the movie is much darker and grittier and just lacked a lot of what made the original show so much fun to watch. On the plus side, they did include the majority of the secondary characters from the show – Trudy, Gina, Switek, Zito, and Castillo are all there, which I thought was cool. Of course, as my co-worker pointed out, there was one important character missing, and that was Sonny’s alligator Elvis. How can you have a Miami Vice movie without Elvis in it???

As far as the acting goes, nobody did a great job. Jamie Foxx just never came across as Tubbs in my mind, and his performance was fairly flat throughout. And while I do have to say that Colin Farrell really reminded me of a young Don Johnson and I think he was perfect for the role, he still didn’t really give a standout performance. I don’t know if the script just didn’t give them much to work with, or if they just weren’t into their characters or what the deal was, but nobody really shined.

So all in all I have to say that this movie was a disappointment. If you’re a fan of Miami Vice the TV show, my suggestion to you would be to pick up the box sets on DVD, and save this movie for a cheap rental night.

Wednesday at the Movies!!

Hello again, boys and girls. So as one of my dear readers has pointed out, it has been a couple of weeks since I have been to the theater. Well, here’s the deal. Two weekends ago, there just wasn’t anything new out that caught my eye, so I went and saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest for the second time (yes, it’s just that good). And last weekend I was out of town visiting with the parental units, so I didn’t manage to make it to the theater. But never let it be said that I don’t take very seriously the comments of my readers! And so, for you, dear readers, I took a day off from work yesterday and headed to the movies (okay, so I mainly did it for me, but it sure sounded good)!!

I was considering doing a triple feature (and actually had the showtimes all planned out – it’s amazing how many matinees you can cram into one afternoon if you schedule properly), but after the second movie decided I had enough things I wanted to do around the house that I’d call it good at two. So what did I go and see, you may wonder? Well, certainly not my usual movie fare, that’s for sure. I saw The Devil Wears Prada and My Super Ex-Girlfriend. My quick ratings of the two? I’d have to say 4 stars for the former, and sadly only 2 stars for the latter. So how about we start with the lesser of the two movies.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend is an interesting concept, but I just don’t know that the superhero genre and the romantic comedy genre were ever meant to come together in one movie, so it’s probably safe to say that this movie was more or less doomed from the outset. It has all the standards of a romantic comedy – the romantically klutzy guy, the best friend who offers nothing but bad advice, the female friend/co-worker who the main character is falling for even though she’s seeing someone else (and of course you can see her interest in him despite her supermodel boyfriend from early on in the movie). Then throw in a couple of crimes stopped by the super heroine, a genius evil villain, and the obligatory “how she got her powers” scene, and you’ve got all of the basic elements of a super hero movie. But sadly, they just don’t go well together.

Maybe it was just not the best script, I don’t know. The movie does bring up an interesting problem for our hero, though; how do you break up with a psycho girlfriend who has super powers? When said girlfriend is capable of throwing a live shark into your apartment, the answer to that question is very, very carefully. But sadly despite the interesting idea, the story just never really comes together. Uma Thurman, while a phenomenal actress, is way over the top here (although at a guess I’d say that’s mostly the blame of the script, and not the actress). Her character is just way, way too crazy jealous and possessive. And none of the rest of the characters are really developed enough to make them interesting. And sadly you can very quickly see exactly where this movie is going. All in all it has its cute moments, and is mildly entertaining at times, but at the end of the day it was something of a disappointment (and I didn’t really have high hopes going into it). So if you’re a big fan of Uma’s it’s probably worth checking out (although she is certainly not at her best in this movie); otherwise I’d say don’t waste your time or your money.

Now our next film, The Devil Wears Prada, is one that’s been out for a while now that I kept telling myself might be interesting to see (the trailer looked really interesting, and I especially loved the fact that it didn’t show much beyond the first 15 minutes of the movie, so that the rest of the film is left as a mystery to the viewers – I wish more trailers were that well put together). But there was always something else that would catch my eye, and since it is blatantly a chick film, I kept putting off seeing it. But when I decided to make yesterday a movie day, I said, “What the hell, let’s go see it.” And I’m really glad that I did. This was a really well done movie. The story is both interesting and believable, and while there is a romantic element to the story, it doesn’t overpower the more dramatic aspects of the story, which is that of a young woman getting caught up in a job and discovering her life suddenly going in a very different direction from where she’d planned it to go. Along the way she does a little growing up, and learns about herself and what she really values in life.

While the story is good, what really sells this movie is the acting. Everyone involved does a fantastic job. Meryl Streep is so much fun to watch as the psycho, pain-in-the-ass, super-demanding boss. She jumps into the role with both feet, just chewing up the scenery in every scene. You just have to have the deepest sympathy for anyone stuck working for her. Also brilliant is Stanley Tucci, who pretty much steals every scene he’s in. But that didn’t surprise me – he’s one of those character actors who always gives a great performance. Emily Blunt is also really good as Meryl Streep’s main assistant. And then there’s the star – Anne Hathaway. What can I say about Anne? She’s beautiful and talented and just does a wonderful job. She’s graduated from her Disney young-girl oriented movies to more mature roles, and done it well. I really enjoyed her performance here, and look forward to seeing her in future films.

And on the subject of Anne Hathaway, if you want to see how much range she has an actress, check out the indie film Havoc (which I just watched). If she wanted to make a break from her good-girl Disney image, she did it in spades in this movie. Her character in this film is about as anti-Princess Diaries as she could get, short of playing a mass murdering psycho killer. She uses the F-word repeatedly, does drugs, and in the first 10 minutes of the movie shows her breasts (the first time) and goes down on her boyfriend. So needless to say, family-friendly this movie is NOT.

Anne’s character is one of a group of wealthy, spoiled LA teens who rebel against their parents by embracing “gangsta” culture, acting like wannabe black gang bangers, listening to rap music and talking like they’re from the ghetto. So naturally the movie features a fair amount of profanity, unsafe sex, and drug use. A group of them go down to the barrio to go slumming, and end up having an altercation with a drug dealer. But Anne finds herself drawn to the drug dealer and his lifestyle, feeling that it’s more “real” than her own life. And so she returns with several of her girlfriends, where they meet the drug deal again and end up partying with him and his friends. Anne and her best friend continue to come back, getting drawn more and more into the world of the barrio, until they find themselves in way over their heads (I won't go into the details; if you want to know everything that happens you'll have to watch it for yourself).

All in all it wasn’t a bad movie, but it’s not one I’d be likely to watch again (other than for the nudity). It’s obviously meant to be a comment on modern youth culture, but considering I haven’t been a teenager in way too many years (and even when I was a teenager, the culture when & where I grew up was very different from the teen hip-hop culture of today), I couldn’t exactly identify with the characters (mostly I just shook my head at how stupid and pathetic they were). So even though the story didn’t really click with me, I do think it had a pretty well-written story. And Anne Hathaway gives an incredible performance. There are times you almost forget that it’s her, her character is so different from what you’re used to seeing her portray. It really showcases her range as an actress, and shows just how much talent she has. So if you’re a fan of hers (or are just curious to see her in a very different role from what you’ve seen her in before), the movie is certainly worth checking out (of course this doesn’t apply to the majority of her fans, since this is in no way a movie that tween girls should be watching).

Well, that’s about it for this entry. And don’t worry, it won't be another 18 days before I roll out my next one, since Miami Vice starts tomorrow (and there’s no way I’m not watching that one opening weekend). Until then!!