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Just Friends: Review

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More Than Just Friends

Just Friends came out in December of 2005 and just barely flew under the radar. It is quite a shame, considering that this movie, more than any other, demonstrates the talent that Ryan Reynolds has at doing what he does best: being a complete jerk. Reynolds has always done his best when in the role of a smug, cocky, and crassly witty anti-hero and this time is no different.
justfriends.jpgChris Brander (Reynolds) was the fattest kid in high school whose best friend just so happened to be the hottest girl in school, Jamie Palamino (Amy Smart). When word gets out that he is in love with Jamie and wishes to be “something more,” he is immediately told by Jamie that he is “like a brother” to her and is instantly crushed and publically humiliated. Ten years go by and Chris is a changed man: he’s athletic, wealthy, confident, a womanizer, and popular with the stars of music and showbiz. Due to a twist of fate, he finds himself back in his hometown and facing Jamie once again.
As the title implies, Just Friends is a unique comedy that tackles a situation that most men have been through: the 2-Ladder theory. The idea is that women have a tendency to put men on one of two inescapable relationship ladders: the friend ladder and the “something more” ladder. Or, as Chris calls it, “the Friend Zone.” As the fat Chris Brander, Ryan Reynolds shows us his acting versatility as he is able to convincingly don the role of the lovable fat kid who is smitten with his best friend but cannot muster the courage to adequately tell her how he feels. His weight problem and awkward social surroundings don’t make matters easier, either. He is immediately a character you identify with, not because he is a full-blown geek but because he is a person of good intentions whose inner self is not fairly represented on the outside. Of course, as the grown-up Chris Brander, Ryan Reynolds takes on his very typical role of the smug jerk who you either love or hate. Unlike his other movies, this one is rated PG-13 and so Reynolds is forced to tone down the crassness and pursue other means of humorous expression.
This is where the movie truly gains and keeps momentum: the chemistry that the characters of the film have with one another is the only real “romance” in this so-called “romantic comedy.” Chris and his brother Mike (Chris Marquette) fight constantly but retain the mutal respect that you would expect between siblings: you are honestly convinced that they are brothers in real life, and the majority of the film’s funniest moments come from their interaction. Naturally, the movie would not be complete without the love-interest, Jamie (Amy Smart). Jamie is convingly attractive as the girl-next-door and has the charm and looks to be believable to the audience: her relationship with Chris is likewise just as convincing.
The movie only slows down when it sacrifices plausibility for the sake of a happy ending. Chris is a jerk to Jamie initially, thinking that by playing the upper-hand that she would be swept off her feet. Instead, she’s disgusted by Chris’ actions and is immediately turned off… yet continues to agree to see him. The new guy, Dusty (Chris Klein) shows up just in time to be a convincing foil to Chris and there’s no reason not to think that Jamie would really like him… until you find out that he’s even more of a jerk than Chris is. Though the movie is a comedy and not a statement of how to handle being in “the Friend Zone,” you can’t help but be annoyed at times when the plot strays away from the expected in favor of a fairy tale resolution.
Acting: A
Effects and Entertainment: B+
Storyline: B
Recommendability: B+

Just Like Heaven: Review

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Just Like Heaven is More Like Purgatory

I am lucky to have seen this film with a girl. Had I not, I would have probably questioned my manhood or suffered from post-movie trauma. It is pure chick-flick all the way and is so sweet you may find yourself with diabetes afterwards. But if you can find someone special in your life and watch it with them, you may make it out alive.
justlike.jpgBig forehead Reese Witherspoon plays (implausibly) a workaholic doctor who seems to retain her Barbie-like prettiness despite working without sleep. She can’t get a date (again, yeah right) and is on her way to visit someone when she gets smacked by a car. Fast forward to sometime later and we meet Mark Ruffalo, who happens to be the new tenant in Witherspoon’s apartment. He starts seeing the unknowing ghost of Witherspoon and thus the saccharine-sweet, testicles-shrinking fun begins.
The movie does have its moments of objective comedy, such as a few jabs at classic “ghost” movies such as The Exorcist and Ghostbusters. And then there’s Jon Heder in the only memorable role of Darryl, the stoned psychic who acts like a tripped out Shaggy from Scooby Doo. The plot is tediously clichéd until a certain point where it becomes contemporarily ironic, pointing out a rhetorical pro-life situation that becomes the crux of the film. I really enjoyed that part, but liberals will probably react to it with protests and chaining themselves to trees or whatever.
But overall, it is what it is. It’s a girl’s movie and a date movie. So if you’re not a girl and you don’t have a date, you may not want to admit to people that you’ve seen this. If you qualify for watching this film, you’ll probably have warm fuzzies and all that good crap.
Grade: C+

Legend of Zorro: Review

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The Legend of Zorro Is a Myth

In a sense, Martin Campbell’s The Mask of Zorro (1998) put forward the potential of comic book lore as a movie genre. Though Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) was the forerunner for the modern day comic book movie, it was merely treated as an inevitability just as Superman was back in 1978. These two pop culture icons had not died over the course of half a century and were long overdue for a movie treatment. With Zorro, however, the name had stuck in most households but never found the broad fanbase that its caped predecessors had. The Mask of Zorro reinvisioned the Zorro story and continued it. It made it appealing to viewers by the fine craftsmanship of movie editting and delivering the usual over-the-top heroics that is expected of both a comic book movie and a summer blockbuster. Most comic book movies now follow this same formula. And who can blame them? The Mask of Zorro was a really good movie for its time and is still immensely enjoyable.
Legend of ZorrpAnd like all good summer movies, especially comic book ones, you expect a sequel to keep the continuity going. We like to see our heroes return. The same can be said of Zorro. It’s just a pity that his latest movie is absolutely horrendous.
The Legend of Zorro is nowhere near its predecessor despite retaining its primary cast and director. How could this movie have gone wrong, having had more than six years to prepare? Maybe they wanted to do something different. Perhaps Antonion Banderas learned a thing or two from Spy Kids. Or perhaps the script writers are ages 6 and 7, respectively. Who knows? The point is, this is not your daddy’s Zorro. The script is clever in a Disney sort of way with dialogue that is Gilmore Girls-witty at times, but it is no great Shakes. It definitely lacks the passion and echoing heroic monologue that the first movie had. The action is not grounded in reality and takes liberty with frequent jumps, flips, and spontaneously convenient actions (such as Zorro throwing his hat like a frisbee to smack some guy in the neck). Might I also take this opportunity to point out a very “what the f*ck” moment in which Zorro’s kid, Joaquin, gets into an extremely choreographed ruler-fight with his Jesuit teacher. Corny scenes like this serve to widen the gap between this film and its forerunner.
But maybe this comparison is unfair. Can The Legend of Zorro work as a film independent of the first? Yes, but only if one has come to expect a Shanghai Knights level of calibur and not a Tombstone one. The plot does not really advance the Zorro legend in the way Spider-Man 2 did for its respective franchise and could easily be dismissed as an inconsequential side story. Basically, Alejandro de la Vega (Banderas) has been asked by his wife Elena (Catherine Zeta-Jones) to give up the Zorro mask for the sake of their misbehaved son. Zorro just can’t do it and quickly finds his wife missing. It turns out that she’s working with the U.S. government and that the divorce papers are just a ruse for her cover as she tries to infiltrate a clandestine world cabal that is intent on using the glycerine in soap to blow up Washington (no, I am not being funny, this is the real plot). There is a lot of teaming up with his annoying kid and a lot of drinking. This Zorro is nowhere near the heroic moralist that he was transformed into by Anthony Hopkins in the original Zorro: he’s a bit of a boor and seems to do the Zorro gig for kicks. I honestly can’t tell if this movie was supposed to be farcical, being as campy and detached from its progenitor as it was.
If you lower your expectations, you may find The Legend of Zorro to be a decent way to waste 2 hours of your life and may even get a chuckle out of it. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
Grade: D

Mr. and Mrs. Smith: Review

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Therapy with Mr. and Mrs. Pitt

What’s one way to get males to watch a paired Hollywood couple make ends meet in their steamless relationship?
Take Tomb Raider and match her with Achilles, add a smidge of domestic violence, and mix an hour of gratuitous gunplay and you get Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
Mr. and Mrs. SmithWhat you have seen from the trailers is what you can expect. John (Brad Pitt) and Jane (Angelina Jolie) Smith are a suburban couple who feel detached from each other despite the comfortable life that they live, complete with a white picket fence. Of course, the tension (or lack thereof) is probably a result of the duo not knowing that they are, secretly, assassins for independent organizations outside the U.S. government. Once they find out, it becomes a matter of Spy versus Spy and an even bigger matter of miscommunication as they each believe that the other has tried to off them from the first S.N.A.F.U. Much explosions, punches, kicks, and bullets ensue.
Half True Lies and half War of the Roses, Mr. and Mrs. Smith has an intriguing yet cardboard-cutout environment that acts more as a playground of destruction than as a setting for marital counseling. It is a visually vibrant film that is well balanced by its obviously dark humor: the trailers cannot prepare you for thinking, halfway, that perhaps this will end with one of the Smiths dead as the finale of a marriage gone down the toilet. The banter between the couple is very typical of arguing couples and achieves its comedic tone by being juxtaposed by the mayhem around them as they continue to bicker. Predictably, violence gives way to sexual tension that has to find its outlet in our violent lovebirds. But the movie has enough chuckles and action to keep one interested as to how all this plays out.
It isn’t without its moral dilemmas. The film suggests that one reason why couples fail is due to what they don’t say as opposed to what they do. It also makes the dual claim that opposites attract (last half of the film) while the original sham marriage was based on the claim that birds of a feather flock together. The end of the movie seems to have been placed as a matter of convenience and not as a matter of plot: it could have conceivably been placed anywhere within the last 40 minutes of the film. It leaves open the nature of the Smith’s newfound passions and fails to answer whether or not it will last, though this all seems beyond the point.
The point is that marriage counseling has never been more over-the-top and gratuitously violent. This is one therapy session that you may want to check out.
Grade: B

King Kong: Review

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King Kong Is Pretty

Summer and Christmas are my two favorite times of year as far as movies are concerned. Summer gives us highly intelligent, heart-warming movies such as Independence Day and Godzilla. Christmas gives us morally appealling, family friendly movies such as Die Hard and Die Hard 2. It should be no surprise, then, that I found King Kong to be just the type of movie for this holiday season.
Please read the following plot preview to establish your decision to watch this movie: a giant friggin’ ape that’s AT LEAST 3 stories tall beats the crap out of not one, but FOUR T-Rexes! FOUR! Holy sh*t, he rips this one dinosaur’s jaw open and BITES OUT HIS TONGUE and then plays with him! And there’s this hot babe who doesn’t say much and this guy with the BIGGEST FRIGGIN’ NOSE IN THE UNIVERSE. Then he (Kong) bites off some guy’s head. WOW. If you don’t watch this movie, people will probably pick on you.
King KongIf you are still clueless, read on.
King Kong trumps its 1937 predecessor in every way. Unless you are a die hard fan of clay apes fighting clay dinosaurs, it is a no-brainer that this movie has made the great artistic leap forward. And whereas the original film had to remind us that there was, perhaps, a moral to the story, Peter Jackson’s monkey-film constatnly holds a sign up to our face in case we are too stupid to see the theme of beauty & the beast. I do prefer, however, the original special effect of throwing screaming rag dolls into a ravine over the new, computer-generated version. But I digress.
The movie is a visual masterpiece, painting Skull Island and 1930’s New York with overly romanticized digial brushstrokes. The only things on screen that you know to be real are the actors: everything has been given so much visual cohesiveness that the environment seems too fluid to be true. And Kong? Kong looks incredible. Many reviewers have said that he is the greatest cinematic creation to date, which is a fare opinion. You can see his nose hairs and maybe even some dingleberries. He moves and acts like an ape. He even laughs! Once you see him, you forget about that guy with the big nose or the fat guy who keeps wanting to make a movie. Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) is so impressed that she never speaks for the rest of the movie. Needless to say (if you weren’t impressed by the trailer, even the words of a ninja won’t convince you), it is a beautiful film.
But it is a long beautiful film. Like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I am of the opinion that Peter Jackson is the type of cinematic orator who sticks to the rule of quantity versus quality: he takes his sweet time in telling his monkey story and establishing who his characters are in the first act. This is problematic for those of us inclined to A.D.D: by the time Kong appears towards the middle of the second act, the characters are stunted in their development and some (Ann Darrow) are literally never heard from again. Why take the time to establish a romance that steps to the side the moment the big gorilla starts chokeslamming V-Rexes? Why establish the character of the jerk film director if nothing happens to him at the end? The first act may make one weary of what follows next, but those who stay in their seats will not be disappointed. Kong and Ann tangibly bond in the mutual relationship of “protector against nasty dinosaurs” and “lovable person who makes me laugh, not like those other hot blondes I just decided to eat.” It is a relationship that is based on debt: Ann owes Kong her life, whereas Kong owes Ann the primal honor of being the only creature to establish a bond of some sort with him. Even his roomates (giant 15-foot bats) pick on him. There is no half-baked attempt at a plot or theme here, which makes the last spoken lines of the movie rather redundant. The movie is fortunate to have a director who balances his hours of exposition with a great deal of visceral quality.
If the movie is to fail anywhere, it has to be in the sheer beauty of the world that Jackson has created. Everything that occurs in the movie, even in the midst of chaos, is absolutely gorgeous. Andy Serkis gives Kong the movements of a real gorilla’s mannerisms, but all this is lost in the perfect, flowing, individual strands of Kong’s hair and the beautiful hues of Skull Island’s setting sun. It’s a GAP commercial with a giant monkey and a flapper girl. I cannot give King Kong the honor of being the greatest cinematic creation to date simply because he does not enter into our world in the tangible fashion that, say, Jaws did. Peter Jackson’s King Kong exists in a world of the 1930’s that is, at most, tangential to ours but nevertheless trapped in the realm of Hollywood fiction. It is a pretty painting in a perfect frame that we are welcome to gaze at for almost 3 hours. That’s not too bad, especially when dinosaurs start getting demolished.
Grade: A+