Review of The Hangover 2

Review of The Hangover 2

The best thing about this movie is that is wasn’t any worse than I thought it would be.

The Hangover 2 blurs the lines between sequel and remake. Same characters, same story, new location. To recap: Somebody’s getting married. Three characters wake up with no recollection of what happened. Someone is missing and they have to piece together what happened. Some weird shit and bad puns happen along the way. Zack Gigglefecus falls over stuff, Ed Helms screams and makes faces, Brad Cooper has blue eyes. Fade out.

The script asks Zack to do a little too much and exploits his inability to act. The surprise of the tattoo was over about three months before the movie hit the theaters, so we didn’t really need the reveal they gave it. The movie was filmed in Shanghai but was written in Writers Contrivance Village. Be prepared for a lot of sperm humor. Though it does play Downeaster Alexa almost in its entirety on the flight overseas and Ed Helms plays a parody of Allentown. That alone earned it back a bug and a half. 4 bugs (out of 10)

Review of Blue Valentine

Review of Blue Valentine

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. And not just because Michelle Williams spent about a third of the time with her legs up in the air.

This is a portrait of a blue collar family and until I just now typed the word, I didn’t draw the comparison to the movie title. Coincidence vs. Irony argument aside, I enjoy movies that don’t lie to the audience. I also enjoy a nice heaping mound of deceit in the form of a flying Delorean, but I enjoy movies trying to depict what it’s actually like to be in a relationship, unlike everything Meg Ryan has ever been in.

I’ve gotten myself lost again.

Blue Valentine phases back and forth between the romantic beginnings of a relationship and the dramatic end of that relationship. The conversations, especially the petty fights from the latter part of the relationship chronology, would have hit the cutting room floor in most Hollywood studios. But Derek Cianfrance grabs that emotion by the nads and exposes it to the world. Who hasn’t gotten irrationally angry about your partner running into an ex? And who hasn’t gotten irrationally defensive about telling your partner about that run-in? And who hasn’t been upset about something – but when confronted with the whole relationship unraveling – turns that anger into desperate cries of “We can make it work” only to hear the brutal reality that the two of you can’t stop treating each other bad? If it wasn’t so painful, I would have watched that scene 20 times.

Michelle Williams was brilliant and worth the Oscar nomination and when the hell is Ryan Gosling going to get the respect he’s earned? Yeah, he’s sexy. But Brad Pitt was sexy once. You can be both sexy and a good actor.

This movie isn’t for everybody. It flirts with infidelity and pornography, it’s slow in parts and it’s depressing in others. But it’s the honest depiction of a relationship I’ve been crying to be made since John Kevin Boggs shouted out “Meg Ryan is a fucking liar!” 9.5 bugs (out of 10)

Review of Drive

Review of Drive

Before I will address whether or not I consider this an Oscar snub, can somebody please tell me why this was shot like it was an 80s movie? The music and the opening credits all pointed to this being a sequel to Silk Stalkings. Years from now, does Albert Brooks just want the world to look back at this movie and think he was just ahead of his time? But they still used cell phones and Al referenced his life back in the 80s. So I guess this was a meta-movie, kinda like The Player and Get Shorty? Or just a gimmick without reason.

So was Albert Brooks snubbed for an Oscar nom this year? Let’s start the movie. The opening scene was phenomenal. Ryan Gosling is a Hollywood stunt driver who moonlights as a freelance getaway driver who pulled a job before those confounding credits even came on. He has his 5-minute rule and once his criminal clients pulled the job and got in the car, he and the movie took off. The scene was brilliantly shot without any dialogue. All the audio came from the police scanner and the broadcast of a Clippers game. He dodged, hid, outran and escaped into the parking garage just before the Clippers game let out. Awesome.

Then the movie started. Nothing like that ever happened again. His life as a freelance getaway guy was all but completely dismissed in favor of a tired plot with a reluctant hero who gets accidentally mixed up in some mob business. There’s a cute love story – but without the sex – so as to let you know that he’s just a nice guy. He just wants to be her friend and spend time with her son and help her ex-con husband get rid of some skeletons. There was a lot of staring in this part of the movie. Which Ryan Gosling and the chick from An Education (Casey Mulligan) happened to be very good at. This is contrasted with a high dose of violence: heads getting stomped in, chicks getting shot in the face, forks going in people eyes. It was a little more than it needed, but after those hot pink credits, who knows what’s going on in Albert Brooks’ head.

In the end, Gosling gets the girl and her kid some money and some safety and kills all the bad guys. But he gets stabbed in the process and sits in a car bleeding seriously form the stomach. Maybe he’s dead. Maybe he’s not. The camera pans to his eyes. Will they blink? If they don’t then this is just like Inception. If they do, then they didn’t have the guts to leave it ambiguous. They can’t win. Gosling blinks. Then he drives off, leaving the audience to wonder if this was the first time he’d done this or not. Maybe in the sequel, we can explore this getaway character a little more rather than get him caught up in a cookie cutter mob movie. I’m not much of a fan of the nominees this year, but this was no snub. 5.5 bugs (out of 10)

See.

Dustin Tells the Story of His Father

Dustin Tells the Story of His Father

Happy 17th Birthday, Quote of the Day! This is a story I told in January for Better Said Than Done on the theme of "Family." It's an excerpt from a piece of writing I started in my memoir class about my father. There is one uncomfortable moment in there - and it's labeled as such - but rest assured, it was meant as a joke. Those that know dad already know this. Either way, enjoy the story of my father.

Review of 50/50

Review of 50/50

Somebody made a comedy about cancer. Very dangerous. Especially when you consider that Seth Rogan is in it. Spoiler alert: He plays a pothead. It’s like Roberto Benigni bouncing lines off of Tommy Chong in Life is Beautiful. My intense dislike for Seth aside, it was tastefully done. Mostly.

Seth did not disappoint. In under five minutes, he was already talking about fuck and dick and shove it down her throat. I powered through his scene-stealing stand-up routine in hopes he would disappear into the background once the plot took form. Thankfully, that happened. Mostly. He eventually let the star of the movie have a couple words in edgewise and proved to be best when playing the wing man role that he should have been from the start. The bar scene where he was trying to figure out how long into a conversation to bring up cancer in order to get him and Joseph Gordon-Levitt laid was great. The scene where JGL and Bryce Dallas Howard were breaking up and he decided to take over the camera sucked me so far out of the moment, I thought I was watching Pineapple Express again.

The story goes how you think it would. A young dude gets cancer, his selfish girlfriend leaves him, his selfish pothead friend turns out to be a good dude, his mom is scared, the doctor is unsympathetic and everything is touch and go until he escapes the surgery cancer-free.  Don’t worry. I didn’t ruin anything.  Clichés abound in this film, from the doctor glancing over the word “cancer” when he first mentions it in mid-sentence, a father with Alzheimers, a wet-behind-the-ears social worker who replaces the girlfriend as a love interest (played beautifully by Anna Kendrick) and a last chance make-a-wish fulfilled. Mostly.

Even considering all the clichés, the predictable plot and the Seth Rogan factor, the movie had its moments, both funny and emotional. The selfish pothead friend actually had a book on cancer in his bathroom and there was a little misdirection with a phone call to Anna in the final scene before the surgery. The movie pulled off what they set out to do and Seth Rogan didn’t ruin the film. Mostly. 6 bugs (out of 10)