thoughts on This Means War

Yeah, so. I took a grading break today to go see This Means War. I hadn't really planned to see a movie today; however, as I was running past Showplace Cinemas South (Evansville's cheap theater) this morning, I noticed that We Bought a Zoo and Sherlock Holmes were playing, and I thought to myself, "Huh. I kind of wanted to see those. Maybe I will, now that they're at the cheap theater. Hey, I haven't checked the movie listings this week, I wonder what-- OH MY GOD THIS MEANS WAR COMES OUT THIS WEEKEND!" Yeah. I was excited. I could not talk myself out of going today.

Friends, it was all that I hoped it would be. You all know how much I love spy stuff, especially when it's fun. Like, I know most people will say that the first two seasons of Alias were the best, and objectively, they are right. However, I have a soft spot for Season Four, when they all went black ops, so basically they had access to all of the CIA's resources but were only accountable to each other, and EVERYONE was out in the field, including Marshall. It was kind of ridiculous, but very fun. It also included my favorite episode of the series, "Welcome to Liberty Village," in which Sydney and Vaughn were stationed in a village where Russian spies were being trained to act like American citizens. That's right: Sydney and Vaughn were Americans...pretending to be Russians...pretending to be Americans. It was awesome. Oh yeah, I'm supposed to be writing about This Means War.

Reese Witherspoon plays Lauren, a career woman who tests consumer products for a living; like, she's the one who gets to, for example, set cooking pans on fire to see how they withstand heat, or whatever. It looks like a pretty fun job, and her knowledge of consumer products comes in handy in humorous and useful ways at key moments in the movie. Her story is that she followed a boyfriend to L.A. from her hometown, Atlanta, only to have him cheat on her. She runs into him early in the movie with his new fiancee, and of course she is wearing running clothes and has headphones on and is singing to herself like a crazy person, and of course after she lies that she has to go meet her (nonexistent) boyfriend, he catches her eating sushi at a restaurant that she goes to alone so often that the staff there refers to her as "Table for One." So, in a nutshell, she has a lot going for her, but her love life is in a pretty sorry state.

This leads her best friend, Trish (Chelsea Handler), whose function in this movie is to make sex jokes and act gross and generally just be Chelsea Handler (who I used to think was funny but have grown tired of), to set up a racy profile for her on an online dating site. There, Lauren meets Tuck (Tom Hardy), a CIA agent who tells people he's a travel agent, has a young son, and hasn't dated much since his divorce. He's very sweet, and they hit it off...but on her way home from the date, she also happens to meet FDR (Chris Pine), who unbeknownst to her is Tuck's best friend and also a CIA agent (he tells people he's the captain of a cruise ship). Lauren and FDR don't actually hit it off right away; he's one of those too-smooth guys with a line for everything, and she's on to him right away. However, he is persistent, and she agrees to go out with him. Their first date doesn't actually go well, either, until she runs into her ex-boyfriend again and FDR does a PERFECT job pretending to be her boyfriend, being super charming to the ex-boyfriend's new fiancee, and driving the ex-boyfriend crazy by repeatedly calling him by the wrong name. It's pretty great. Anyway, so before she knows it, Lauren has gone from dating no one to dating two great guys.

Tuck and FDR find out pretty quickly that they're dating the same woman. However, both of them really like her, so they decide that they will both continue dating her and just let her choose. The thing is that since they're spies, they have the means to spy on her, and spy on each other on their dates with her, and gadgets to sabotage each other's dates with her. It's all pretty silly, but very fun; I was grinning from ear to ear for most of the movie and laughed out loud repeatedly. I thought the movie did a great job of keeping it fun while raising the stakes-- allowing relationships to deepen, conflicts to develop, complications to arise, etc. I thorougly enjoyed it. If we're going to place this in some sort of "Spy vs. Spy Romantic Comedy" genre, of which Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Duplicity are also a part, then I'm going to go out on a limb and call this my favorite of that genre.

Side note: while buying a ticket for this movie, I witnessed a very funny exchange between a young (maybe five year old?) boy who was very excited to see Ghost Rider and his dad, who was acting all confused, like, "What? You don't want to see The Vow?" And the dad was being so convincing about pretending he was going to take this kid to see The Vow that it is to the kid's credit that he did not completely lose it. Anyway, good stuff.

thoughts on Smash series premiere

I dug it, for the most part. I like Debra Messing. I like Katharine McPhee (and have since her Idol days...I'm remembering an awesome performance of "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" kneeling on the edge of the stage, as well as a truly bizarre duet with Meatloaf on the finale of her season). I didn't particularly care for the way that the musical numbers would switch back and forth between reality and fantasy, though I guess they have to, to some extent, if the characters are going to do things like walk down the street singing. And, during the part when Katharine McPhee went to the director's apartment, naturally I was sitting on my couch freaking out, all, "Does this kind of thing really happen?! This is so inappropriate! I'm so uncomfortable!" Anyway, I'll stick with it. I like it so far.