thoughts on American Reunion

So, I have kind of a soft spot for the American Pie movies. Remember what a big deal it was when the first one came out? I was twenty, I think, home from college for the summer and working as a temp; I went to see it with a friend from work after hearing how awesome it was from many people. I later went to see American Pie 2 and American Wedding; neither of them were particularly memorable-- like, I can remember the basic plot of both, but few really funny or awesome moments. Well, no, wait, there was a pretty funny dance-off scene in American Wedding. But anyway, I still have good feelings toward the series as a whole, so obviously I was going to see American Reunion.

For one thing, I enjoy seeing casts that I like reunited; like, the first Sex and the City movie didn't even come out that long after the show ended, and I remember sitting there in the theater thinking how happy I was to see everyone again. I felt the same way when I saw Scream 4. I think there's something about thinking that a series is over, then getting to catch up with the characters again. Like, I heard that there is a Sweet Valley High novel that catches up with the Wakefield twins as adults, and I totally plan to read it.

Anyway. American Reunion catches up with the gang as they return home for their thirteen-year reunion. Yes, thirteen. Their school didn't get around to having a ten-year reunion. This made me giggle. Jim and Michelle are married with a two-year-old. Oz is a sportscaster and appeared on a Dancing with the Stars-type show. Kevin is married and an architect. Paul Finch is supposedly a world traveler. Stifler is a temp. The plot involves Jim and Michelle trying to recapture the "spark" in their marriage whilst Jim is constantly being hit on by a girl he used to baby-sit; Jim trying to convince his widowed father to start dating again; Oz and Heather realizing they still have feelings for each other; Kevin having conflicted feelings about Vicky even though he loves his wife; etc. There are lots of parties and drinking. There are also lots of reminders of stuff that happened in the original movie (like the whole school seeing the video of Jim and Nadia), and lots of stuff that is similar to stuff that happens in the original movie; for example, there is a scene where Jim has to try to sneak the girl he used to baby-sit (Kara), who has gotten drunk, stripped naked, and then passed out in his car, into her house while the rest of the guys distract her parents. I thought to myself, "Oh, YEAH, there was always a part like this in those movies!" There is some grossness here and there. There is also lots of awesome nineties music and funny references to advances in technology that have happened since the first movie; like, Stifler's big plan for distracting Kara's parents is to knock on the door, say that their car broke down, and ask if he can use their phone to call Triple A. Kara's dad: "Um, none of you guys have cell phones?" Stifler to Oz: "The last time I tried this, cell phones hadn't been invented yet!" Oh! And the guys get into a little war with some high school kids, which is pretty funny.

So, basically, if you liked the first movies, I'd recommend seeing it. I'm not sure if it would have much appeal for people who hadn't seen the first ones, though there are some funny moments. There was this forty-something couple in the theater when I saw it who seemed to be enjoying *the heck* out of it; like during the closing credits, they show a bunch of pictures of stuff that happened in the first three movies, and at one point the guy was all, "Oh, do you REMEMBER that, from the second one? With the TROMBONE?"

Also: they showed a preview for a movie with Adam Sandler and Andy Samberg that I'm sorry to say looks like it's going to be the worst movie of all time. I really like Andy Samberg, but it looks HORRIBLE.

That's all.

Awesome Things About The Hunger Games movie (spoilers)

All right, friends. I saw The Hunger Games this afternoon. Many of you were with me =). I will first just say what I said at dinner afterwards, which was that it was a complete moviegoing experience: I was cringing in my seat and covering my eyes at times, near tears at others, and even giggled a few times. Here are the things that I particularly enjoyed, in no particular order:

1) Woody Harrelson as Haymitch. Totally knocked it out of the park. He was funnier and more charming than Haymitch in the book, who was mainly just gross. I enjoyed his performance a lot.

2) Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss. There were parts of this movie where she was doubled over sobbing, and she totally sold it. She was awesome.

3) the way they incorporated the hosts' commentary to explain things that you wouldn't know unless you'd read the book, like what a tracker jacker is

4) the way the camera simulated Katniss's point of view when she was under the influence of tracker jacker venom

5) the scene when Katniss puts flowers over Rue's dead body. I know it had the same function in the book, but here I really *got it* that she was calling attention to the fact that someone was dead, and this was something we should feel bad about, not just view as entertainment.

6) the scene when Katniss goes to get the medicine for Peeta and gets into a really nasty fight with another tribute

7) the fact that they left out the scene where Peeta gets all mad when he finds out/determines that Katniss may have been faking her feelings for him. It was a life or death situation, and you didn't know for a long time whether Peeta was on the up-and-up, either, so I never really got where his anger came from, anyway.

8) Seneca Crane's beard, which, in his review, Roger Ebert humorously and accurately said that Satan would be envious of. There was debate over dinner about how you would shave a beard that way, or whether it was stuck on.

9)the random moments where I made myself giggle for no good reason. For example: Peeta can disguise himself to look like trees and rocks and stuff. There is one moment where Katniss is just walking around and Peeta just pops up, camouflaged. Katniss gives him this surprised look, like, "Peeta! You look like a f'ing rock!" Similarly, there is a moment where Peeta asks her to give him the bow and arrow, and she just looks at him like, "What are you going to do with it, bitch?" I commented over dinner that it was kind of too bad that it was a PG-13 movie, because I imagine that Hunger Games contestants would be swearing a lot more.

One random thought: I liked Stanley Tucci as Caesar Flickerman, but thought it would have been funny if Ryan Seacrest had played that part, though that might have been too obvious.

Anyway, that's it! It was great! Go see it!

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.

thoughts on My Week with Marilyn/The Descendants

My Week with Marilyn

I saw this almost a week ago and haven't felt like writing about it. After thinking about it a little, though, I think I get it, even though I didn't much care for it. Basically, we all know those people who the world seems to revolve around: other people will put up with things from them that they wouldn't put up with from anyone else, and if they ask you to do something, you drop everything to do it. Their attention makes you feel special. However, if you are someone who doesn't see what everyone else sees in this person, you are just exasperated by the lengths that others are willing to go to for them.

Marilyn Monroe was one of those people that the world revolved around, according to this movie. The problem, for me, is that I didn't quite get why. I don't know much about Marilyn Monroe, which is my own fault, I guess; however, the movie doesn't let us know a lot else. This is partly because she apparently remained a mystery to a lot of people, including the film's main character; however, what we learn about her over the course of the film wasn't really enough for me. Additionally, everyone in the film talks about what a good performer she is when she is at her best, and how she lights up the screen; Michelle Williams didn't really sell me on that. I will admit that I've never really cared for Michelle Williams and was maybe predisposed against her, but either way, I just didn't find the movie all that interesting.

The Descendants

There is a moment in this movie where George Clooney's character, Matt, tells his daughter, Alex (played by Shailene Woodley from Secret Life of the American Teenager), that her mother is going to die. She has been in a coma for a few weeks, and it has been determined that she will never wake up, and that they should turn off the machines keeping her alive. He tells Alex this while she is swimming in the pool in their backyard, and when he tells her, she reacts by ducking underwater and bursting into tears. A few moments later, she yells at him, "Why did you have to tell me when I was in the pool?"

This is a movie that is largely involved with the giving and receiving of bad news. On a few occasions, this telling is planned in advance and done very carefully. More often, however, it either just comes out (as in the previously described scene), or is said at least partly in anger, as when Alex tells Matt that her mother, Elizabeth, was cheating on him; Matt responds to this by pulling on the first pair of shoes he can find and sprinting down the street to his best friends' house, where he demands to know what they know and hurls the news that his wife is dying at them. It is these moments, the moments where characters are told bad news and we see them react, immediately and emotionally, that ring the most true for me in the movie. It made me recall the times in my own life when I've received bad news, and how it never happens at the "right" place and time. It just happens wherever you are at the time.

That's what I really liked about this movie-- that for as much as this movie is about dealing with the death of a loved one, it acknowledges that this horrible event doesn't erase anything else that's going on in your life at the time. The family's sadness over Elizabeth's death is mixed up with their anger over her infidelity. Her death also happens at the same time that Matt and his cousins are trying to decide who to sell a valuable piece of land to, or whether to sell it at all. Additionally, her death doesn't change the fact that Matt and Elizabeth hadn't been happy for a long time, or that Alex and her younger sister Scottie both have their own lives and issues. This movie is about dealing with saying goodbye to Elizabeth in the midst of all that.

Two small things that bothered me: Matt waits until he has told literally everyone else that Elizabeth is dying before he tells ten-year-old Scottie; when she is eventually told, the actual words come from a woman who I assume is the hospital's grief counselor, not him, and we don't even get to hear most of what the grief counselor says. Every moment that he didn't tell her, I got more and more uncomfortable, and I kept thinking she was going to find out accidentally, or react really violently when she did find out. Her actually finding out is pretty anticlimactic. I was also bothered by a character named Sid, a stereotypical dumb surfer dude who is friends with Alex and who is with the family throughout most of the film. He also has a knack for saying incredibly inappropriate things. I guess he was there for comic relief, and to give us the perspective of someone less close to the situation. I still didn't think he was all that necessary.

Regardless, I liked the movie a lot, for the most part. I'd recommend it.

thoughts on "Take a Back Road" music video

I've never written about a music video before. I don't even watch many music videos. However, I saw this one this morning, for a song that I have enjoyed for several months now, and found I had a surprising lot to say about it.

I think Rodney Atkins is supposed to be an angel similar to the angels in the movie City of Angels in this video. I did not get this until the end, when he claps the cute cop on the shoulder and the cop, without acknowledging that he has been clapped on the shoulder, walks over to the cute single woman and strikes up a conversation. I believe this explains why no one seems to notice Atkins walking around with his guitar in places he doesn't belong, like in Interstate traffic. I believe this is also why they show him perched on a bridge and a water tower at different points in the video (I hope he was placed there using special effects, by the way, because my heart leapt into my throat every time they cut to him just casually sitting on a bridge, playing his guitar).

Anyway, despite this bit of curiousness, I did like this video. I like the point where the guy is sitting in traffic, looking frustrated, then a song he likes comes on the radio and he just sits back with a smile, like everything's okay now. That's how it is for me, too. In fact, just this morning, when I turned on the TV and a video I like immediately started up ("Beautiful Every Time" by Lee Brice), I thought to myself, "Today is going to be a good day." I also full-on went "AW!" when the cute cop went over to talk to the woman. However, I do think this is weird: no one appears to be able to see Atkins throughout the video, including at the end, when they are at the barbecue. However, at the barbecue, people *can* hear the song, as evidenced by the fact that many people are clapping in rhythm to it. How is this possible? They can hear the other two musicians they show at the party, but not him, the singer? Weird.

thoughts on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The guy at the ticket counter at the AMC on the West Side talked me into buying their Rewards card. Then as he handed me my ticket, he said, "You'll like this movie. Parts of it are kind of vulgar, but it's good. It's like three hours long, though, so go pee before you go in." Farily accurate assessment (though I'm not sure if I would have specifically chosen the word "vulgar"), good advice.

I don't have a ton to say about this movie, but my general assessment is, "It was like the book, only more confusing." I hadn't read the book for about a year, which I thought would be good so that I wouldn't be constantly comparing everything, but it took me awhile to remember who certain characters were, and I still feel like I'd like to skim through a couple of parts of the book again. Also, while some things in the book happen quickly and are surprising, here it seems like a lot of the surprises come completely out of nowhere. Plus...Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander are both farily complex characters. Mikael Blomkvist also has fairly complex relationships with the people in his life, which I think is fairly normal for a man of his age and life experiences. I just don't think the movie captured those complexities, and that they, for the sake of time, had to skate over certain details that deserved more attention. I guess the thing that I liked best about the book was the characters and their relationships, and I was disappointed in the amount of attention the movie was able to give them.

That said, I thought the casting was good, for the most part. I liked Daniel Craig as Blomkvist, and I thought Rooney Mara totally disappeared into the role of Lisbeth Salander. Totally wasn't expecting Robin Wright as Erika Berger. Erika Berger, in the book, anyway, always just struck me as more sophisticated and put-together than the roles Wright often plays. I thought Wright did fine; I just wouldn't have pictured her in that role.

Obviously, I was squirming and covering my eyes during the rape scene. I thought the film handled it okay; it was just difficult to watch.

I guess that's all I'll say. I thought the movie was okay. I didn't love it.