thoughts on Mud

Basically...this was surprisingly and disappointingly boring for a movie in which Matthew McConaughey plays a character named Mud who has a snake tattoo and hangs out in the woods eating beanie weenies out of a can and insists that while it's fair enough to call him a hobo, he is NOT!!! a bum. (I will admit that I, in the very recent past, have also had a conversation about the difference between a hobo and a bum. I thought it was that hobos ride the rails. According to Mud, hobos work for a living but just travel around a lot and don't have a permanent home. Learn something new every day!)

I walked into this movie a few minutes late, and for a few minutes after I got there, only the sound was working, not the picture. This was fairly disorienting because I hadn't realized I was so late; I thought the previews would still be playing when I got there, and for awhile I was convinced that not only was the picture not working, but they had started the movie in the wrong place. I quickly determined that this was not the case, but the bottom line is, I'm not entirely sure why the main character, a fourteen-year-old boy named Ellis, and his friend, Neckbone, initially head out to the woods and encounter Mud. I think that it has something to do with a boat that is stuck up in a tree, and where they find Mud living. Within a few days of the boys' initial meeting with Mud, the following events occur:

1) Ellis learns that his parents plan to divorce, and that regardless of which parent he chooses to live with, he will likely have to move out of the houseboat that he has lived in all of his life.

2) Ellis punches a high school senior in the face for getting handsy with May Pearl, an older girl who Ellis has a crush on. She is impressed, and tells him to call her if he can find her number.

3) Ellis and Neckbone learn more of Mud's story. Basically, Mud has been in love for years with Juniper (Reese Witherspoon). She has a habit of leaving him for guys who get violent with her, then returning to Mud, who takes her back and then goes and beats the most recent guy up. The most recent time, he actually shot and killed the guy. Now, Mud is wanted by the police and hiding out until he can come up with an escape plan for him and Juniper. He is also being hunted down by the family and friends of the guy he killed. So, Ellis and Neckbone agree to help him get the boat down from the tree and get it running again. Ellis does this because he is all upset about his parents' divorce and is moved by the fact that Mud claims to be doing this for love. Neckbone does it because Mud agrees to give him his gun once they've helped him.

This obviously is all going nowhere good, but it doesn't all go bad in exactly the way you expect. Basically, Ellis's parents' divorce, what ultimately happens between him and May Pearl, and what ultimately happens between Mud and Juniper causes Ellis to lose his faith in love, but then he sort of gets his faith back in humanity because Mud saves him from dying from a snake bite even though it is dangerous for him to do so for a number of reasons. And then after this, which seems to be the resolution of the movie, happens, the movie continues for something like another ten minutes and gets moderately ridiculous.

I feel like this could have used another rewrite, or something. It had potential. McConaughey's character is skeevy and possibly dangerous, which we all know he does well. Witherspoon's character is kind of trashy, which Witherspoon has done before but not for awhile, which could have been interesting. There are two main problems, however:

1) The movie is interesting for as long as Mud's story remains a mystery, and then quickly becomes boring once we learn what's going on. We spend an awful lot of time just watching Mud and the kids fix the boat, and waiting around to see whether Juniper actually sticks around for him, which we don't really care that much about. Mud and Juniper are onscreen together for a grand total of maybe ten seconds in the whole movie. We believe that he loves her; she isn't onscreen enough for us to really know what she's thinking, though a character played by Sam Shepard tells Ellis that she's no good and basically only with Mud when things don't pan out with someone else. This appears to be true, and because unlike Ellis, we don't have some deep personal reason to root for their relationship, we just don't care. I think that the Mud and Juniper characters, and McCounaughey and Witherspoon as actors, could potentially be interesting together, but in this context, they're not. We don't know enough about their relationship and they're almost never onscreen together, so we have no idea whether they even have chemistry.

2) There is all this ridiculous, over the top stuff going on that has the potential to be really wild and fun. The stuff with the snakes, and Mud being hunted down by both the police and some random bad men, and Juniper being somewhat shady...it's all there. And yet, this is mostly Ellis's coming of age story, and most of the other stuff comes to a head in a scene near the end that doesn't really belong. Everything's played too straight, like the director didn't get how over the top and ridiculous a lot of this is and decided to make a serious coming-of-age film that just happened to have all of this other random stuff in it.

I don't know if this movie had the potential to be great. But it had the potential to be entertaining, trashy, and fun, and it wasn't really even those things. Disappointing.

thoughts on the most recent Smash

Well! I always like this show for its soapy goodness, but this episode was actually pretty brilliant-- it effectively tied the Bombshell and Hit List storylines together while advancing the major plotlines in an interesting way. Also...Derek has had his douchey moments in the recent past, but I love how he was RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING in this episode and Jimmy and Karen both wound up looking like arrogant douches for not realizing it. There both of them are, thinking that Derek is just messing with the show to fuck with them, and they both manage to piss off their best friends, and then the show gets a BRILLIANT review and Derek gets to be all, "I was right. And by the way, Karen, your boyfriend's on drugs, I just loaned him a ton of money, Jimmy's not even his real name, and oh, by the way, I'm sleeping with your mortal enemy." ALL OF WHICH IS TRUE! I mean, he even looks like he was right with his whole "Get away from my woman" business, even though at the time I thought he was overstepping his bounds. And Julia was right-- his not being in love with Karen anymore *did* make the show better, because if he still thought he had a shot with her, he never would have given those songs to Ana, which was clearly the right decision. Yeah. Derek redeemed himself this episode, and I am happy about that, because I wanted to like him even when he was being douchey.

Meanwhile, I still hate Tom. Really, the only thing Julia did wrong by helping Hit List was keeping it a secret. I also liked Ivy more than I have in awhile.

Good job, Show!

recent thoughts on Smash

Y'all know how I love shows that make me shout at the TV, right? Well, tonight (as I watched Tuesday's episode via the Internet) what I was shouting was, "DRUGS! DRUGS! DRUGS!"

So...I've started to like Jimmy a little bit more lately, but he's still basicallly a douche, right? I mean, could he have messed up the Karen situation more? First not pursuing her because of Derek...then pursuing her but keeping it a secret from Derek...then borrowing money from Derek but keeping it a secret from Karen. I know he really liked/likes Karen, and I know that Derek really had no right to be all "Get away from my woman" with him, but I just feel like him getting together with Karen under the circumstances-- being reliant on Derek for his job/owing Derek money/still being tangled up in drug shit-- probably wasn't the smartest move ever. Also, the secret came out in such a way that made both Derek and Karen feel stupid. He's just...yeah. A douche. And then Karen finds drugs in his jacket pocket and doesn't say anything? Run away, Karen! Run away!

I really don't care about anyone else on this show besides Derek and Karen. I hope Derek and Ivy don't sleep together (again), but I'm sure they probably will.

thoughts on Admission

Tina Fey plays Portia Nathan, an admissions officer at Princeton. She lives her life in a fairly predictable fashion; she has a long-term live-in boyfriend and has been in admissions at Princeton for sixteen years. Her orderly life begins to unravel, however, when John Pressman (Paul Rudd), who works at an alternative high school, asks her to come talk to his students about Princeton. Most of them are actively opposed to the idea of attending an exclusive, traditional, Ivy League school, but one, Jeremiah, is very interested. John, meanwhile, seems strangely interested in Portia; it's clear that he knows her from somewhere, or wants to tell her something. He lets her know what that "something" is fairly quickly: he thinks that Jeremiah is her son. He knew her roommate in college, he explains, and that roommate borrowed his car to take Portia to the hospital when she went into labor. Jeremiah's birth certificate reveals that he was born in the same hospital at the same time that Portia delivered, and as Portia gets to know Jeremiah as he pursues applying to Princeton, it begins to seem more and more likely that he is her child. Something else also begins to happen: for the first time in perhaps years, Portia actually actively cares about whether a particular student gets in to Princeton or not. She has warned a younger colleague about getting too emotionally invested in any one particular applicant, but she finds that she really wants Jeremiah to get in, and actively fights for him. Meanwhile, her boyfriend leaves her for a Virginia Woolf scholar who is pregnant with his twins, leaving her free to sort of, kind of, maybe start something with John, who has a habit of picking up and moving every few years, much to the dismay of his adopted son, Nelson. Add in a subplot with Portia's eccentric mother (Lily Tomlin), who wants Portia to call her by her first name and stops feeding her dogs because she thinks that animals are too dependent on humans and should learn to hunt for themselves, and you've got yourself a movie.

I've come to really like these "high-strung woman has to learn to deal with unexpected changes in her life" movies. Celeste and Jesse Forever is another recent example. The basic message of such movies is that life doesn't always turn out the way you planned it, but it usually works out okay, which I generally find to be true. I identify fairly strongly with characters like Portia and Celeste, and I find it fairly comforting to see these women completely lose their shit, yet have things still work out in a positive (though less than perfect) way. As far as this particular movie is concerned, I also really liked most of the characters and performances; I generally find Paul Rudd and Tina Fey to be very likeable, and many of the secondary characters are very interesting and different in generally believable ways, which I also really liked.

Despite the fact that I thoroughly enjoyed myself throughout much of the movie, though, there were some holes in the plot. Basically, I feel like the whole movie would never had happened had John, instead of contacting Portia, approached Jeremiah's adoptive parents and said, "I know a woman who gave birth at the same time and in the same hospital where Jeremiah was born. I don't know how you feel about Jeremiah meeting his birth parents, but if you think this is a good idea, I could give you her name and you could contact the adoption agency for advice on how to pursue this." I have no idea whether even that is the appropriate course of action in this situation, but I don't feel like you should just spring this on some woman out of the blue unless you have more proof. I also don't think the woman should then, as Portia eventually does (spoiler alert), approach the child and be like, "I think I'm your mother." I'm just saying; there are ways to find out for sure whether Jeremiah is Portia's or not, so why get people all worked up based on theories?

Also (spoiler alert), Portia eventually goes so far as to actually tamper with records to get Jeremiah into Princeton; she is caught and fired for this. Now, I get that this is meant to show how much Portia has come to care for Jeremiah and also serves to get her out of her rut; she's had the same job for sixteen years. But...if the message of the movie is that life sometimes turns out better when it doesn't go according to plan, then does it really matter that Jeremiah doesn't get into Princeton? Couldn't he be just as happy and successful somewhere else? He would be disappointed, of course, but he would presumably get over it. So much of the movie is spent establishing how worked up students and parents get about getting into Princeton; while it is an interesting twist to have Portia become one of those worked-up parents, wouldn't it have been interesting to then have her realize that this thing (admission to Princeton) that she and her colleagues, along with so many parents and students, spend so much time agonizing over, just doesn't matter that much? The college admissions process is stressful, for sure, and the decision of where to go to school is an important one...but not getting in to one particular school is not the end of the world. Having Jeremiah just plain not get in and watching Portia deal with that would have made more sense and sent a better message, I think, than having her tamper with the outcome.

In spite of this, the performances and characters are strong enough for me to still recommend this movie. The plot just kind of all falls aprt if you start thinking about it too much, though.

thoughts on the second season of Smash (so far)

May I preface this by saying how much I really, really enjoy this show? I actively look forward to it every week. There are a few shows that I like but only catch sometimes; this is one of only three current shows (along with Nashville and The Americans) that I make sure to catch every episode of, or look up online if I can't watch it live. That said...

...Karen and Derek are the only two characters that I really, really like and care about. Ivy can be pretty entertaining and funny at times, but I don't like how they've taken her apart from the rest of the cast and put her in a completely separate play; I just don't think she's a strong enough character to carry her own storyline. In fact, during her one solo number during the most recent episode-- the one that supposedly was so amazing and funny that the star of her show decided to cut it because it would take attention away from him-- I found myself checking Facebook. She didn't have my complete attention. Julia is also okay sometimes, but her storylines are so all over the place-- now she's having an affair! Now she's getting divorced! Now she's mad that they're making her rewrite Bombshell! Now she likes her rewrite better, and is mad that the producers decided to stick with her original version of Bombshell!-- that it's hard to know what to care about where her character is concerned. Along those same lines...

...We don't know enough about the new version of Bombshell to care which version they go with. Yes, we've been told-- and seen inklings-- that the new version is edgier and more authentic or whatever...but we haven't seen it. We get the vague idea that they should go with the new one, but we certainly aren't invested enough in it to make Eileen's decision a cliffhanger, as they did in the second-to-last episode. They're trying to creat tension around plot points that we just don't care about. Also...

...at least once every two or three episodes, there is a musical number that is so bad that I am actively embarrassed for everyone involved. The most egregious example is the "Public Relations" number in which Tom envisioned himself playing all of the journalists, and one was a woman, and they all had really bad, stereotypical accents. I honestly have had trouble even looking at Tom since then. Also...

...the fact that Karen and Derek are the only two characters that I am super invested in has become more of a problem now that Derek has left Bombshell and that, in fact, the storyline involving Hit List has become far more compelling. I'm actively rooting for Karen to leave Bombshell and join its cast. That said...

...Jimmy is an ass-- though absolutely, he can sing, and I love his storyline and the show he's helped create. However, I absolutely don't want him and Karen to get together. I want her with Derek.

Basically, what it all comes down to is that they've split this season off into too many separate storylines, only one of which (the "Hit List" storyline) is very compelling. Like I said, I still really look forward to this show; it's just getting to the point where there are only certain characters and storylines I like, which I think is a problem.

thoughts on Side Effects

A young man, Martin Taylor (Channing Tatum), returns home after serving four years in prison for insider trading. His wife, Emily (Rooney Mara), seems happy to see him, but it soon begins to seem that she is suicidal; she runs her car into a brick wall in a parking garage. A psychiatrist, Dr. Banks (Jude Law), is sent to consult with her in the hospital; she claims that she just "lost it" for a minute and refuses to be institutionalized, though she agrees to outpatient psychiatric care. He prescribes a couple of anti-depressants that don't work; she asks about Ablixa, a new drug that is currently being advertised and that she claims she heard about from a friend. It seems to work great-- she has more energy and more of a sex drive-- but it makes her walk in her sleep; one night her husband finds her up cooking in the middle of the night, music blaring, and when he tries to talk with her, she acts as if she can't see or hear him. Dr. Banks is told of this side effect, and Martin asks if there is something else she can take, but Emily is insistent about staying on Ablixa. Next thing any of them know, Martin is dead; Emily stabs him multiple times, supposedly in her sleep, and supposedly as a result of Ablixa.

This is really where our story begins. Emily is found not guilty by reason of insanity and institutionalized until Dr. Banks deems that she is fit to return to society. Along the way, a number of questions come up: was it Dr. Banks's responsibility to take her off of Ablixa when she reported the side effects? Is it possible that she's not crazy, at all? If not, does it even matter, in a country where there are Double Jeopardy laws that prevent her from being retried? And why is a psychiatrist that she saw for a short time after her husband's arrest, Dr. Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones) coming around again?

I saw this movie with my friend Melinda, and at one point I had to refrain from whispering to her, "This is like a nightmare." Things that were particularly scary to me:

1) The doctor prescribes Emily her first anti-depressant after a conversation that lasts maybe five minutes. He doesn't know her. He knows that she seems to have attempted suicide and that her husband recently got out of prison. That's it. She basically has to agree to take said anti-depressant to be released from the hospital. When it doesn't work, he's fairly quick to suggest something else, and he doesn't hesitate much when she asks to take a drug that she's "heard about from a friend." He also has what seems like an inordinate amount of power over her future once she murders her husband and is institutionalized. I have no idea if any of this is realistic, but I find the idea of a doctor being so casual about prescribing one drug and then another, and then having so much power over a patient who is arguably at least partly in her current predicament because of a drug he prescribed, HORRIFYING. This made me sincerely hope that I never have to see a psychiatrist.

2) Emily supposedly wakes up from a nap and finds out that she MURDERED HER HUSBAND IN HER SLEEP. Can you imagine anything worse, really? I mean, she was supposedly under the influence of a drug when this happened, but people sleepwalk and do more innocuous things in their sleep all the time. Again: terrifying.

3) There are people in this world who are capable of carrying out very complicated schemes to do very bad things, and who feel no remorse afterwards. I can't talk more about that without giving away more of the plot than I should, but that is perhaps the scariest thing of all: that there are people out there who are both evil and smarter than you, and if you are unfortunate enough to get tangled up with one of them, your life will be ruined. Period.

All of these terrifying things take place in a movie that is very well-done. Rooney Mara is FANTASTIC. She has this face that can seem innocent and fragile one moment and capable of doing terrible things the next, and in every movie I've seen her in (the others have been The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), she comes across as the smartest person in any room. Sometimes, but not always, she seems superior. All of this works for this movie. Channing Tatum is also incredibly well-cast here; he has this sort of bland, rich pretty boy look about him. He also comes across as just a little bit dumb, but like a very nice, well-intentioned guy. He doesn't have as much to do as Rooney Mara or Jude Law, but I think it takes a very specific actor to be all of the things that Martin is supposed to be here: regretful of the consequences of insider trading and the way they have affected his and his wife's lives but not so much sorry for actually doing it ("It's part of the culture," he says at one point); concerned about his wife's well-being and guilty about the role he has played in her problems, yet somewhat frustrated that things can't just go back to normal. Jude Law also is good here; like his character's patients, I would imagine, you want to trust him but are a little bit suspicious of him, as well. No one here is completely squeaky-clean, and you have to imagine all of them capable of doing not-so-great things at different times, and I thought the casting really worked here.

I'm realizing that I haven't talked about Catherine Zeta-Jones much here, and in fact, when I was telling my mom about this movie this morning, she interrupted me at one point to ask, "Wait, isn't Catherine Zeta-Jones in this? What's her part in it?" The thing is is that her character is sort of just a pawn in a larger scheme, and while she's convincing enough in her role, she doesn't leave much of an impression. Maybe another actor could have done more with what she was given?

Bottom line, though: terrifying, thought-provoking movie with largely excellent performances.

thoughts on Nashville 2/6/13

Jeez, whoever puts the previews together for Nashville is GOOD, man! Next week? Is the songwriter guy back? I somehow think that whatever happens to Rayna onstage won't end her career, but-- oh, the drama!

So, Teddy slept with someone else first, and he was the one who asked for a divorce. Good. Now she can get out of the marriage virtually guilt-free and things can start to get good...as if they haven't already. The elevator scene didn't disappoint. I really liked how they built up to it with other elevator scenes throughout the episode. Also...once again I find all of Rayna's relationship drama strangely comforting. Any time I have a crush I get kind of frustrated because I feel like I'm acting like I'm twelve, but watching Rayna and Deacon staring at their phones-- debating whether to text the other one, wishing the other one would text them-- and then seeing Deacon sort of dancing around in the hallway, debating whether to go see her, only to be deterred by Teddy, I was like, "Yeah, stuff never changes."

As for the minor storylines-- sweet, if Rayna signs Scarlett and Gunner to her record label, that will bring them into the main storyline the way I've been wanting. Juliette's "I'm a girl!" song at the beginning made my eyes grow huge with the ridiculousness of it all-- the lyrics, the dancing, and Deacon, a grown-ass man, standing there looking like a moron through the whole thing. The song she wrote with Deacon was good, and yeah, both the negative tweets and positive feedback made sense-- obviously the people who came to the concert came to see her hits and probably wouldn't like it, but a larger audience would dig it. I got so frustrated with the record exec-- does an artist really have to go to such lengths just to do anything different, ever? I suspect the answer is yes, because people try to talk you out of making changes/taking risks even when you're not some big star, but-- man, that must be frustrating.

Another great episode! Loved it!