So, prior to this, the movies I'd seen in 3D were limited to Gnomeo and Juliet, Thor, Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, and the relatively recent rerelease of Titanic. I only saw Gnomeo and Juliet in 3D out of convenience; now that I'm thinking about it, I'm not even sure if I saw Thor in 3D or if it just seems that way because it gave me a headache ("Why is everything so loud?," I kept wondering); I didn't care for Alice in Wonderland, period, 3D or no 3D; and it was fun seeing Titanic again on the big screen, but the 3D didn't really add anything to it. In other words-- not so impressed with the 3D, usually. However, I'd been told that 3D was the way to see Gravity, and we have an IMAX here in Evansville, so I figured I'd go for the total movie-going experience. In fact, that's what I was hoping for: a total movie-going experience. To explain that further: I love seeing movies in the theater. I'll see a movie in the theater that I would never bother to watch on DVD. Why? It's an EXPERIENCE-- you eat popcorn and drink soda (which I almost never do, in my normal daily life). You're immersed in the film for a couple of hours, no cell phone, no Facebook, no getting up to unload the dishwasher or water the plants or do any of the little things I often find myself doing when watching TV or movies at home. You usually have some friends with you, and even if you're there by yourself, there's a feeling that you're doing something in a way that there isn't when you're just hanging out watching TV at home: you got out of the house and you went to see a movie. And probably, you had a good time, even if the movie wasn't your favorite.
Being in IMAX 3D and taking place in outer space (a place that very few of us will ever get to go), Gravity had more potential than most films to be a total, immersive movie-going experience. I'm happy to say that it didn't disappoint.
Sandra Bullock plays Ryan Stone, who The Internet tells me is a "medical engineer" (all I could have told you based on the film itself is that she is referred to as Dr. Stone, we are told she works at a hospital in her normal daily life, and she doesn't have much training/experience as an astronaut). George Clooney plays Matt Kowalski, an experienced astronaut. Through a series of unfortunate events, just before they are about to head back to Earth, they are left the only two remaining members of their crew, literally floating out in space, tethered to each other, fighting for survival. After a time (spoiler alert!), Ryan must let Matt go, and she is left alone to try to reenter her spacecraft...then make it to a neighboring space station...then make it back to Earth. This film chronicles how she does so.
Interestingly, the film that this reminded me most of was 127 Hours, a.k.a. the film where James Franco cuts off his own arm. That film was about James Franco's character, Aron Ralston, finding himself in a life-or-death situation and finally getting desperate enough to do what he needs to do to survive. It's a very good film featuring a very good performance from Franco; with the exception of a couple of women he briefly spends time with at the beginning of the film and characters we see in flashback, he's basically the only actor in the film, meaning that he has to carry it. Here, Bullock and Clooney are the only actors we spend any significant time with at all, and the stakes are heightened by the literally out-of-this-world setting: Ryan and Matt are dealing with a lack of gravity, as well as dangerous fluctuations in temperature, oxygen, and carbon dioxide levels. There is also more action here, as Ryan has to learn to deal with changes in circumstance and make a series of quick, life or death decisions.
It's an emotional and physical rollercoaster, everyone. I was hunkering down in my seat. I was fighting tears. I was sometimes on the verge of whispering advice. This is what I mean by "total movie-going experience"; I felt like I'd been through something at the end of it. The 3D helps with this, making the action more immediate. Additionally, Bullock's performance is very good. She doesn't usually tend to choose movies that are particularly interesting to me, in general, but I think she's established that she can carry a film, and that's absolutely necessary here. I really think this is a movie that you should see in IMAX 3D if you can, but it will be interesting to see how this plays on DVD, when you are less immersed in the movie-going experience and her performance really does have to carry the whole thing. I'm betting in that case, the film will be less engrossing/exciting but still very good.
Monday, October 14, 2013
Friday, October 11, 2013
thoughts on Don Jon (spoilers)
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Jon, a young Jersey man who watches a lot of online porn. He goes to confession every week, and it seems that he sometimes watches it as much as three or four times a day. He doesn't actually think there's anything wrong with this, but he knows that he's committing a sin, so he confesses it anyway. Outside of watching porn, he goes out to clubs with his friends a lot and has a lot of one-night stands, but no serious relationships until he meets Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson). It seems that she is perfect...but he's still watching a ton of porn.
Naturally, she has a major problem with this when she finds out, but that's not the only thing she won't accept as-is about him. He's a bartender, and she insists that he take a night class even though he never would have had any interest in one on his own; in theory, suggesting that someone get an education isn't a bad thing, but she basically just wants a boyfriend (and eventually husband) who makes a lot of money, and she thinks a degree is the way to that.
There's also a scene that I found fairly bizarre where they're in a store looking at curtain rods or some such, and he tells her that he also wants to pick up some Swiffer pads while they're there. She doesn't even know what those are (a housekeeper does her cleaning), and she can't believe that Jon, a grown man, does his own cleaning. She finds it downright offensive, if not disturbing, when she offers to send her housekeeper over and he says that he enjoys cleaning; he's proud of his apartment, and he likes keeping it nice. She tells him that when they're living together, he won't be doing that anymore. She won't even let him go buy the Swiffer pads, because she says it's embarrassing. Like I said, bizarre. She knows he doesn't make a lot of money. Who does she think cleans his place? Would she rather he lived in a pigsty? So...it's not just that she wants to change him, but she's fairly out of touch with reality, to a degree that I was fairly taken aback by. It's a pretty brilliant scene; I can't remember ever seeing a discussion about cleaning products on film before, and it reveals so much about both of them.
Anyway, so she dumps him because of the porn. You think that the film's happy ending is going to be that he learns to give it up and she takes him back, but the film takes an interesting turn involving a fellow night class student named Esther (Julianne Moore) who initially doesn't seem all that important (to Jon or to the movie). She finds out about the porn one of the first times she and Jon meet (he takes to watching it on his phone to hide it from Barbara); she's not judgmental about it, but she eventually helps him understand what he's missing out on with real women, and from real sex, by being so fixated on porn. I still, for a time, thought that Esther was just going to be the person who helped Jon give up porn so Barbara would take him back. But maybe Barbara was never right for him.
I think the amount of time I've spent talking about the plot here shows how interested I was in it. At times, the focus on porn is a little, for lack of a better word, skeevy...but I was genuinely interested in Jon and wanted to find out what happened to him. For that matter, all of the characters are interesting, even those with less screen time, such as Jon's family and two best friends. The film sees the humor in the Jersey world it is set in without making fun of it, the performances are all solid, and the plot has some unexpected turns. I really liked this movie.
Naturally, she has a major problem with this when she finds out, but that's not the only thing she won't accept as-is about him. He's a bartender, and she insists that he take a night class even though he never would have had any interest in one on his own; in theory, suggesting that someone get an education isn't a bad thing, but she basically just wants a boyfriend (and eventually husband) who makes a lot of money, and she thinks a degree is the way to that.
There's also a scene that I found fairly bizarre where they're in a store looking at curtain rods or some such, and he tells her that he also wants to pick up some Swiffer pads while they're there. She doesn't even know what those are (a housekeeper does her cleaning), and she can't believe that Jon, a grown man, does his own cleaning. She finds it downright offensive, if not disturbing, when she offers to send her housekeeper over and he says that he enjoys cleaning; he's proud of his apartment, and he likes keeping it nice. She tells him that when they're living together, he won't be doing that anymore. She won't even let him go buy the Swiffer pads, because she says it's embarrassing. Like I said, bizarre. She knows he doesn't make a lot of money. Who does she think cleans his place? Would she rather he lived in a pigsty? So...it's not just that she wants to change him, but she's fairly out of touch with reality, to a degree that I was fairly taken aback by. It's a pretty brilliant scene; I can't remember ever seeing a discussion about cleaning products on film before, and it reveals so much about both of them.
Anyway, so she dumps him because of the porn. You think that the film's happy ending is going to be that he learns to give it up and she takes him back, but the film takes an interesting turn involving a fellow night class student named Esther (Julianne Moore) who initially doesn't seem all that important (to Jon or to the movie). She finds out about the porn one of the first times she and Jon meet (he takes to watching it on his phone to hide it from Barbara); she's not judgmental about it, but she eventually helps him understand what he's missing out on with real women, and from real sex, by being so fixated on porn. I still, for a time, thought that Esther was just going to be the person who helped Jon give up porn so Barbara would take him back. But maybe Barbara was never right for him.
I think the amount of time I've spent talking about the plot here shows how interested I was in it. At times, the focus on porn is a little, for lack of a better word, skeevy...but I was genuinely interested in Jon and wanted to find out what happened to him. For that matter, all of the characters are interesting, even those with less screen time, such as Jon's family and two best friends. The film sees the humor in the Jersey world it is set in without making fun of it, the performances are all solid, and the plot has some unexpected turns. I really liked this movie.
Thursday, October 10, 2013
thoughts on Runner Runner
Well. That was very disappointing.
Justin Timberlake stars as Richie Furst, a grad student at Princeton whose makes money on the side bringing in customers for an online gambling site. He gets in trouble with the dean for gambling on campus at around the same time his tuition, $20,000, is due; he doesn't have it, but he has over $17,000, so he decides (naturally) to bet it all and see if he can win the rest. He loses everything, but he manages to figure out that the site has cheated him, so he flies down to Costa Rica to confront the site's owner, Ivan Block (Ben Affleck). Ivan denies knowing that his programmers were cheating customers, but is impressed that Richie was able to figure out that this was happening, so he offers him a job. Richie takes it, and all seems great until he is confronted by an FBI agent (Anthony Mackie), who basically tells him that Ivan's up to some shady shit, they're trying to take him down, and if Richie doesn't help them, he's going down with him.
Already you can see that much of this is fairly implausible. The problem is, it should be more fun. Generally, I love gambling movies. I really like Justin Timberlake. Ben Affleck isn't my favorite, but he's playing a shady rich bully here, which he does well, and which should be entertaining. The thing is, though, the fun of gambling movies comes from both the tension of the games the gamblers are playing and the challenge of trying to figure out how they're pulling it all off. Part of the problem is that the gambling here takes place online, meaning it is more difficult for the filmmakers to build tension and completely impossible for the audience to figure out things along with the main character; even if you are a computer programmer yourself, it's not like you have access to the code Richie is using.
Another problem is that though gambling is Ivan's business, it almost might as well be drugs or weapons or any other shady thing, considering the lack of insider knowledge we get on the online gambling industry. The real tension comes (or should come) from Richie slowly realizing that Ivan is up to no good and trying to take him down, but it's pretty easy to tell right from the beginning that Ivan is shady, and the impending takedown is too all over the place to really care about. First Richie is going to be loyal to Ivan and NOT help the FBI! Then, oh no, it looks like the FBI is right about him! Then Ivan is threatening Richie's father! Then a couple of Richie's programmer friends are involved! Then...zzzzzz. It's all just hard to keep track of, and not that interesting.
This movie had potential to be interesting and fun. Instead, it was just kind of boring. Like I said, disappointing.
Justin Timberlake stars as Richie Furst, a grad student at Princeton whose makes money on the side bringing in customers for an online gambling site. He gets in trouble with the dean for gambling on campus at around the same time his tuition, $20,000, is due; he doesn't have it, but he has over $17,000, so he decides (naturally) to bet it all and see if he can win the rest. He loses everything, but he manages to figure out that the site has cheated him, so he flies down to Costa Rica to confront the site's owner, Ivan Block (Ben Affleck). Ivan denies knowing that his programmers were cheating customers, but is impressed that Richie was able to figure out that this was happening, so he offers him a job. Richie takes it, and all seems great until he is confronted by an FBI agent (Anthony Mackie), who basically tells him that Ivan's up to some shady shit, they're trying to take him down, and if Richie doesn't help them, he's going down with him.
Already you can see that much of this is fairly implausible. The problem is, it should be more fun. Generally, I love gambling movies. I really like Justin Timberlake. Ben Affleck isn't my favorite, but he's playing a shady rich bully here, which he does well, and which should be entertaining. The thing is, though, the fun of gambling movies comes from both the tension of the games the gamblers are playing and the challenge of trying to figure out how they're pulling it all off. Part of the problem is that the gambling here takes place online, meaning it is more difficult for the filmmakers to build tension and completely impossible for the audience to figure out things along with the main character; even if you are a computer programmer yourself, it's not like you have access to the code Richie is using.
Another problem is that though gambling is Ivan's business, it almost might as well be drugs or weapons or any other shady thing, considering the lack of insider knowledge we get on the online gambling industry. The real tension comes (or should come) from Richie slowly realizing that Ivan is up to no good and trying to take him down, but it's pretty easy to tell right from the beginning that Ivan is shady, and the impending takedown is too all over the place to really care about. First Richie is going to be loyal to Ivan and NOT help the FBI! Then, oh no, it looks like the FBI is right about him! Then Ivan is threatening Richie's father! Then a couple of Richie's programmer friends are involved! Then...zzzzzz. It's all just hard to keep track of, and not that interesting.
This movie had potential to be interesting and fun. Instead, it was just kind of boring. Like I said, disappointing.
Sunday, September 29, 2013
thoughts on New Girl Season Two
This show, you guys.
As many of you know, I liked the first season a lot. The second season is much better. The first season introduced us to likeable, interesting, flawed characters and put those characters into funny situations. It was very well-written. However, in the second season, we got to know those characters, and their stories started to move forward. For example...
...Nick and Jess. In the first season, it was clear that something would happen between them eventually. In the second season, something did happen, and it was, at different times, hot, touching, messy, and frustrating. Always believable.
The two have their first kiss in episode fifteen, "Cooler." The plot of the episode is as follows: Schmidt (Max Greenfield), Winston (Lamorne Morris), and Nick (Jake Johnson) plan to go out with the intention of getting laid. Jess (Zooey Deschanel) wants to go, too, as her hot doctor boyfriend, Sam (David Walton), is working late; however, Nick tells her that she can't because she's his "cooler": he never gets laid when she's around. At the same time, a neighbor's trench coat has been delivered to their apartment by accident, and Nick loves it and begins wearing it everywhere even though it is a woman's trench coat.
The guys go out, and Jess is initially just bored at home alone, but then she begins hearing scratching noises at the door and gets scared. She tries calling Sam, who initially doesn't answer because he's busy at work; her best friend Cece (Hannah Simone), who is out on a date with Shivrang (Satya Bhabha), a man she is in the courtship stage of an arranged marriage with; and finally Nick. Nick answers, of course, because he loves her. Anyway, the guys wind up leaving the bar with a couple of girls and coming back to the apartment; they are eventually joined by Cece, Shivrang, and Sam. They play a "sexy" version of the drinking game True American, and at one point the "rules," such as they are, require Nick and Jess to go behind a door and kiss. Nick drags his feet about kissing her, to the point where Jess begins to feel a little insulted and wonders why he doesn't want to kiss her. "I just don't want to kiss you like this," he blurts out. She is flabbergasted-- what does he mean, like this?
Later that night, the game is over. Jess and Sam go to bed in her room. Nick goes to bed in his. However, eventually the scratching starts up again, and Nick and Jess both go to investigate. It turns out to be a large dog being chased by a woman. The woman is apologetic until she realizes that not only has Nick not returned the trench coat that has been delivered to him by mistake, but he has apparently been sleeping in it ("It gives me confidence," he tries to explain). She leaves, and Nick and Jess start to head back to their rooms. But then Nick takes her hand and pulls her to him, and they share what I daresay is one of the best TV kisses I have ever seen. Jess agrees; in the next episode she will tell Cece, "He just...took me! He was firm, yet gentle! He was a man, and I was a woman, and for just a minute, I saw through time and space!"
Regardless, the two don't instantly become a couple. She's still dating Sam. Then she and Sam break up, but by then, Nick is dating his new boss at the bar. Then Nick's dad dies; it brings Nick and Jess closer, but when they try to go out on an actual date, it's kind of a mess. Finally, Nick remembers something his dad told him: the best things in life are the things you don't think about. Jess is about to leave to meet up with the guy she lost her virginity to years ago, who is in town and has contacted her. She gets on the elevator, but just before the door is about to close, Nick holds the door and gets in with her.
"What are you doing?" she asks.
"Not thinking," he says. They go back to the apartment and make love.
Here's what I love about all of this: the two are a great couple in a lot of ways. They have great chemistry. They're always there for each other. However, the show doesn't try to ignore the characters' flaws or the actual problems they would realistically have. It's been established that Nick is kind of a mess; he dropped out of law school and now works as a bartender, which isn't horrible, or anything, but he doesn't really have any idea what he wants to do next, drinks too much, and has kind of a Grumpy Old Man personality. He has a lot of good qualities, too, and it seems like he will try harder at life for Jess, but it's not like he just automatically becomes the perfect guy or like the show tries to sweep his issues under the rug. I also like that while, sure, it's pretty normal for TV to delay the couple getting together, all of the things that get in Nick and Jess's way are pretty believable. Finally, I like that through all this, the show still stays its wacky self. Games of True American. Silly storylines like the whole trench coat thing. Schmidt and Winston eventually trying to sabotage Cece's wedding. It stays the show we knew and loved in the first season, but explores the characters with more depth.
This brings me to Schmidt. He was my favorite part of the first season. I liked him in the second season, too, but I feel like as we got to know the other characters more, they all started to be more of a balanced ensemble, with no one standout. I consider this a good thing. Also, he stopped being just the womanizing, clean freak, formerly overweight funny guy with commitment issues to a fully rounded character. Near the end of the second season, we meet Elizabeth (Merritt Wever), who he dated for years when he was overweight. She still is overweight (though she is not now, nor was she ever, as heavy as Schmidt once was). They initially fell in love because she didn't care what anyone thought, which he appreciated and loved about her when he was heavy; however, as he began to lose weight, *he* started to care more about appearances, and, as she puts it, "got mean." They start to date again at the end of the second season, though it's not like he still doesn't care about appearances or isn't generally his funny but slightly douchey self, and it's not like he's not still hung up on Cece, who he dated off and on through much of the first season. Again, the show doesn't skate over any of this or try to pretend he's suddenly this perfect, stand-up guy. I liked this a lot.
Oh. And the second season also manages to work in the song "22" by Taylor Swift and to give Swift a cameo in the season finale. That's also pretty awesome.
Bottom line, I fell in love with this show even more during the second season. I can't wait to catch up on the third.
As many of you know, I liked the first season a lot. The second season is much better. The first season introduced us to likeable, interesting, flawed characters and put those characters into funny situations. It was very well-written. However, in the second season, we got to know those characters, and their stories started to move forward. For example...
...Nick and Jess. In the first season, it was clear that something would happen between them eventually. In the second season, something did happen, and it was, at different times, hot, touching, messy, and frustrating. Always believable.
The two have their first kiss in episode fifteen, "Cooler." The plot of the episode is as follows: Schmidt (Max Greenfield), Winston (Lamorne Morris), and Nick (Jake Johnson) plan to go out with the intention of getting laid. Jess (Zooey Deschanel) wants to go, too, as her hot doctor boyfriend, Sam (David Walton), is working late; however, Nick tells her that she can't because she's his "cooler": he never gets laid when she's around. At the same time, a neighbor's trench coat has been delivered to their apartment by accident, and Nick loves it and begins wearing it everywhere even though it is a woman's trench coat.
The guys go out, and Jess is initially just bored at home alone, but then she begins hearing scratching noises at the door and gets scared. She tries calling Sam, who initially doesn't answer because he's busy at work; her best friend Cece (Hannah Simone), who is out on a date with Shivrang (Satya Bhabha), a man she is in the courtship stage of an arranged marriage with; and finally Nick. Nick answers, of course, because he loves her. Anyway, the guys wind up leaving the bar with a couple of girls and coming back to the apartment; they are eventually joined by Cece, Shivrang, and Sam. They play a "sexy" version of the drinking game True American, and at one point the "rules," such as they are, require Nick and Jess to go behind a door and kiss. Nick drags his feet about kissing her, to the point where Jess begins to feel a little insulted and wonders why he doesn't want to kiss her. "I just don't want to kiss you like this," he blurts out. She is flabbergasted-- what does he mean, like this?
Later that night, the game is over. Jess and Sam go to bed in her room. Nick goes to bed in his. However, eventually the scratching starts up again, and Nick and Jess both go to investigate. It turns out to be a large dog being chased by a woman. The woman is apologetic until she realizes that not only has Nick not returned the trench coat that has been delivered to him by mistake, but he has apparently been sleeping in it ("It gives me confidence," he tries to explain). She leaves, and Nick and Jess start to head back to their rooms. But then Nick takes her hand and pulls her to him, and they share what I daresay is one of the best TV kisses I have ever seen. Jess agrees; in the next episode she will tell Cece, "He just...took me! He was firm, yet gentle! He was a man, and I was a woman, and for just a minute, I saw through time and space!"
Regardless, the two don't instantly become a couple. She's still dating Sam. Then she and Sam break up, but by then, Nick is dating his new boss at the bar. Then Nick's dad dies; it brings Nick and Jess closer, but when they try to go out on an actual date, it's kind of a mess. Finally, Nick remembers something his dad told him: the best things in life are the things you don't think about. Jess is about to leave to meet up with the guy she lost her virginity to years ago, who is in town and has contacted her. She gets on the elevator, but just before the door is about to close, Nick holds the door and gets in with her.
"What are you doing?" she asks.
"Not thinking," he says. They go back to the apartment and make love.
Here's what I love about all of this: the two are a great couple in a lot of ways. They have great chemistry. They're always there for each other. However, the show doesn't try to ignore the characters' flaws or the actual problems they would realistically have. It's been established that Nick is kind of a mess; he dropped out of law school and now works as a bartender, which isn't horrible, or anything, but he doesn't really have any idea what he wants to do next, drinks too much, and has kind of a Grumpy Old Man personality. He has a lot of good qualities, too, and it seems like he will try harder at life for Jess, but it's not like he just automatically becomes the perfect guy or like the show tries to sweep his issues under the rug. I also like that while, sure, it's pretty normal for TV to delay the couple getting together, all of the things that get in Nick and Jess's way are pretty believable. Finally, I like that through all this, the show still stays its wacky self. Games of True American. Silly storylines like the whole trench coat thing. Schmidt and Winston eventually trying to sabotage Cece's wedding. It stays the show we knew and loved in the first season, but explores the characters with more depth.
This brings me to Schmidt. He was my favorite part of the first season. I liked him in the second season, too, but I feel like as we got to know the other characters more, they all started to be more of a balanced ensemble, with no one standout. I consider this a good thing. Also, he stopped being just the womanizing, clean freak, formerly overweight funny guy with commitment issues to a fully rounded character. Near the end of the second season, we meet Elizabeth (Merritt Wever), who he dated for years when he was overweight. She still is overweight (though she is not now, nor was she ever, as heavy as Schmidt once was). They initially fell in love because she didn't care what anyone thought, which he appreciated and loved about her when he was heavy; however, as he began to lose weight, *he* started to care more about appearances, and, as she puts it, "got mean." They start to date again at the end of the second season, though it's not like he still doesn't care about appearances or isn't generally his funny but slightly douchey self, and it's not like he's not still hung up on Cece, who he dated off and on through much of the first season. Again, the show doesn't skate over any of this or try to pretend he's suddenly this perfect, stand-up guy. I liked this a lot.
Oh. And the second season also manages to work in the song "22" by Taylor Swift and to give Swift a cameo in the season finale. That's also pretty awesome.
Bottom line, I fell in love with this show even more during the second season. I can't wait to catch up on the third.
Saturday, September 14, 2013
thoughts on The Spectacular Now
Miles Teller (who you may remember from the relatively recent Footloose remake) stars as Sutter, a high school senior who has recently broken up with (been dumped by?) his girlfriend, Cassidy (Brie Larson, from The United States of Tara and 21 Jump Street). In voiceover early in the film, he says something like, "I don't want to say that we were the life of every party...but we were pretty much the life of every party." He meets Aimee (Shailene Woodley) when he literally passes out on her lawn one night after a party; she finds him the next morning when she heads out to leave on her (technically her mom's) paper route. He offers to help her out, and the two of them begin a friendship that fairly quickly develops into a romance.
I thought the film's performances were pretty solid across the board. Teller is charming as Sutter, a basically nice guy who isn't doing great in Math, who sneaks drinks from a flask pretty much constantly, and who believes his mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) kicked his father (Kyle Chandler) out years ago. Woodley is insecure and nice as Aimee. However, in terms of plot, I really had no idea where the movie was going, or where I was supposed to want it to go. Sutter and Aimee make an okay couple, I suppose. On the one hand, he drinks too much, and she starts drinking quite a bit when she's around him. On the other hand, through dating him, she gains the confidence to stand up to her mom (who we never meet), who Aimee thinks won't let her leave to go to college.
There is also the issue that since the movie is told from Sutter's perspective, we don't really know that much about Aimee. She reveals at one point that her father, an addict, is dead. She seems smart and like kind of a loner, though we see one friend that she occasionally talks to. She gets along fine when Sutter takes her to a party, though, so it seems mainly that she lacks confidence, not like everyone sees her as some huge dork or anything. When it comes down to it, we don't know enough about Sutter, either; he's supposedly popular, and he seems to get invited to more stuff than Aimee, but it seems to be mostly because he's a partier and somewhat charming. He doesn't seem to be popular for any particular reason; the popular kids at my high school were good at things and really involved in the school, and that doesn't seem to be the case with him. So...it's a love story between two kind of blah characters who don't really do much except hang out together and drink, and you're not really sure whether you want them to stay together or not. In other words...it's hard to care that much about this movie.
I thought the film's performances were pretty solid across the board. Teller is charming as Sutter, a basically nice guy who isn't doing great in Math, who sneaks drinks from a flask pretty much constantly, and who believes his mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) kicked his father (Kyle Chandler) out years ago. Woodley is insecure and nice as Aimee. However, in terms of plot, I really had no idea where the movie was going, or where I was supposed to want it to go. Sutter and Aimee make an okay couple, I suppose. On the one hand, he drinks too much, and she starts drinking quite a bit when she's around him. On the other hand, through dating him, she gains the confidence to stand up to her mom (who we never meet), who Aimee thinks won't let her leave to go to college.
There is also the issue that since the movie is told from Sutter's perspective, we don't really know that much about Aimee. She reveals at one point that her father, an addict, is dead. She seems smart and like kind of a loner, though we see one friend that she occasionally talks to. She gets along fine when Sutter takes her to a party, though, so it seems mainly that she lacks confidence, not like everyone sees her as some huge dork or anything. When it comes down to it, we don't know enough about Sutter, either; he's supposedly popular, and he seems to get invited to more stuff than Aimee, but it seems to be mostly because he's a partier and somewhat charming. He doesn't seem to be popular for any particular reason; the popular kids at my high school were good at things and really involved in the school, and that doesn't seem to be the case with him. So...it's a love story between two kind of blah characters who don't really do much except hang out together and drink, and you're not really sure whether you want them to stay together or not. In other words...it's hard to care that much about this movie.
Saturday, September 7, 2013
random blog on Alias Season Three/Lauren Reed/Melissa George
Today I'd like to talk about Melissa George as Lauren Reed, a.k.a. Vaughn's wife in Season Three of Alias. Here's a Season Three promotional picture of her in case you are unfamiliar:
Anyway, so after the Sydney/Vaughn YouTube binge I told you all about recently, I went back and watched some full episodes-- not in any particular order, just the ones I felt like watching. The thing I keep puzzling over is whether or not the producers always intended for Lauren to be evil, or whether they either a) decided to make her evil because she was so hated by fans, or b) perhaps *did* intend for her to *eventually* reveal herself as evil, but rushed to this a bit more quickly than they might have because, again, fans just wanted Sydney and Vaughn back together. Don't get me wrong; I was one of those fans. But here's the thing:
Vaughn is DESTROYED when he learns the truth about Lauren. He basically goes completely insane in the last two episodes of Season Three. He freaking pours acid on someone at one point during an interrogation. He leaves Sydney with no back-up to run after Lauren on one mission. Let me repeat: He puts Sydney at risk for a shot at revenge on Lauren. He actively plots Lauren's murder (with Jack's help and encouragement). When he eventually does kill her, it's more of a self-defense type scenario, but he shoots her a ridiculous number of times. He fully wants to do it, which haunts him well into Season Four. There is one Season Four episode where he has to exhume her corpse and where Sydney has to pretend to be Lauren for the purposes of a mission (I don't remember the exact details surrounding this, but trust me: it happened), and this is unbearably painful for him. In another Season Four episode, he confesses to Jack that he can't sleep and that he sees her everywhere. He eventually forgives himself for what he's done (in an episode where he goes undercover as a hot priest, by the way). However, we are led to believe that what happened with Lauren may very well have ruined his life had Sydney not been there to pull him back from the dark side. In order for us to buy any of this, we have to believe that Vaughn was completely and totally in love with Lauren.
This was always going to be a hard sell. For one thing, we are positioned to identify with Sydney in this narrative, meaning that when Sydney lost two years at the end of Season Two, we lost them with her. We didn't see Vaughn and Lauren meet and fall in love. For us, like for Sydney, it was like Vaughn had been with Sydney just earlier that day, planning a romantic vacation for the two of them, and...what now? He's married to someone else? He tells Sydney that he's moved on with his life, and in the first couple of episodes of Season Three, he seems like he has; he seems primarily concerned with making sure that Lauren doesn't feel threatened by Sydney's reappearance in his life, meaning that 1) Sydney doesn't have him, even as a friend, to help her through her transition back to a life where everyone has moved on without her and 2) he sometimes appears a bit insensitive to Sydney, being openly affectionate with Lauren right in front of her. He's not intentionally being mean; he just honestly doesn't seem to care that much about Sydney anymore. Again: hard sell for the audience, who saw Vaughn in love with Sydney at the end of the very last season.
Add to that the fact that his indifference to Sydney doesn't last terribly long. Within maybe three or four episodes, we see him having a post-stabbing dream where he wakes in the hospital to find Sydney sitting next to him crying about how much she misses him. He confesses that he misses her, too, and they kiss. We figure out that it's a dream when she stabs him (again) and asks, "How could you do this to me?" He wakes up and seems a bit shaken, if not a little disappointed, to see Lauren sitting by his bedside. It's not much longer before he is actively lying to/hiding things from Lauren to protect Sydney. It takes him awhile to realize that he still has feelings for Sydney and to make any sort of move to leave his marriage, but...the feelings for Sydney are clearly there, early on. In other words: he was in love enough with Lauren for her betrayal to destroy him? Really?
Also: not even two full years had passed since Sydney's "death," which means that Vaughn either married Lauren roughly five minutes after Sydney disappeared, which doesn't seem overly plausible, or that he had only been married to Lauren for roughly five minutes at the time of Sydney's return, in which case...who cares about Lauren? It doesn't really help that the show doesn't really give us a clear timeline for all of this. I have this Alias companion book that states that Vaughn and Lauren met and began dating nine months after Sydney's "death." At one point, Lauren mentions something about not hearing from her handlers for more than two years after she was assigned to marry Vaughn. At another point, Vaughn makes a comment about how they've been talking about taking a vacation for over a year. When the heck did all of this happen? How long have these people even known each other? When did they have time to fall in love, plan a wedding, and get married? The whole thing makes not one goddamn bit of sense, is what I'm saying.
And yet. The producers of the show did seem to put a fair amount of effort into both casting Lauren and (at least initially) creating a character that Vaughn might realistically marry. Melissa George is very pretty, and in a more va-va-voom type way than Jennifer Garner:
Her role on Friends back in the day was the "hot nanny." On Grey's Anatomy, she played Meredith's wild college friend who allows the other interns to freaking take out her appendix *for practice.* In other words: I haven't seen her in a ton of things (though her IMDB page indicates that she gets fairly regular work, particularly on TV, and I'm kind of excited about the fact that she will apparently be "tempting" Peter Florrick on the upcoming season of The Good Wife), but in the stuff I *have* seen her in, she seems to get brought out when they need someone hot and/or wild and/or shady. Okay, I guess I've just answered my own question. Maybe they totally planned for her to be evil all along.
But beyond her appearance, they gave her character a backstory and independent storylines the likes of which characters other than Sydney rarely got on Alias. In a nutshell, she was a NSC agent/liaison to Sydney and Vaughn's task force at the CIA. Her father, a United States senator, had managed to keep her from being trained as a field agent. That's the thing: we met her parents. They factored into a couple of fairly major storylines. There were a handful of scenes shot at her parents' house. We did not even see Jack's apartment until Season Four. We never saw Vaughn's house until he married Lauren. I'm just saying: why go to all of this trouble with her if they were just going to reveal her to be evil in like half a season, and kill her off by the end of that same season? I feel like when we were originally introduced to her, we were supposed to view her as a legitimate professional and personal rival for Sydney. I also feel like, given the fact that they later added Mia Maestro to the cast in late Season Three, then Rachel Nichols in Season Five, the producers/network were planning for the possibility that the show might last for a long time, that Jennifer Garner might want to leave someday, and that they should have some sort of back-up female character ready in that event. None of them really stuck, and the show ended after five seasons.
The interesting thing was, as unpleasant as it was for me personally to watch Sydney and Vaughn be apart in Season Three, I came away from all of this with mildly positive feelings toward Melissa George. Like, when she shows up on something I'm watching, my reaction is usually, "Oh! I'll bet this is going to be fun!" I actually just watched a couple of her Grey's Anatomy episodes last night; she was pretty fun and entertaining. I feel like maybe Season Three Alias could have been more okay if they'd taken more time to play out the whole Vaughn/Lauren storyline...but even I, at the time it was actually on, pretty much just wanted it to be over with. So, they wrapped it up, they moved on, and, what, eight years after Lauren's last appearance on the show, I found myself puzzling over it. I guess the show wins, then =).
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| You will notice that she is sitting on some boxes that say "Fireworks." |
Vaughn is DESTROYED when he learns the truth about Lauren. He basically goes completely insane in the last two episodes of Season Three. He freaking pours acid on someone at one point during an interrogation. He leaves Sydney with no back-up to run after Lauren on one mission. Let me repeat: He puts Sydney at risk for a shot at revenge on Lauren. He actively plots Lauren's murder (with Jack's help and encouragement). When he eventually does kill her, it's more of a self-defense type scenario, but he shoots her a ridiculous number of times. He fully wants to do it, which haunts him well into Season Four. There is one Season Four episode where he has to exhume her corpse and where Sydney has to pretend to be Lauren for the purposes of a mission (I don't remember the exact details surrounding this, but trust me: it happened), and this is unbearably painful for him. In another Season Four episode, he confesses to Jack that he can't sleep and that he sees her everywhere. He eventually forgives himself for what he's done (in an episode where he goes undercover as a hot priest, by the way). However, we are led to believe that what happened with Lauren may very well have ruined his life had Sydney not been there to pull him back from the dark side. In order for us to buy any of this, we have to believe that Vaughn was completely and totally in love with Lauren.
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| Vaughn and Lauren in a Season Three promo pic. |
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| Vaughn and Lauren getting annoyed with Sydney during a meeting. |
Also: not even two full years had passed since Sydney's "death," which means that Vaughn either married Lauren roughly five minutes after Sydney disappeared, which doesn't seem overly plausible, or that he had only been married to Lauren for roughly five minutes at the time of Sydney's return, in which case...who cares about Lauren? It doesn't really help that the show doesn't really give us a clear timeline for all of this. I have this Alias companion book that states that Vaughn and Lauren met and began dating nine months after Sydney's "death." At one point, Lauren mentions something about not hearing from her handlers for more than two years after she was assigned to marry Vaughn. At another point, Vaughn makes a comment about how they've been talking about taking a vacation for over a year. When the heck did all of this happen? How long have these people even known each other? When did they have time to fall in love, plan a wedding, and get married? The whole thing makes not one goddamn bit of sense, is what I'm saying.
And yet. The producers of the show did seem to put a fair amount of effort into both casting Lauren and (at least initially) creating a character that Vaughn might realistically marry. Melissa George is very pretty, and in a more va-va-voom type way than Jennifer Garner:
Her role on Friends back in the day was the "hot nanny." On Grey's Anatomy, she played Meredith's wild college friend who allows the other interns to freaking take out her appendix *for practice.* In other words: I haven't seen her in a ton of things (though her IMDB page indicates that she gets fairly regular work, particularly on TV, and I'm kind of excited about the fact that she will apparently be "tempting" Peter Florrick on the upcoming season of The Good Wife), but in the stuff I *have* seen her in, she seems to get brought out when they need someone hot and/or wild and/or shady. Okay, I guess I've just answered my own question. Maybe they totally planned for her to be evil all along.
 |
| Melissa George on Grey's Anatomy, possibly trying to convince the other interns to remove her appendix. |
But beyond her appearance, they gave her character a backstory and independent storylines the likes of which characters other than Sydney rarely got on Alias. In a nutshell, she was a NSC agent/liaison to Sydney and Vaughn's task force at the CIA. Her father, a United States senator, had managed to keep her from being trained as a field agent. That's the thing: we met her parents. They factored into a couple of fairly major storylines. There were a handful of scenes shot at her parents' house. We did not even see Jack's apartment until Season Four. We never saw Vaughn's house until he married Lauren. I'm just saying: why go to all of this trouble with her if they were just going to reveal her to be evil in like half a season, and kill her off by the end of that same season? I feel like when we were originally introduced to her, we were supposed to view her as a legitimate professional and personal rival for Sydney. I also feel like, given the fact that they later added Mia Maestro to the cast in late Season Three, then Rachel Nichols in Season Five, the producers/network were planning for the possibility that the show might last for a long time, that Jennifer Garner might want to leave someday, and that they should have some sort of back-up female character ready in that event. None of them really stuck, and the show ended after five seasons.
The interesting thing was, as unpleasant as it was for me personally to watch Sydney and Vaughn be apart in Season Three, I came away from all of this with mildly positive feelings toward Melissa George. Like, when she shows up on something I'm watching, my reaction is usually, "Oh! I'll bet this is going to be fun!" I actually just watched a couple of her Grey's Anatomy episodes last night; she was pretty fun and entertaining. I feel like maybe Season Three Alias could have been more okay if they'd taken more time to play out the whole Vaughn/Lauren storyline...but even I, at the time it was actually on, pretty much just wanted it to be over with. So, they wrapped it up, they moved on, and, what, eight years after Lauren's last appearance on the show, I found myself puzzling over it. I guess the show wins, then =).
Monday, September 2, 2013
thoughts on Butter
Huh.
I'm not entirely sure I completely got this movie, or that it really accomplished what it was trying to do. It seems like it might have been trying to be a few different things, didn't go for any of them quite enough, and thus didn't really succeed at any of them. However, there were enough funny one-liners and enough genuinely bizarre moments that a day after watching it, I find myself chuckling about parts of it in a "What the f*ck was that?" kind of way.
Ty Burrell plays Bob Pickler, who has won the Iowa State Fair butter carving contest fifteen years in a row. He is asked to step down and give someone else a chance to win, and perhaps be a judge. His wife, Laura (Jennifer Garner), whose life seems to revolve around this contest and who seems to fancy herself some sort of First Lady even though...you know...it's a butter carving contest that happens once a year, is initially FURIOUS about this ("Those mother f*ckers don't know who they're dealing with!). She grows even more furious when she catches Bob having sex with a stripper (Olivia Wilde) in their van. She decides to enter the contest herself. Her competition at the county level consists of Carol Ann (Laura Schaal), a butter carving contest "groupie" (is there such a thing?) who carves a laughably bad sculpture of kittens in a basket (in her speech explaining her sculpture, she says something along the lines of, "I really love kittens when they're all tangled up in a blanket, but I didn't know how to carve that, so I just put them in a basket instead"); the stripper, Brooke, who basically enters just to mess with Laura; and Destiny (Yara Shahidi), a ten-year-old foster child who has recently been taken in by Jill (Alicia Silverstone) and Ethan (Rob Corddry), a couple with a fridge full of soy products who think that butter carving competitions are "kind of redneck-y." There is a subplot where Brooke hooks up with Bob's daughter (Ashley Greene) to try to get the $600 (she later raises the price) she says Bob owes her for sex. There is another subplot where Laura has sex with her high school boyfriend, Boyd Bolton (Hugh Jackman), so that she can get him to help her get a rematch after she loses the initial competition to Destiny. It all comes to a head at the Iowa State Fair contest.
So...I've read some stuff that said this was supposed to be a political satire, and as Laura, Jennifer Garner dresses and speaks in a sort of Sarah Palin-esque way. But no one besides her seems to be taking the butter carving contest overly seriously, and she's definitely the only one getting cutthroat and playing dirty about it, so she just comes across as kind of insane, and since her main competition is a ten-year-old girl, it's just kind of like, "Why is she being so mean to that little kid?" I also read some reviews that suggested that the movie was going for a Christopher Guest Best in Show type thing, but in that movie, the dog show was such a huge part of it; here, the butter carving stuff seems almost arbitrary-- it seems like it's more about how insane competition in general can make some people, but again, Laura is the only one who seems particularly insane about it. So it's kind of like, "Here's a movie about some crazy lady who's really into this butter carving competition for some reason, and also there's this crazy stripper running around, and also, hey, there's Hugh Jackman as a dumb local car dealer."
That's not to say that this isn't all sometimes kind of fun and funny. For one thing...this movie is rated R basically just for language, and some of the stuff that comes out of Jennifer Garner's mouth made me laugh just in a "Oh my god, I don't think I've ever heard Jennifer Garner swear before" kind of way (I looked her up on IMDB, and no, it's likely that I haven't. Besides Alias, she's been in Juno, a few short-lived TV series from the '90s, and some romantic comedies. A handful of other stuff, too, but nothing that I would imagine would involve a lot of swearing.). I've also read some stuff about how Olivia Wilde pretty much steals every scene she's in, and that's pretty true; there is one scene where she's riding her bike-- which appears to be a child's dirt bike-- across a football field where a marching band is practicing, and she could easily just ride around the marching band. Instead, she rides right through them shouting, "Out of my way, bitches!" Why? I don't know, but I laughed. Also...what is Hugh Jackman doing in this movie? He's seriously in like four scenes, one of which involves staring at Jennifer Garner's boobs and another in which he prays to God to thank him for bringing her to him. This prayer quickly grows dirty enough that I had another moment of shocked oh-my-god type laughter.
So, bottom line: it was kind of a hot mess of a movie, but it had its moments. It didn't make a lot of sense, but it was pretty funny.
I'm not entirely sure I completely got this movie, or that it really accomplished what it was trying to do. It seems like it might have been trying to be a few different things, didn't go for any of them quite enough, and thus didn't really succeed at any of them. However, there were enough funny one-liners and enough genuinely bizarre moments that a day after watching it, I find myself chuckling about parts of it in a "What the f*ck was that?" kind of way.
Ty Burrell plays Bob Pickler, who has won the Iowa State Fair butter carving contest fifteen years in a row. He is asked to step down and give someone else a chance to win, and perhaps be a judge. His wife, Laura (Jennifer Garner), whose life seems to revolve around this contest and who seems to fancy herself some sort of First Lady even though...you know...it's a butter carving contest that happens once a year, is initially FURIOUS about this ("Those mother f*ckers don't know who they're dealing with!). She grows even more furious when she catches Bob having sex with a stripper (Olivia Wilde) in their van. She decides to enter the contest herself. Her competition at the county level consists of Carol Ann (Laura Schaal), a butter carving contest "groupie" (is there such a thing?) who carves a laughably bad sculpture of kittens in a basket (in her speech explaining her sculpture, she says something along the lines of, "I really love kittens when they're all tangled up in a blanket, but I didn't know how to carve that, so I just put them in a basket instead"); the stripper, Brooke, who basically enters just to mess with Laura; and Destiny (Yara Shahidi), a ten-year-old foster child who has recently been taken in by Jill (Alicia Silverstone) and Ethan (Rob Corddry), a couple with a fridge full of soy products who think that butter carving competitions are "kind of redneck-y." There is a subplot where Brooke hooks up with Bob's daughter (Ashley Greene) to try to get the $600 (she later raises the price) she says Bob owes her for sex. There is another subplot where Laura has sex with her high school boyfriend, Boyd Bolton (Hugh Jackman), so that she can get him to help her get a rematch after she loses the initial competition to Destiny. It all comes to a head at the Iowa State Fair contest.
So...I've read some stuff that said this was supposed to be a political satire, and as Laura, Jennifer Garner dresses and speaks in a sort of Sarah Palin-esque way. But no one besides her seems to be taking the butter carving contest overly seriously, and she's definitely the only one getting cutthroat and playing dirty about it, so she just comes across as kind of insane, and since her main competition is a ten-year-old girl, it's just kind of like, "Why is she being so mean to that little kid?" I also read some reviews that suggested that the movie was going for a Christopher Guest Best in Show type thing, but in that movie, the dog show was such a huge part of it; here, the butter carving stuff seems almost arbitrary-- it seems like it's more about how insane competition in general can make some people, but again, Laura is the only one who seems particularly insane about it. So it's kind of like, "Here's a movie about some crazy lady who's really into this butter carving competition for some reason, and also there's this crazy stripper running around, and also, hey, there's Hugh Jackman as a dumb local car dealer."
That's not to say that this isn't all sometimes kind of fun and funny. For one thing...this movie is rated R basically just for language, and some of the stuff that comes out of Jennifer Garner's mouth made me laugh just in a "Oh my god, I don't think I've ever heard Jennifer Garner swear before" kind of way (I looked her up on IMDB, and no, it's likely that I haven't. Besides Alias, she's been in Juno, a few short-lived TV series from the '90s, and some romantic comedies. A handful of other stuff, too, but nothing that I would imagine would involve a lot of swearing.). I've also read some stuff about how Olivia Wilde pretty much steals every scene she's in, and that's pretty true; there is one scene where she's riding her bike-- which appears to be a child's dirt bike-- across a football field where a marching band is practicing, and she could easily just ride around the marching band. Instead, she rides right through them shouting, "Out of my way, bitches!" Why? I don't know, but I laughed. Also...what is Hugh Jackman doing in this movie? He's seriously in like four scenes, one of which involves staring at Jennifer Garner's boobs and another in which he prays to God to thank him for bringing her to him. This prayer quickly grows dirty enough that I had another moment of shocked oh-my-god type laughter.
So, bottom line: it was kind of a hot mess of a movie, but it had its moments. It didn't make a lot of sense, but it was pretty funny.
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