Couples Retreat

Couples Retreat (2009)

Writer: Jon Favreau, Vince Vaughn, Dana Fox (to get that womanly perspective?)
Director: Peter Bilingsley
Starring: Jason Bateman, Kristen Bell, Vince Vaughn, Malin Ackerman, Jon Favreau, Kristin Davis, Faizon Love, Kali Hawk

Synopsis
three couple friends are convinced by a fourth struggling couple friends to go to a couples counseling retreat for vacation. hilarity ensues. message: sometimes marriage is work. hahahahahaahahahahahahaha!

The Woman
this wasn't as bad as i thought it would be. that, of course is not saying it was good by any means. this was like the "lost" of vince vaughn movies. there were all these issues brought up, and all these characters that were introduced that never went anywhere. on further examination, i think all the male characters were douchey, except maybe, holy crap, vince vaughn. his douchey exterior was just a facade, blocking his beautifully sensitive, loving side. kristin bell should have never gotten back together with jason bateman because he was a super anal controlling douche who crushed her will. there was also the whole beginning is, by comparison, waaaaay funnier than the ending. everything was wrapped up nice and tidy and happy and cheerful. yeah! everything worked out! eh. vince vaughn movie. if you think he's funny (which i might find suspect) than you could possibly like this movie. i will say i would chose vince vaughn over douchey mcdouchstein a.k.a. ....shit, whats' his name...hold one moment please... dane cook! now that guy. man, is he a hack, i mean, funny. sorry to go off on that tangent. anyway, i don't know why i put this on the queue. for realsies, but i take full responsibility and that is the first step isn't it?

Changeling

Changeling (2008)


Writer: J. Michael Straczynski
Director: Clint Eastwood
Starring: Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Jeffery Donovan

Synopsis
LA in '28. a woman's kid goes missing and the corrupt and greedy police give her the runaround and try to convince her the kid they "return" to her is hers. incorrect!

MOster
Ya know, I had some trepidation going into this one; but it turned out to be pretty alright.  I never saw Girl Interrupted, and I was wracking my brain to remember another "drama" in which Angelina played.  The closest we could come up with was Hackers, which doesn't really count.  But, whatever, really.

Supposedly based on a true story, I find it difficult to believe that in real life every end was tied quite so neatly; and having eleven endings to do so did a disservice to what was a pretty well-paced first 110 minutes.  While I have no difficulty in believing that the police were exactly as corrupt as they were shown to be there should have been some more weight behind the people working to "help" her.  Both the Malkovich character and the lawyer were obviously in it for their own political / PR gain.

That aside, empathy is easy to find here; and there's plenty of responsibility to share for that accomplishment.  A lot of it comes from my own feelings of paranoia and pig-distrust, but there were no missteps in the technical side of the production or the acting.  We weren't quite getting 100% from Malkovich--we still got more than enough--and while we did get 100% from Joile her 100 equaled whatever we were getting from him.

Again, whatever.  The "facts" behind movie will probably frustrate you, but it's still worth watching.

The Woman
this wasn't bad for a jolie flick. i have problems with her. she annoys me. but i guess eastwood cancelled her annoyingness out. it started to drag three quarters of the way through and i think it was taken a little too far down her life. there were approximately three different parts where it could have ended and i would have been satisfied. her end speech was a little too schmaltzy for me too. it was at that point that i began to mock it. but i think all together it was a solid three out of five, which lately, with us, has been no small feat. i'm glad we watched it. i can always appreciate a lady who stands up for herself, especially against the man.

Killshot

Killshot (2008)


Writer:  Hossein Ameini, Elmore Leonard (book)
Director: John Madden
Starring: Micky Rourke, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Thomas Jane, Diane Lane


Synopsis
Hitman sees some of his idiot brother in small time crook.  They botch a robbery and try to kill all the witnesses. Two of the witnesses are an aspiring carpenter and his soon-to-be-ex fife.


The Woman
this was absolutely bleh. it went on forever and nothing happened, and i didn't care about anybody. they all should have been killed in the end, but unfortunately they weren't. don't watch this movie.


MOster
It's really interesting to me how Elmore Leonard books are adapted in so wide a range of manners.  To think that Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, LA Confidential, and Out of Sight all came from the same style of writing is actually pretty neat.  And one of these days I'll sit down with one of those books in an attempt to deepen my opinion.

But this one was just crappy, and given the thickness of the other movies cited I have little choice but to blame the filmmakers.  I actually thought Rourke did a pretty good job; and I could hear a bit of Aboriginal North American Flophead in his dialect.  Diane Lane is Diane Lane, and she probably had some sort of final payment on something coming up.  But nothing else was really worth it.  Mr. G-L has come a long way since Third Rock and he fucking made Brick.  But here he was waaaaay too over the top and his character was utterly unredeemable.

Leila's right that this thing went on forever, and that's almost an accomplishment given its less than 90 minute runtime.  But there was no point to this.  There were no hooks, no teeth, no interest.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)


Writer: Roald Dahl (um BOOK), Wes Anderson, and Noah Baumbach (screenplay)
Director: Wes Anderson
Starring: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman

Synopsis
a crafty fox has a hard time living down his promise of a safe life free of stealing that he made to his wife. after many fox years of a boring life he decides to steal from the three farms in the neighborhood owned by the meanest farmers anybody has ever heard of ever.

MOster
This was a not-so-much for me.  I am a great admirer of Wes Anderson, and it often takes two or three viewings for the entire message to sink in; but this one really felt like Wes-light.  It was very interesting technically, and the odd way in which the story was presented was done consistently and immersively.  But there were no teeth to the story.

I can't speak to the adaptation because I don't know the source material, but this thing felt SO MUCH like a Wes Anderson movie that it seems to me there wasn't a lot of faith to go around.  His characters are practically archetypes: The Royal/Zissou guy; the Etheline/Elanor lady; the not-exactly-Chas guy;... But again, there wasn't as much depth.  It took me a couple of times to see the beauty in that big final shot in Life Aquatic but much like that tiger fish I knew it was there and I kept diving for it.  I just feel no desire to put that time into this one.

I will look forward to his next one, however.
The Woman
i loved this movie. i love all wes anderson movies. i think this was just exactly his genre. his movies are always presented in a storybook form soooooo....ummm. there you go. although i think ash was just a manifestation of max fischer i didn't care because i love myself some max fischer and if he is prolonged in the character of an adolescent fox so be it. i have never read the book, but it seems to be fairly obvious that anderson made it much more his style when adapting it for the screen because it just oozed him. i think we may have a fight over rating this. why don't we own life aquatic?

The Man Who Fell to Earth

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
Written by Paul Mayersberg, Walter Tevis (book)
Directed by Nicolas Roeg
Starring David Bowie, Candy Clark, Buck Henry, Rip Torn

Synopsis
Alien creature falls to earth somehow.  Employing a lawyer as a mouthpiece he uses his alien knowledge to build something of a corporate empire.  He meets and marries (?) a woman and builds a company town in the middle of nowhere.  The government becomes wary of the success of the company and then some shit hits one fan or another.

Major Woman
this made me realize how sick of movies that end in long sequences that make no sense. this whole movie was difficult to follow and maybe by the end i was just tired from thinking. it was incredibly long. i was beginning to think it would never end. that said it wasn't a horrible movie. it was very deliberate. so i guess that's something. it was restored beautifully by criterion. at least i'm pretty sure it was. it looked like it was filmed last year instead of 1976. david bowie is fantastic. you get to see his penis.

Ground ConMOster
This film tells a pretty typical alien-on-Earth tale in a way which is slightly to greatly atypical for any point in cinematic history which I've experienced so far.  The story itself begins simply and it expands organically until everything and everybody unhinghes to a greater or lesser degree.

The movie is far less an obvious product of the 70s than The Lathe of Heaven, but it's fairly easy to tell from a point 30 years in the future.  That said, a top-notch restoration presents a very smooth, consistent production in which regardless of setting everything appears to be of a piece, and not in a Transformers way.  Direction here was beautiful all around, from performance-instruction to some excellent, unassuming shots.  One of the easy telltales that this is not an American film is that nobody seems to care if the audio and video are perfectly synchronized.  Another easy way to tell is that there are boobies when there should be boobies.

There are few missteps in the other departments, either.  Characters are fully-realized, even if you never quite know what Bowie's deal is.  They do many inscrutable things but we never believe that they do them for simple reasons of moving the plot along.  This is evident because there is some ambiguity built in to the long end a slow second act and while some of my conclusions have less confidence than I would like I don't think that this is nearly as big a problem as my woman does.  There are plenty of "how" questions which aren't answered; but it's the "why" questions which are important, and those are never misunderstood.  This movie made me think, but more importantly it made me want to think.

Finally, I--especially I--would be remiss in telling you that your anticipation of viewing Mr. Bowie's penis will not go unrequited.

Push

Push (2009)


Writer: David Bourla
Director: Paul McGuigan
Starring: Dakota Fanning, Chris Evans

Synopsis
people have super powers and stuff. the government wants them i think. i think the government wants to experiment on them to make their powers stronger. it's kind of like a cold war thing, but with super powered people. there is a lot of attention paid to this drug thing that no one has survived but this one chick. yeah.

MOster
Is this the movie that I said had atypically clear action sequence direction?  I'm not sure.  I think so.

There is no reason to watch this.  It wasn't particularly anything, bad or otherwise; but it's been done better before.
The Woman
this movie was incredibly forgettable. we watched it 4 days ago and i'm having trouble remembering it. i compared it to "double dragon" the movie. it was badly planned out, and it was very convoluted (this may be because of my waning attention to it) it was also longer than it should have been. i have nothing else to say on this subject.

The White Ribbon

The White Ribbon (2009)

Writer: Michael Haneke
Director: Michael Haneke
Starring: Christian Friedel, and a bunch of other german actors.

Synopsis
this is about a german town in 1913ish. it's mostly about the families of the baron, a doctor, the midwife, one of the baron's farmers, the pastor, and the schoolteacher. there is a lot of focus on the 900 children who are really creepy too.

The Woman
i gave this movie two stars only because my sum total experience was "didn't like it" this is mostly because i do not know german turn of the century history because being an american in the american historical education system foreign history is deemed unimportant. especially a more contemporary history. WWII pretty much encases and over shadows anything else in european history. anyway, back to the movie. this movie was very intelligent. it was filmed beautifully. the plot was linear an made sense (which has been hard to come by in recent movies). there was just all this stuff i could tell i was missing because i'm not german. the children were consistently put down and abused, but they kept rebelling and doing terrible things. i guess this is where fascism started it's rise, so says the description on netflix, but i didn't get 80% of it. i still don't.  hence i missed the point of the movie. it was like i could actually see the stuff sailing over my head. i could run my fingers through it, but couldn't grab it. it did make me want to read about it, which is a good thing. i just wish i knew things while i was watching it.