Movie reviews

[angelophile]

Post-deadline and that's usually my cue to get the hell away from my computer for a couple of days, spend time with real human beings and just chill out in general. Watched a couple of movies I've had in the stack for some time over the weekend, so i figured I'd share my thoughts.

Firstly, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is a bit of a strange beast. It clearly wants to be bitingly satirical. It also clearly wants to be a romantic comedy. What it does is fall clumsily between both stools. The romance is too abrupt and contrived, the satire limp and toothless. In fact, for what could have been a biting commentary on celebrity and a sort of testosterone fuelled Devil Wears Prada, it pretty much fails to ever hit a satirical note, instead relying on pratfalls and physical comedy for its humour.

Based on Toby Young's memoir of his inglorious time at Vanity Fair magazine, where he infamously managed to upset the rich and famous, including hiring a stripper on Bring Your Daughters To Work Day. In the movie, the names have been changed to protect the innocent and a few of the incidents from the book are kept, but tagged onto a light romantic comedy of errors where Simon Pegg plays the British journalist who makes it into the "first room" of celebrity journalism, then proceeds to scupper his career with bad judgment and outrageous gaffes. The character starts the movie as a charmless jerk and it's only later we discover he's not entirely hapless, but Pegg's performance is, as always, packed full of charm. And, frankly, the main thing that keeps the movie afloat.

Apart from him it's all limp, although not entirely without merit. Miriam Margoyles is always entertaining and the quiet moments with Bill Patterson as Pegg's father are nicely handled. There's a few subtle jokes, but all too often it's the dead dogs and comic slapstick that gets pushed to centre stage and it's hard to understand why magazine boss Jeff Bridges (underused) would hire such a dick head in the first place, even when the reasons are explained. The trouble I found is simply that it just tries to be a humorous romantic comedy with a tiny touch of bite instead of having any real teeth. For what it tries to be it, like Pegg's other US movie Run, Fatboy, Run it's entertaining enough. It's just disappointing when the set up and cast leads you to expect a little more.

Likewise, Be Kind Rewind fails to live up to expectations. The basic story, based on real life events, of some video store workers who start making their own versions of movies after the tapes get accidentally erased, has enough comic potential. It's just unfortunate that, a few moderately funny spoofs of existing movies aside, the movie tries so hard to be charming it just comes across as sickly sweet and too farcical where it should be plainly funny. The script deploys whimsy like a blunt instrument, something that's at odds with Jack Black's performance where, presumably he's supposed to be like Pegg, a jerk, but a likable one. In actual fact, Black simply comes across as a jerk, like his character in High Fidelity, but perhaps even more charmless. A sulky man-child in the company of an equally dense, but less offensive, man child in the shape of Mos Def. Two characters who make the cast of Dumb and Dumber seem like intellectuals. The stupidity is no doubt meant to be charming but comes across rather as grating,

We're meant to pull for the characters as their own brand videos start to take off and become lauded in their community and further, creating a real community spirit as everyone pitches in to sav... oh, stop. And more sweetness like that and my teeth will rot. As it is, I found the characters too irritating to pull for and found the popularity of their idea inexplicable - the idea of people queuing around the block to get the tapes, the whole community gathering to help them save the store for aging Danny Glover would probably have been rejected from It's A Wonderful Life for being too schmaltzy. I mean it's funny to start with. When they're doing Ghostbusters or Rush Hour 2, it's moderately amusing. But then they go on and on and on and gets tiresome as it reaches the climax, where they're involved in a big production, and I didn't believe any of it. I didn't believe anyone would want to watch their movies. I didn't believe street thugs would suddenly turn straight to help them out. I didn't believe anyone would find them charismatc enough to give a damn about. And that's the trouble.

A lot of people seem to find the movie charming, though. I'm a cynical bastard, though, so for me it was simply grating.