movies – mccormicky

Dan in Real Life

I was asked to create an advice column type of website recently so in the interest of research I rented Dan in Real Life without knowing much more about the plot than that the Dad (Steve Carell) is an advice columnist.Personally I feel that Steve Carell’s best role ever was in Anchorman.I’d prefer it if he stuck to roles that have him bellowing non sequiturs like “I love lamp”. He is an artist of the absurd and he should embrace this about himself. It worked for Bill Murray and now look at him. I got equally queasy when Jim Carrey went the dramatic route and I still refuse to like him when he is being serious.We have enough serious actors.

My biggest problem with ye old plot was that it was stupid.The writers must have assumed that we would not mind a father of 3 acting like a 12 year old.They probably think that our level of maturity hovers around the 12 year old mark,too.

Total Spoiler
Dan, while home for the holidays, meets a woman in a bookstore, ends up talking to her for hours and then goes back to the family home to find out this woman is his brother’s(Dane Cook,troublesome casting choice) new girlfriend and he is crazy about her.The woman, “Marie”(Juliette Binoche,love love) has fallen for Dan but she is in this new relationship with his brother and is determined to be realistic or at the very least,polite. Dan can’t stand her grown up choice and acts like a complete twit about it. It’s like Geez, you knew her for 3 hours,dude,relax.
Following the formula of boy meets girl, girl is boy’s brother’s girlfriend, boy loses girl, boy gets girl in the end,thank you Hollywood.

Avoid this movie

Trouble Every Day

The plot is the kind of maddening, meandering crap that makes you want to kick something.
Vincent Gallo,the lead, does a lot of staring in this movie.Everyone in this movie does a lot of staring.I suppose director Claire Denis thought that providing coherent dialogue to go along with all the staring would have been “too obvious” or something.
Vincent plays a honeymooning in Paris American doctor who suffers from the same affliction as his old girlfriend, a woman married to another doctor,a former colleague of Vincent’s who is trying to cure the affliction:the need to eat people and have sex with them at the same time.
The female cannibal enjoys going roaming and eating people but Vincent doesn’t.He takes pills and avoids his wife in bed and starts mooning after the French hotel maid instead.His wife copes by sleeping a lot.

The blurb on the DVD cover promised that Vincent and his former girlfriend were going to go on a bloody rampage together.But they got it wrong.The woman goes on a bloody rampage on her own but old Vincent shows up after it’s over.She lights a fire in her house,Vincent drops by for a chat and she tries to bite him but he shoves her down and she catches on fire,presumably expiring.He leaves and the dead woman’s husband walks in to the burning house.The fact that Vincent never gets to talk to this guy totally deflates the urgency built up around their meeting.The fact that Vincent seems to spend days trying to find this couple yet has about 2 minutes screen time with her is just irritating.It was the one solid plot device handed to us and it goes nowhere.Ok,she was so far gone that she wanted to screw and eat Vincent.But why could he not have had a talk with her husband?
Movies that end abruptly like this, having settled nothing plot wise,are annoying.I know they’re supposed to be artsy but it looks more like they ran out of money and had to stop filming.

I was going to use a still from the movie but I found this picture. It’s a beauty.

DVD Frenzy

I’ve been in love with Coen brothers movies ever since I saw Blood Simple way way back when.
I can watch Barton Fink,The Big Lebowski and Miller’s Crossing over and over again. I love them when they are humourous because they employ intelligent humor(not that falling down BS that makes up what passes for humor in mainstream movies these days.Ahem:Good Luck Chuck,Daddy Day Care?) But I adore them when they are dramatic,slow,violent and Southern.Texas plays a part in Blood Simple almost as important as the characters and plot and again In No Country For Old Men we are treated to the bleak greatness of a wide open Texas landscape.
No Country For Old Men began almost exactly the same way as Blood Simple but instead of
M. Emmet Walsh narrating we hear the voice of Tommy Lee Jones.
When I watched this movie I was struck by how long it has been since I was utterly transfixed by the goings on on the screen.
I was prepared to see a good movie, The Coen brothers usually deliver at least that. But this was something else. The lowest points were Llewellen’s mother in law because that character actress is just too memorable from Speed as the selfish lady who tries to get off the bus and ends up as roadkill. i like Woody Harrelson. I don’t know what was off about his performance but it wasn’t doing it for me.Though both had such minor parts that it did little to reduce my enjoyment.
My boyfriend and I are very sad cases as we can’t get to the theater to watch a movie before it comes out on DVD.
Is it just me or are movies getting into the rental store a lot faster?
Anyways you have to see this film. I’m talking to the one or two other folks in this world who haven’t seen it since it won the Oscar,ha.