The 21st Best Move I Saw This Year: Crazy, Stupid, Love.

I have problems when I watch “The Office” sometimes. Not because of the dull, plodding mess that it’s become (though that hasn’t helped), but because of its love affair with awkwardness. I cringe whenever someone launches into a scene where they make fool of themselves. Sometimes I’m forced to cover my face, or take a lap around my room. I empathize with the characters so powerfully that I physically can’t take it. Oftentimes, if the remote’s in reach (I try and chuck it across the room so I can’t do this), I’ll pause a scene several times, working through it in little bits and pieces. I can’t help myself.

This condition is known as vicarious embarrassment, and man, do I have it. It’s better when I watch these shows in a room with other people, and the embarrassment is abated by having people there with me.  But it’s always there.

I had a little bit of trouble getting through Crazy, Stupid, Love. It’s not the characters are placed in scenes that are overwhelmingly embarrassing – it’s more that the scenes are unnecessarily embarrassing. People keep announcing personal things in front of large groups for no reason. Every display of affection is a public one. The title of this movie is supposed to indicate that love is lived out loud, but after watching this movie, I’m less and less convinced about that. Everyone seems like their life would be better if they had a quiet talk about how they felt over a cup of coffee somewhere. But they don’t, not when there’s loud displays of affection to be announced in the midst of middle school graduation ceremonies! The plot of this movie hangs on the belief that enough shouting and passionate makeouts with strangers can awaken love. That is a fragile frame upon which to hang a film.

But weirdly, the movie works. And the reason it works is because the actors in it are absolutely, totally sold out to their characters. You believe every word they say, no matter what it is. I’m a fan of all the actors in this picture, but there’s no question that directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa managed to get their very best performances out of them. They also managed to work in a fairly shocking reveal at the end without ever tipping their hand earlier in the film, showing real storytelling deftness.

After seven years as Michael Scott, Steve Carrell is perhaps now unparalleled among modern movie stars as the master of awkward comedy. But this movie shows why he doesn’t have to be. I’ll watch him in almost anything.

Also, I’m trying to avoid awkward comedies these days. I’m gonna break the remote one of these days if I keep chucking it across the room.

The 22nd Best Movie I Saw This Year: Source Code

There’s no way to talk about this movie without talking about the massive, gigantic, maelstrom of a plot hole at the center of this movie. So if you’re the sort of person for whom spoilers matter, get out now. This review is going to be nothing but spoilers. 

This is a science fiction movie built around a central conceit, that after a massive train explosion outside of Chicago, they have the technology to send someone back into the memory of one of the passengers for the eight minutes before the explosion. It’s not time travel, it’s simply reliving the past. So they send the consciousness of a severely wounded soldier kept alive by breathing machines (Jake Gyllenhaal) into the man’s memory to try to figure out who the bomber is, in order to catch him before he can blow anything else up.

It’s clear from the get go the creators of the technology have no real concept of what they’ve tapped into. When Gyllenhaal is sent into the passenger’s memory, he also inhabits the man’s body.  He doesn’t just relive the person’s life, he’s able to control it – to walk up and down the train, speak to people, investigate rooms the man had never visted before.

So clearly Gyllenhaal isn’t simply living in the man’s memory, he’s somehow ended up in an alternate universe: one where the explosion can still be prevented. The movie does not acknowledge this viewpoint through most of the movie, but logically, there’s no other explanation.

Now, up until this point, I haven’t given you too many spoilers, but this is where things are about to go off the rails (ha!) of standard movie reviewing. Let’s talk about the ending. Get out now if you want to watch the movie someday.

All right, everybody ready to move on? Are you sure? Let’s go.

At the end of the movie, after numerous failures, Jake Gyllenhaal finally figures out who the bomber was (shocking, I know), but he isn’t able to stop the train from exploding. He’s certain that with another trip, he can succeed at stopping the bombing. The operators of the Source Code are reluctant to send him back in again – they already have the information they need, so what’s the purpose of the sending him back? He can’t change the past. Gyllenhaal, understanding that the trips he’s being sent on are not to the past, begs until one of the engineers (Vera Farmiga) finally obliges.

Once back on the train, Gyllenhaal defuses the bomb and captures the bomber. Eight minutes pass and…. nothing happens. The train arrives in Chicago. The passengers exit, and Gyllenhaal continues on, living in the man’s body in this alternate timeline.

…wait. So, what happens to the guy whose body it was beforehand? I don’t know. He disappears. Every other passenger on the train survives and continues on with their lives, and this poor guy is up in Heaven, trying to explain things. “Yeah, Jake Gyllenhaal is living in my body now, hitting on my girlfriend. Don’t really know what happened.”

Not to mention, there’s already a version of Jake Gyllenhaal in this timeline. So Gyllenhall writes a note to Farmiga, thanking her for sending him back into the Source Code (in another timeline that she isn’t aware of). He tells her that the efforts of her alternate timeline-self helped stopped a train explosion this morning, and asks her to mercy-kill the version of Gyllenhaal living there in that timeline as a favor. This seems mean of him, because he’s ruining any chance of this-timeline’s-Gyllenhaal getting to get put into the body of some other poor sap and resurrected in a different timeline, but it is his own life (sort of), so I guess I’ll allow it.

She obliges, which means that in this new timeline, we have a living Gyllenhaal (in someone else’s body), a dead Gyllenhaal (in his own body), plus the soul of this train passenger that’s still out there somewhere. In the original timeline, we now have no Gyllenhaals (not even Maggie!) – just a wounded body with no consciousness. Odd place to leave a movie.

Not to mention that, if the movie’s ending means that we’ve established that Gyllenhaal was tapping into a series of alternate timelines. So each time he failed to solve the puzzle, all of those people died. If he’d figured things out faster and spent less time trying to call his dad, several thousand more people would be alive. That’s a lot of times he allowed Michelle Monaghan to die. More than I can really forgive. 

End spoilers.

All that said, it was a pretty good movie (you weren’t expecting that, were you?). Gyllenhaal, Monaghan, and Farmiga are all really good in it, and the film feels the way thrillers are supposed to feel: like a puzzle slowly being put together in front of you. It’s a very well-directed picture, and I enjoyed myself a great deal. Go ahead and see it.

Just… try not to think too much. It’s only gonna bug you.

The 23rd Best Movie I Saw this year: Fast Five

God, this movie is dumb.

At least it knows that it’s dumb. Rejoices in it, really. There’s no part of this movie that is connected to reality. People drive off cliffs and land, hundreds upon hundreds of feet below, in a small river, and come up swimming and spitting water and acting like nothing had happened.

Here, I’ll embed one of the trailers. In this one, the big takeaway line is Tyrese saying “This just went from Mission Impossible, to Mission Freaking Insanity!” Why is that terrible line in the trailers? Because every line in the movie is like that. The dialogue in this movie is simply a collection of one liners, tossed into a bag and shaken, then dumped on a page:

Ridiculous, yes? The whole movie’s like that, except when it’s intercut with horrendously stilted scenes to provide depth. Here’s one where the characters talk about their relationship with their fathers:

You see that? That scene was in this movie. Right after they jump a car off a train. And you know what? I wouldn’t have it any other way. Some movies are made to be silly, to play endlessly on TNT on weekends, to be mindless drivel. This is a movie that my friends who thought Transformers 2 was awesome found ridiculous. This is a seriously silly movie. But I honestly don’t know if the stars in the movie know it. Listen to Jordana Brewster talk about her character.

Oh, man, guys, this one’s even better. Here’s Gal Godot talking about the movie’s strong female characters.

Ready? Now, here’s her big scene, showing her character’s strength.

This is the best thing since Emmanuelle Chriqui got interviewed about what it’s like to play such a strong, dynamic character on “Entourage.” I really could do this all day, but let’s move on.

The movie builds up to the big climactic heist, but first, we need to have a fight scene between The Rock and Vin Diesel, which would be a lot more exciting if it wasn’t for how incredibly obvious it is that The Rock is about a foot taller than Vin Diesel. All the quick-cuts and low camera angles in the world can’t cover up a height difference like that. You know what it’s like to try to punch someone while standing on an apple box? Vin Diesel does.

Man, I’d forgotten how much fun making fun of this movie was. They use sports cars to pull a safe! Because sports cars are perfect for towing! They’re trying to steal as much money as they can from a guy, but they burn several million dollars of it to “show him they’re serious.” Why? No one knows! It makes no sense at all, even in the shallow constructs of this movie. This is a movie where Ludacris looks like he’s too talented an actor to be involved! I can’t get enough.

This movie is too low on the list. I need to move this thing up. Tune in to TNT sometime this summer, guys, and watch this thing. You won’t regret it.

On SOPA and ignorance and needless yelling.

Late last night, I clicked over to Google and found the arresting image on the left. I’d known that Wikipedia was in the midst of an “information blackout” protesting the Stop Online Privacy Act that day, but hadn’t realized that Google was involved as well.

I clicked the link and found a short plea for support protesting SOPA, and would I please help by signing their online petition? An email address and a zip code later, I had made my voice heard and returned to the main page to continue my very important business (I was comparing the box office takes of No Strings Attached and Friends With Benefits, if you must know, so I had no time to just be messing around with petitions). Five minutes later, the whole event had completely disappeared from my mind. After all, this overview of sex-obsessed romantic comedies wasn’t going to write itself.

If your Facebook news feed is anything like mine, you saw at least a dozen links to Google’s infographic on spreading the news about protesting SOPA yesterday. I would bet I saw close to a hundred links to it over the course of the day, and on a day when I was at my computer a fair bit less than I normally am. Clearly, after a few months of disinterest among the general population (with the exception of Reddit aficionados), this relatively minor effort to create an online groundswell has worked. Or at least, worked among the under-30 crowd that – thanks to the wonder of smartphones – is now never not on Facebook. The word is out.

It was only after the day had passed and I was driving home that I really began thinking about SOPA again. I realized suddenly that I knew almost nothing of any substance about the bill. I had a vague understanding that there was a second bill in the Senate with similar goals, but if it wasn’t for our cultural obsession with the younger Middleton, I doubt I’d have remembered its name.

I would be naïve to think that I’m alone in this. In fact, if you look at the webpage that Google put up, there’s almost no information about the bills, or to sites that would have some information about them, or to the bills themselves. The infographic that they invite you to share is even less helpful: it just points out that if you tell a bunch of people about this, then they’ll tell more people and eventually we will have a groundswell. The message being that with a little work, a lot of people can have strong negative opinions about something they know very little about.

When Wikipedia went black yesterday, they were wise enough to leave the pages explaining SOPA and PIPA still active, so people could come and learn about the bills they were supposed to be protesting. Unfortunately, every other page on Wikipedia was blocked, so if I wanted to click some of the links and learn more about U.S. Copyright law, or the founders of the bill, or similar proposed bills in the past, they were out of luck (I mean, I suppose I could have tried using other websites, but who has time for that? There’s important games of Temple Run to be gotten to!).

I sat down last night and sorted through the hue and cry of my peers on Facebook. It was a depressing expedition. No matter where I looked, I found almost no data of any kind. It was all generic “Censorship is bad!” drivel, clearly dashed off by its author without the faintest need to look into what it is that they were complaining about. By the end of the night, I seemed to know less than I ever had about the issues at hand. In fact, my biggest takeaway was that people are very concerned about losing the ability to make GIFs of movies and television shows. It made me weep for my generation. And I love GIFs of movies and television shows. Here’s one now!

It’s ironic, really, that the thing that brought the issue to the attention of the masses was the blackout of Wikipedia, since the temporary loss of the ability to be casually informed was what motivated everyone to become casually informed about SOPA. If we’d lost Tumblr for a day, we’d probably all have created new SOPA memes by this morning. If we’d lost Facebook for a day, we’d have…. well, we’d probably have descended into madness and killed each other.

Oddly, the site that actually ended up linking to relevant, useful information was the most recent XKCD comic. I don’t know why a webcomic is able to outdo Google so easily, but it was.

I browsed through the liked pages and developed a better-than-cursory understanding of the two bills at hand. Took all of ten minutes.

I wonder how many issues pass by where I don’t even bother to do that. I should get involved more.

But until then, I’ll just stay here and stare at GIFs for a while.

Heh.

The 24th Best Movie I Saw This Year: Friends With Benefits

The two stars of Black Swan (Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis) both immediately followed up their strange, lesbian-tinged thriller by making movies with the exact same premise: two best friends decide to use each other for sex, with no emotion in it. Since Portman’s version, No Strings Attached, arrived in theaters first, its box office take is higher ($71 million to $55 million), confirming for the millionth time that if you have two movies with the same premise coming out, do whatever you must to make sure that your movie gets out first.

The best example of this: Capote was released about a year before the other Truman Capote movie, Infamous was. It made about $30 million at the box office and was nominated for 5 Oscars, including Best Picture. Infamous made barely a million and was immediately forgotten, despite getting similar reviews and having bigger stars. Sometimes timing is twice as important as quality.

That’s the case here, too, as the strong opening for No Strings Attached covered up its less-than-ecstatic reviews (49% on Rotten Tomatoes), while Friends With Benefits was met with surprising acclaim for a featherweight romantic comedy (its Tomatometer is a robust 71%). And as for star power, it’s not like anyone was clamoring to see Ashton Kutcher in this. Or, anything.

Friends With Benefits is exactly what you expect a standard romantic comedy to be. It’s funny that the characters in it protest that rom-coms are silly and unrealistic, because the film couldn’t be more formulaic in how it sets up its pieces. Justin Timberlake is the head of some mercurial web site who gets an interview for the art director job at GQ. Kunis is the head hunter who brings him out to New York and talks him into taking the job. Both jobs are clearly semi-ludicrous choices for these actors, and despite the characters talking constantly about how their life is their work, we rarely actually see them at their offices. They seem to have plenty of time to simply gad about the city and riff on the fickle nature of love. Both talk at a frantic pace, as if their characters are auditioning for a particularly lightweight Aaron Sorkin movie (yes, yes, Timberlake was in Social Network, I know). It features two flash mobs, for chrissakes.

Still, for all its formula, Friends With Benefits is exactly what a romantic comedy should be. It’s frothy and fun and light, and both leads are immensely likable and easy to root for. The movie zips right along to their deciding to become, y’know, “screwfriends”, and doesn’t slow down for a moment after. The supporting pieces are all played by pros doing their best work: Patricia Clarkson playing the horny mother in her second consecutive Will Gluck movie, Woody Harrelson goofing off as Timberlake’s unconventional gay friend, and especially Richard Jenkins as Timberlake’s Alzheimer’s-stricken father, providing a relatively undeserved level of emotional resonance to a silly story. My favorite, though, was Emma Stone playing against type as the bitchy ex-girlfriend, a role she absolutely proved (adorably) unsuited for.

There’s been plenty of complaints about Timberlake as an actor of the “stick to making music” category (oddly, mostly from people who don’t seem to listen to his music at all), but he’s just as good here as any of the bland Kutcher-Zac Efron-Robert Pattinson types that keep getting thrown at us in these movies. I feel he’s better suited to play a supporting type similar to his role in Social Network, but his star’s on the rise and if he wants to spout ridiculous one-liners while firing a handgun for a little while, good for him. Have fun.

Let’s just make sure we see plenty more of Mila Kunis in movies like this. She’s both gorgeous and relatable, a fairly rare combination. She should milk that all she can, because that quality is the reason why people like Meg Ryan and Reese Witherspoon are rolling in dough.

Just don’t let her play a hard-driving headhunter again. It’s just silly.