Film

If there's one thing I hate about the current state of film criticism, it's that so many critics (mostly online) view movies through a cracked lens of jaded cynicism and detached boredom that it makes me wonder whether they even enjoy the world of film to begin with. Specifically, there's a word that drives me insane and since it's birth it has become the nadir of intelligent discourse and critical thinking. A word that says to the world that you're too indifferent to actually put words together to form sentences and create an intelligent critique of something you observed.
What could this word be you probably aren't asking? The word is “meh” and it hates us all. Urban Dictionary defines “meh” as “when one simply does not care,” and I fail to understand how any art (whether it's van Gogh or Vin Diesel) cannot extract something more from us than the absence of opinion. The word wants us to become detached from thinking deeply about topics like art, politics and religion. It soothes us into a state of apathetic snobbery we may never escape from. But if you were to ask me what I thought about 30 Minutes or Less, all I can think to say is meh.

Dear Movie Gods,
Now that's how it's done. All I had to do was complain in four straight reviews about the death of the Hollywood blockbuster and you, the movie gods, answered my prayers. With the excellent Rise of the Planet of the Apes, I'm sure I must owe you a blood sacrifice or at least a back rub at some point.
You know my biggest complaint about this summer at the movies has been the uniformly strong first acts (Transformers notwithstanding) and a fizzle when it comes to the final third of the films. In the cases of Cowboys and Aliens, Captain America and Green Lantern, they all have this really fascinating origin story, only to let us down when it comes to the final battle and the denouement (fancy nerd talk for conclusion, but you knew that). They all seem to just be doing their best to set up a franchise instead of telling a complete story and that's where Apes succeeds grandly: it has a beginning, middle and an actual end that it earns instead of just stopping until they can start shooting the next one.

Yawwwnnnnnn! That was the sounds of the extremely tired body-switching plot convention that has come to us yet again, this time in The Change-Up. You would think after Freaky Friday, Big, 17 Again, 13 Going on 30 and The Hot Chick (OK, I'll stop) that Hollywood would realize that we've finally seen it all in this exhausted genre. I guess this time their excuse for adding another title to the bunch comes from the two body-switching characters being adult males, rather than an adult and a child.
You know the routine: Mitch (Reynolds) makes his “living” as an out-of-work actor who sits around and smokes weed all day. Dave (Jason Bateman) shines as the overachieving husband/father/grossly-talented lawyer. One night, while drunkenly peeing into a fountain together, the two simultaneously proclaim, “I wish I had your life!” Then thunder strikes, the city goes dark and, presto-chango, those two fools have switched bodies.

We, women, are the perfect combination of sexy and cute. Or at least that's what some of us want to hear. Of course, this is also the line that Steve Carell's character, Cal, uses to describe his wife, and then later to pick-up a one-night-stand in Crazy, Stupid, Love. This also might be the ideal description of this film: A cute tale about fighting for the one you love done with a dash of sexy. In this case, Ryan Gosling provides the sexy.
Cal, a loving husband and father, is blatantly told by his wife (Julianne Moore) that she wants a divorce. He then becomes depressed and finds himself at a single's bar where he meets Jacob (Gosling), a much more suave and attractive younger man who effortlessly takes women home. We then witness a makeover, a few painful attempts at picking up women and then back to where we began with Cal still in love with his wife. Intermixed is a love triangle between Cal's 14-year-old son, his son's 17-year-old babysitter and, what do you know, Cal himself. Oh yeah, and then there's Hannah (Emma Stone) who at the beginning of the film turns Jacob down in a bar to rush back to her boyfriend (Josh Groban). And like any other romantic comedy, we are thrown a unique surprise at the end that I actually didn't see coming. Snaps to the writers.

I like a lot of really bad movies. Movies that are so bad they actually force me to examine my life choices and rationale behind why I think a movie called Mega Python vs Gatoroid is going to be worth my time (answer: it has Debbie Gibson and Tiffany in it.). It's easy to watch bad movies because it's fun to tear into them with friends afterward and dissect them like the hidden meaning of Pink Floyd lyrics (answer: drugs). What's much more difficult to discuss are movies that are just… good. Middle of the road, perfectly satisfactory movies that don't stick out, one way or the other. Cowboys & Aliens fits this model perfectly. It made me smile and has several exhilarating action sequences that wrap you up in the spirit of the picture, but it feels like it could have been so much more and I know it will be completely forgotten in outside of a week.

After watching Friends With Benefits I walked down the street and rented No Strings Attached. I needed a refresher on what exactly happens in that movie. If you've seen the trailers for both, or as you can easily deduce from their titles that these are basically the same movie – just released six months apart. Upon second viewing, No Strings Attached doesn't live up to my slightly over-hyped review, and solidifies my initial judgment that Friends with Benefits wins the contest for 2011's best friends-who-think-they'll-stay-friends-after-sleeping-together movie.
In what are essentially the same movie, both films center around the idea of two super-hot singles having casual sex, while trying to stay just friends. Ha, good one. Each films feature a ballerina from Black Swan, and in Friends with Benefits head-hunter Jamie (Mila Kunis) recruits Dylan (Justin Timberlake) for an art director position at GQ and when he moves to New York for the job the two become BFF.

I don't think I'm ready for this yet. Superheroes have been such an integral part of my life for so long that I don't even know who I'd be without my love for Captain America, The Punisher, X-Men, both Green's (Arrow and Lantern, screw Hornet), Batman, Spidey and The Avengers. I know these people better than I know my friends and family. Now that I've seen Captain America right on the heels of Thor and Green Lantern, I'm afraid I might be growing out of superhero movies or, more accurately, I'm growing out of the formula that they all have in common, which I call the Batman Begins syndrome.

I am a bad luck theatergoer. No matter the movie, the time of day or day of the week, I will always sit within one row of the drunkest, most obnoxious human being in the entire auditorium. If you see a person answer their phone at the climax and say “Hey what's up man? Oh nothing, just watching a movie,” look directly behind them and there I'll be, fists clenched, wondering if I could get away with punching them in the back of the head and running like a bearded cheetah.

At one point in Beginners, Ewan McGregor's character, Oliver, says “Jack Russells are bred to be cute.” The film's implicit statement about human beings is much darker in contrast – humans are bred to be sad… and depressed, we learn.
Oliver meets Anna (Mélanie Laurent) after the death of his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer), who after 44 years of marriage came out of the closet at age 75 to live a full and energized gay life. The flashbacks of Hal's newfound honesty turn out to be funny and moving, bringing father and son closer than they'd ever expected. Oliver attempts to love Anna with the same courage and humor, hoping that his father taught him how, but is at a loss.

It must be nice to be Adam Sandler's pal. The funny man is known to keep it all in the family, sticking his buddies in movies that aren't original or risky, yet rake in cash. Kevin James is part of Sandler's crew and Zookeeper is basically Night at the Museum set in a zoo. It's a Dating Game version of Noah's Ark, with James taking cues from the wild kingdom and peeing and grunting in public.