Weekend In Reviews

I don't know if anyone else does this, but sometimes I like to watch movies I know will be bad.  Some take-out food and a few bad movies on a Saturday night and I'm a happy girl. 

You Again - If you're looking for a bad movie, you can't get much worse than this.  On paper, a movie starring Kristen Bell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sigourney Weaver, Victor Garber and James Wolk sounds like a delight.  But despite having a bit of a dream cast, this movie is a whole bunch of terrible.  The story is stupid, the characters are annoying, I wasn't entertained so much as I was distracted wondering what sort of blackmail material the producers and casting people had on all those people to force them into this movie. 

The plot, such as it is, sees Marni (Kristen Bell) coming home to the small town in Northern California where she grew up, for her brother's (James Wolk)wedding.  Naturally, she's not ever met the bride who turns out to be the very mean girl (Odette Yustman now Annable) who tortured her in high school. But Mean Girl doesn't acknowledge that they've ever met before which gets Marti's hackles way up.  Complicating the situation is the arrival of Meanie's aunt Sigourney Weaver who is her only living relative.  Sigourney was the high school BFF of Marni's mom Jamie Lee Curtis until jealousy came between them.  From there it's all stupid excuses for physical "comedy" and ruined weddings.  Despite all of that, I probably would stop and watch it if it were on cable on a future Saturday.  

Life As We Know It - I think we all remember the ads for this one with Josh Duhamel walking behind a toddler in his boxer briefs drinking a beer?  Or the trailer that focused fairly heavily on Katherine Hiegl's face full of poop?  Both of those things are in the movie, neither are funny and both could have been removed.  In fact, both are a perfect example of what is wrong with the movie in general, which is that it shouldn't be a comedy at all. 

It is a bad movie but it had pretty good bones.  I could have been a perfectly fine movie if they had cast it differently and had left out the hacky "comedy" about poop and the like.  I mean, it was a dick move to leave the kid to two people who hate each other and not even bother to tell them first, but that aside, I feel like the elements were there for the movie to be decent.  Unfortunately, every time the story started to overcome the crap, the crap would rear it's ugly head again.  All-in-all it was a better movie than You Again but it was still pretty bad.  This one was kind of the good kind of bad though, the kind that I might actually want to watch again on purpose.  You know, when I want something pretty to look at that I don't have to pay full attention to because I'm also painting my nails or doing a crossword puzzle or shopping online.  It's a decent space filler.