Treasures From The Past

Having a bad day at work has yielded an unexpected and delightful gift.  While trying to find a file saved on one of the 12 unlabeled USB drives in my drawer, I came across this picture.  Who else misses the '90s?

Admittedly, this would be even more delightful if the 7th Heaven peeps were replaced with extra Buffy or Felicity cast members, but beggars can't be choosers. 

Weekend In Reviews

I had a pretty productive movie weekend that included two trips to the theater to watch brand new films plus three recently released movies on DVD. 

The Backup Plan - This is one of the most poorly written movies I've ever seen, and I have seen many poorly written movies.  The dialogue is stilted, awkward, cheesy and predictable.  The story is absurd and obnoxious.  And I can not understand why anyone enjoys movies that star Jennifer Lopez.  The last time she was even remotely likable on film was Out of Sight in 1998.  And I suspect that a large part of what made her tolerable in that film was her proximity to George Clooney. 

On the other hand, Alex O'Laughlin is really nice to look at and he takes his shirt off more than once in the movie.  That does it for the nice things I can think of to say about this movie.  I honestly can't recommend that anyone watch this because it's not even a good bad rom-com, it's just bad.  But if it were on cable and you had NOTHING else to watch, you could certainly put it on mute and enjoy looking at Alex O'Laughlin for 90 minutes. 

Killers - Ok, fine, this section of my NetFlix queue had a lot of bad rom-coms in it.  But who among us doesn't enjoy watching bad rom-coms on a Saturday afternoon?  This was better than The Backup Plan by a very small margin.  It was like if Mr. and Mrs. Smith had been 100% less kick-ass, 90% less funny and with 360% less chemistry between the leads (which is good news, I suppose for Demi Moore and that guy Katherine Heigl is married to). 

The problem with this movie is that the concept was decent but it took forever to go anywhere and it was pretty boring while it was getting there which is particularly unfortunate when your story is essentially the same as True Lies and the aforementioned Mr. and Mrs. Smith, because both of those movies are done so much better. 

I dislike Heigl as a person a lot but she's a decent actress and her bad rom-coms are often the most delicious kind of guilty pleasure bad rom-com I can really enjoy.  But between Killers and The Ugly Truth, her on-screen characters are starting to be as unenjoyable as her off-screen personality.  Ashton Kutcher is the equivalent of a cinematic rice cake for me - I never think about him unless he's right in front of me and he's perfectly serviceable while I'm watching him, but as soon as I'm done, I forget it ever happened.  If you want to watch this one, I won't steer you away from it but I will council you against getting your hopes up, it's more of a time waster than it is entertainment. 

Date Night - Do you think Steve Carrell and Tina Fey are funny?  Of course you do.  Do you enjoy seeing fairly big name stars make silly cameo appearances in films?  Sure, who doesn't.  So Date Night should be for you...except somehow it isn't as fun or funny as I expected it to be. 

Don't get me wrong, there were several good laughs to be had, they were just fewer and further between than I'd anticipated when I saw the cast list.  Remember several years ago when Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn remade the Out-Of-Towners?  This was a better version of that remake that I still didn't love as much as the original Out-Of-Towners. 

But I enjoyed the Taste and Whipit scene, the pole dancing, and the running joke about Mark Wahlberg's shirtlessness.  Oh, speaking of Mark Wahlberg, I've met him and he's not a tall man, he's just about my height (5'7") so the first thing I thought when I saw him share a scene with Steve Carrell was "Damn!  Carrell is SHORT!"  Just putting that out there. 

Anyway, a movie worth seeing but I must also recommend you rent the original Out-Of-Towners starring Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis, if you've never seen it.  You won't be sorry.  

Easy A - Smart, charming and funny.  Emma Stone is delightful and possessed of effortless comic timing.  I see the story less as an adaptation of The Scarlet Letter and more of a tutorial about the novel as it freely uses both the book and it's subsequent film adaptations in the narrative.  When Olive (Stone) realizes that the false rumor that's been spread about her has turned her from a regular, anonymous student to an infamous social pariah, she decides to embrace her fate and turn herself into a modern-day Hester Prynne whom they're currently studying in English. 

Even more than The Scarlet Letter, the film pays homage to teen-centric movies from the '80s.  This movie loves John Hughes, it loves Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Can't Buy Me Love, and maybe that's partly I love it - because we have the same, nostalgic taste in movies. 

Olive's parents (Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson) and her favorite teacher (Thomas Hayden Church) are hilarious and Amanda Bynes makes a good foil for our heroine.  Dan Byrd is under-utilized as her gay friend and I think I'd have cut Aly Michalka from the cast and made his Brandon Olive's BFF instead.  He's got much better acting/comedy chops and Rhiannon came off mean and stupid instead of boisterous and wacky.  The other weak link in the cast is Cam Gigandet who didn't fit the part of the twenty-something high school senior boyfriend of judgemental Christian nutbar, but even if the casting had been better, the character felt tacked on specifically to be the catalyst for the climax of the story which felt awkward and clunky. 

Still, any movie that includes the line "If there's anything worse than chlamydia, it's Florida" gets an automatic place on my DVD shelf.  And Emma Stone's wonderful performances in this and Zombieland get her a new spot in my girl crush category. 

The Town - I loved this movie.  It's interesting, well paced, attractively cast (I would make out with about 80% of the main cast, including the chicks) and beautifully directed.  The writing was a little off in several places - heavy handed when it needn't have been, and the tiniest bit sloppy in the service of advancing the plot on occasion - but the acting and directing are good enough so as to mostly make up for where the writing falls short. 

The film opens with a robbery that lets you know from the start that this movie is going to include action but wastes no time setting up the love story as even in the middle of the robbery, Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck) shares a nice moment with Claire (Rebecca Hall).  It also kicks the drama up from the start as the dynamics between Doug and his life-long best friend James Coughlin (Jeremy Renner) are set up when Coughlin beats a bank employee senseless against Doug's better judgement.  The action sequences are really well done, exciting without causing motion sickness and plotted every bit as well as the story which is intricate and emotional and suspenseful. 

Renner is easy to hate as Coughlin and Jon Hamm is a great FBI foil for our gang of robbers.  He makes it pretty easy to root for the "bad guy" rather than the law which, trust me, is a compliment.  Claire doesn't have a very dynamic part which isn't to say that Hall doesn't do great work, because she does.  But the part isn't exciting or showy and she's mostly there as an emotional anchor and love interest for Ben Affleck who, I am not exaggerating even a little bit, has never been hotter in his entire life.  To wit:

To my great surprise, the real powerhouse performance came from supporting actress Blake Lively playing Renner's drug addicted/dealing, single-mom sister who has a past with Doug.  She is in only a small handful of scenes but her slurring, bleary-eyed portrayal of Krista is pure perfection.  I wouldn't be surprised to see her get an Oscar nom for this role and I wouldn't argue with it either. 

Not only would I recommend everyone see this, I think I might go see it again myself. 

Happy Birthday

Michelle Williams - 30

Eric Stonestreet - 39

Julie Gonzalo - 29

Hugh Grant - 50

Goran Visnjic - 38

Michael Buble - 35

Happy Birthday

Selma Hayek is 44 years of gorgeous.

Keanu Reeves turns 46 today. Did I ever tell you that my aunt met him while he was filming Point Break (circa this very picture!) on her block back in the day? She didn't know who he was because my aunt is unbelievably clueless, but she had this long conversation with him as he parked his motorcycle in front of her apartment while she played with her 2-year-old son in the yard. I'm planning on holding that against her forever.

Mark Harmon is 59. I have another aunt who thinks Mark is about the dreamiest thing ever and would never miss an episode of NCIS for just that reason. I don't get either hot or bothered about ol' Leroy Jethro Gibbs (he's just a year younger than my dad after all) but I will admit he was quite the piece of man meat in his more youthful days.

Nit Pickery

This is such an adorable picture of Christina Applegate who is, herself, adorable. Seriously, if you don't follow her on Twitter you should do yourself a favor and get on that. But I kinda think she could have chosen a dress that fit her a bit better. I dig it all over except in the bust, where it just doesn't do anything for her.

Happy Birthday

Joan Allen is 54.

James Marsters turns 48.

Amy Adams is 36.

And my favorite angel, Misha Collins, is also 36 today.

Happy Birthday

Kyra Sedgwick is 45 today. I hope I stumble on a giant bag of money soon, so that I can afford the many, many surgeries it will take to ensure I look that young and amazing when I'm 45.

Happy Birthday

Justin Theroux, writer, director, producer, actor, and all-around good-looking fella, turns 39 today.

Joanna Garcia is 31. I think she's just as cute as a bug's ear and every time I see her face or hear her name it reminds me how bummed I am that Priveleged got cancelled.

Weekend In Reviews

When In Rome – I actually watched this one on my vacation with Meg and Lisa who are maybe the least critical romcom fans on the planet and they were lukewarm at best on this one so take that as your warning that there really isn’t anything about this movie that’s redeeming.

You probably gleaned the plot from the trailers but in case you’ve forgotten, Beth (Kristen Bell) attends her sister’s wedding in Rome. At the wedding, she shares several nice moments with Nick (Josh Duhamel), the impossibly sweet and adorable best man. The two share a kiss and things are really starting to sizzle between them but then Beth sees Nick with a drunk woman hanging all over him and misreads the situation as all romcom characters are contractually obligated to do in order to facilitate a “story.” Now spurned by her potential soul-mate she gets drunk and steals a few coins from this “magic” fountain causing the throwers of those coins to become immediately infatuated with her. Hijinks ensue.

I suppose there is a way that this movie might not have sucked quite so much but that way would have involved re-writing most of the characters and then not casting Dax Shepard or Jon Heder at all.

I hope it doesn’t spoil it for you if I tell you that Nick and Beth end up together in the end.

It frustrates me so to see Kristen Bell waste her considerable talents in this kind of crap. She either needs a better agent or she needs to go back to television. Damn it, none of this would have happened if the CW hadn’t cancelled Veronica Mars!

Valentine's Day – I’m not sure I understand the necessity of following so many people. There were at least three stories going on that would have made fine movies on their own (not great, maybe, but fine) but instead we had to have 27 simultaneous stories which took most of the interesting stuff out of every one of them.

Still, it was actually a little better than I expected it to be. I didn’t go in with very high expectations, in fact, I pretty much expected it to be terrible, but the very worst I can say about it was that it was predictable and a little boring. There were several redeeming qualities though – Eric Dane and Bradley Cooper were very nice to look at, I didn’t see the twist coming with Julia Roberts’ character and it was a really nice twist, I rather enjoyed the scene when Jennifer Garner confronts Patrick Dempsey in the restaurant, and I really enjoyed Hector Elizondo.

But at the end of the day, the very best part of the entire movie was the last out-take of Julia Roberts that they show over the end credits. And it’s not ideal to make a 2+ hour movie and have the best bit be a 20 second drop-in over the credits, you know?

She’s Out Of My League – I can’t really think of anything to say about this movie except that I sort of felt like I’d seen it before. It was a gross-out, male-skewing, romcom with mostly likeable characters and extremely likeable actors that suffered from childish writing and a slight lack of imagination but was basically enjoyable to watch.

Both Krysten Ritter and Mike Vogel were woefully under-used in the movie and more Geoff Stults would not have killed anyone, but Jay Baruchel and Nate Torrence were both fantastic and Alice Eve had some definite moments as well.

This movie is like Knocked Up + Kevin Smith x Superbad ÷ Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Take from that what you will.

Crazy Heart – Can I appreciate the consensus that Jeff Bridges gave an award-worthy performance in this movie? Yes. Did I enjoy watching this movie? No.

I found the movie boring and depressing to the extent that shortly after Bad Blake’s truck flips and he winds up in the hospital, I got up and started cleaning and only ½ paid attention to anything else that happened in the movie.

Happy Birthday

July 25th is apparently Pretty Lady Day. Who knew?

Shantel van Santen, who plays Quinn on One Tree Hill, is 25 today.

Kate Beckinsale, whose hair is probably the most enviable thing I've ever laid eyes on, is 37.

Sandra Bullock turns 46 today. There's really nothing to say about how awesome she is that hasn't already been said so I'll just say that she's a great example for how a woman should rise above it when she's handed a pile of shit.

Helen Mirren, who might be the hottest sexagenarian on the planet, is 65.

And because the exception proves the rule, I might as well mention that Taylor Momsen is turning 17 today. Last week she was talking to some magazine or other about her "style" (ironic quote alert!) and said that she still wears things from "fucking middle school." She was, I gathered, trying to make the point that she uses "old pieces" along with new in her wardrobe but since middle school was 3 years ago for her, I was once again overcome with an urge to slap her and tell her to keep her fucking mouth shut. And also to petition the government to get her a parent who can actually PARENT.

Ahem. Happy birthday, ladies...and Taylor!

Happy Birthday

Sandra Oh is 39 today. She is one of two things I never grew to dislike about Grey's Anatomy. Bailey is the other.

Judy Greer, who makes a career out of being capital-A Awesome (but should be a much bigger star based on her very high level of awesomeness), is 35.

John Francis Daley - or as I'm now fully committed to referring to him, Sweets - turns 25.

And blowing my mind completely by being older than Sweets, Percy Daggs III (now and forever my beloved Wallace Fennell from Veronica Mars) is 28 today.

Happy Birthday

June is just chock-full of awesome birthdays!

The incomparable Laurie Metcalf is 55. That picture is from the short-lived CW show I've already forgotten the name of but she was by far the best part of it. She's also every bit as awesome as Sheldon's mom as Jim Parsons is as Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory.

John Cho is 38 today.

Missy Peregrym, who I liked a lot on Life As We Know It and who'll be co-starring with Gregory Smith in the new summer series Rookie Blue (premiering next Thursday on ABC - you should all watch it), turns 28 today.

Clifton Collins, Jr. is 40. You should recognize him because he's one of those character actors who's been in a million things playing just about every kind of character. It still bothers me that he didn't receive an Oscar nomination for his supporting role in Capote because he was brilliant in that movie.

And speaking of character actors, Bill Cobbs is 76.

Teacher Of The Year

Sandra Bullock

The living embodiment of the very important lesson that being awesome is the best revenge.

Green With Envy

Like a year or more ago there was a rumor that Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling were dating (while they were filming their movie Blue Valentine which is currently showing at Cannes) and I prayed that it was true. Because how cute a couple are they?

Anyway, this post is not about how how those two could give Matilda a truly adorable sibling. This post is about how cute I think Michelle's new haircut is and how, if I had her face and straight hair, I'd totally get the same cut. I even like the blonder color.

Her makeup is gorgeous too. So fresh and beautiful in a sea of people who are over-lining these days, I do love it when a person goes for a more natural look.

You know what I love the most though? Her shoes! I want to love them and hold them and make them mine.

Ryan's shoes on the other hand? I'm pretending they never happened.