Tag Archives: Cameron Diaz

What Lisa Watched Last Night: The 84th Annual Academy Awards

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last night, me and my BFF Evelyn watched the 84th Annual Academy Awards.

Lisa and Evelyn at the Oscars

Why Was I Watching It?

As if you had to ask.

What Was It About?

It was about honoring some good films and making a lot of catty comments about rich people who don’t know how to dress themselves.

What Worked?

You know who is adorable?  Bret McKenzie, who all good people as a member of The Flight of the Conchords.  He won an Oscar last night for best original song for Man or Muppet and he gave exactly the type of wonderfully sincere acceptance speech that you would expect from Bret McKenzie.

You know who else is adorable?  Jim Rash.  The script he co-wrote for The Descendants is overrated but it was still good to see Community’s Dean up there accepting an Oscar.

And you know who is really, really adorable?  The little Emma Stone.  Loved her dress and loved her whole little skit with Ben Stiller.

Jean Dujardin, Christopher Plummer, and Octavia Spencer all gave wonderful acceptance speeches and Uggie got to go on stage when The Artist won best picture!  That was so cute!

What Didn’t Work?

Much like the Golden Globes last month, the Academy Awards were a rather somber affair,  It was as if everyone couldn’t get over the fact that they had actually nominated Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close and everyone was muttering under their breath, “Let’s get this over with before anyone remembers that we nominated a film that not even those people at the Golden Globes were impressed by!”

As much as I enjoyed two of the nominees for best picture (The Artist and Hugo), respected one of them (The Tree of Life), and enjoyed another almost despite myself (The Help), the majority of the nominations this year went to movies that we will probably never watch again and to performers who will probably never have a year as good as this one.  Perhaps that is why the various Academy montages all seemed to feature scenes taken from films that received not a single Oscar nomination.  (More time was devoted to the latest Mission Impossible than to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.)  It just gave the whole ceremony a rather odd feel.  It reminded me of when I was in high school and the drama club would give out little trophies and certificates at the end of the year.  I received a little trophy for being the Best Actress in Advanced Theatre during my junior year.  I also got a certificate for “Biggest Flirt.”  (My acceptance speech, by the way, was: “Couldn’t it have been for best lay?”  Ahhh, High School.)

As host, Bill Crystal was pretty bleh and he kinda looked like Robert Blake from Lost Highway.

Whenever Rooney Mara popped up on screen, me and Evelyn would yell, “You need boobs to wear that dress, honey!”

Meryl Streep’s acceptance speech was long-winded and she came across as being a bit full of herself, I think.  Now I know that you’re saying, “Well, gee, Lisa, she’s the greatest actress ever so she’s earned the right to be full of herself!”  Actually, if you really pay attention to Streep’s performances, you’ll see that the main reason she has a reputation for being a great actress is because she never allows you to forget that she’s acting.

I missed James Franco.

“OMG! Just like me!” Moments

As I mentioned on twitter, Evelyn and I have decided that we were the Jennifer Lopez and Cameron Diaz of my living room.  We’re still debating on just who exactly was Cameron and who was J.Lo. 

Lessons Learned

Everything is better with James Franco!

A Quickie With Lisa Marie: Bad Teacher (dir. by Jake Kasdan)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

So, last Friday night, I went and saw the new Cameron Diaz comedy, Bad Teacher.  Right now, all sorts of mainstream critics are running out of ways to trash this film but, for the most part, they seem to overlooking one important fact.  Flawed and unfocused as this film may be, it’s funny.  It made me laugh, it made Jeff laugh, it made my sister laugh, and it made my friend Evelyn laugh.  (Of course, according to Evelyn, I laugh at everything, even if it means I’m the only person laughing, but that’s another story.  Hi, Evelyn!)  It also made almost the entire audience laugh.  Admittedly, it was a small audience.  I guess everyone else was busy crying at Cars 2.  (It’s a Pixar film after all.)  As for Bad Teacher, it may not be a great film but it works.

Anyway, Bad Teacher tells the story of a very bad teacher, played by Cameron Diaz.  She doesn’t care about her students, goes out of her way to antagonize her fellow students, and shows up to work everyday either hungover or stoned.  She’s also snobbish, petty, shallow, and you’d totally hate her except for the fact that 1) you can’t help but admire the way that Diaz throws herself into being as crass and as shallow as possible (she may be playing a vain character but there’s no vanity in her performance) and 2) every other teacher in the school is so annoyingly perky and movie perfect that you can’t help but share Diaz’s disgust with them. 

Anyway, Diaz is teaching because her rich fiancée has dumped her.  (One of the better jokes in the film is the number of lies that Diaz comes up with to explain why her engagement ended.)  She is content to spend the school day asleep while her class watches movies featuring other, better teachers.  However, then she meets the new substitute teacher who is really kinda creepy with his constant “up with humanity” perkiness but is also 1) rich and 2) played Justin Timberlake so he’s like totally hot.  However, Timberlake is dating Diaz’s sworn enemy, the incredibly upbeat Amy Squirrel (played by Lucy Pond).  Diaz realizes that the only way she’ll ever capture Timberlake’s attention is if she can raise the money necessary to get bigger boobs.  The rest of the film basically deals with Diaz’s efforts to raise the money for her boob job (among other things, she accepts bribes from parents and embezzles from the school car wash) while continuing to pursue Timberlake and be pursued by the gym teacher (Jason Segal).

That’s actually a lot of plot for an 89 minute film and, as a result, Bad Teacher does feel overly episodic and ultimately disjointed.  But so what?  I laughed consistently for 89 minutes and that’s the important thing.  It’s not that the film itself is filled with witty lines as much as it’s the fact that the entire cast so totally throws themselves into playing these genuinely odd characters.  Pond steals every scene she’s in and Timberlake especially seems to be having fun spoofing his own image.  If you think that watching people dry hump while fully clothed can’t be hilarious, than you haven’t seen Justin Timberlake in Bad Teacher.

For me, there were two other things that made Bad Teacher a success. 

1) It confirms what we all always suspected and knew in middle school and high school — that our teachers were a bunch of horny, pot-smoking degenerates.  Admittedly, I used to actually get high with my drama teacher — shhhhh!  Don’t tell anyone! — but I’ve always figured that same was probably true of every high school drama student.  This film confirms that the history and math teachers were just as stoned.

2) It features this scene, which got laughs and applause from the Dallas audience that I saw it with:

Lisa Marie Does The Green Hornet (dir. by Michel Gondry)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

And I would!  For an overweight, kinda disheveled guy who gives off a definite fear-of-intimacy type of vibe, Seth Rogen has a definite charisma and appeal to him.  But, is he believable as a super hero?  That’s the question posed by the new film, the Green Hornet.

In The Green Hornet, Rogen plays Britt Reid, the son of a wealthy Los Angeles newspaper publisher.  Britt has a difficult relationship with his dad (played by the great Tom Wilkinson).  His dad constantly reminds Britt that he’s wasting his potential and Britt responds by holding wild parties and throwing TVs off of balconies.  (I’ve always wondered what the children of rich people do whenever their favorite show comes on since they always seem to be destroying any nearby televisions.)  Anyway, Britt’s dad suddenly dies and just as suddenly, Britt inherits both his dad’s newspaper and one of his dad’s mechanics, Kato (Jay Chou).  It turns out that Kato is something of a genius who spends his spare time sketching women, bullet-proofing cars, and making weapons.  Kato’s also a skilled martial artist.  Well, of course, what else can Britt do but fight crime with Kato as his loyal sidekick?  Of course, fighting crime means coming into conflict with the biggest crime lord in Los Angeles, a paranoid Russian mobster (Inglorious Basterd’s Christoph Waltz) who is having a rather bloody midlife crisis.  Along the way, Rogen also hires Cameron Diaz to work at the newspaper and soon finds himself competing with Kato for her affections.  (I can’t remember, off the top of my head, the name of the character that Diaz plays but it doesn’t really matter.  Much like Gwynneth Paltrow in the Iron Man movies, Diaz is mostly there to be herself.)

So, is Rogen a convincing super hero?  No, not really.  But that’s kind of the point of the entire movie.  If The Dark Knight was the first truly postmodern comic book movie than The Green Hornet is the first mumblecore one.  If The Dark Knight was the first movie to question what the deeper meaning of comic book heroism might be, The Green Hornet is the first movie to confidently answer with “there are none.”  As played by Rogen, Britt becomes a super hero because there is literally nothing else to do.  Kato becomes his sidekick for much the same reason while the film’s villain spends most of his time agonizing over what his evil catchphrase should be.  That’s the genius of a The Green Hornet: it’s a super hero film about people who seem to understand that they’re characters in a super hero film and therefore, they have to act accordingly even while they comment on the absurdity of it all.

There is a plot to The Green Hornet but it’s really not that important.  Ultimately, this film is all about Britt’s relationship with Kato.  Kato is upset to constantly find himself being referred to as being the Green Hornet’s sidekick.  Britt, meanwhile, is painfully aware of the fact that he contributes next to nothing to the team.  Both of them find themselves competing for the affections of Diaz who doesn’t appear to have feelings for either of them.  At first, Britt and Kato do the whole male bonding thing and then, after Waltz comes after them, they end up going their separate ways only to reunite in time for the film’s conclusion.  This is a bromance disguised as an action movie but, fortunately, Chou and Rogen are both engaging and likable and they have a definite chemistry together that makes them fun to watch. 

That’s probably the best way to sum up The Green Hornet.  It’s a likable, entertaining, and frequently very funny movie that has a few memorable moments and, in this case, that’s more than good enough.