So, Jeff and I went and saw Chernobyl Diaries tonight and, to be honest, the film was pretty bleh but I was happy because I got to see the trailer for Magic Mike on the big screen. My boyfriend feels that my enthusiastic reaction to this trailer has more to do with Channing Tatum stripping than the film itself and maybe he’s right. Then again, it’s also possible that the entire film is just Channing Tatum stripping and that would be even better.
This was released about a week ago. It’s the first teaser trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s upcoming film, The Master. Essentially, Joaquin Phoenix acts a lot like Joaquin Phoenix while an unseen Phillip Seymour Hoffman interrogates him. I have to say that after seeing this teaser I am intrigued about The Master. It just has such a wonderfully obscure and enigmatic feel to it. It may just be the beach and the ominous atmosphere of the whole thing but this teaser reminds me a lot of Lost.
Though, just going by the rumors that I’ve read online, The Master is more concerned with exposing Scientology than revealing the Dharma Initiative.
This trailer has been out for a while now but I still want to post it here because, I have to admit, I have slowly fallen in love with it. Lawless appears to be a stylish period piece about ruthless men shooting each other and, quite frankly, after sitting through such ponderous and overly serious films as Public Enemies and J. Edgar, I think we’re all in the mood for a prohibition gangster film that’s actually fun to watch.
There are three reasons why I think Lawless might be good and those three reasons are: Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, and Guy Pearce (though I do have to wonder what exactly is going on with Pearce’s hair). Seriously, this trailer had me as soon as Oldman flashed that little smirk of his. As for Tom Hardy — well, I’m with Jessica Chastain on this one. I’d dance for him too.
There are a few reasons to be concerned. Director John Hillcoat previously directed The Road, which I didn’t really care for. (The end of the world might be many things but it should never be boring.) However, my biggest concern is the fact that even though the film features Hardy, Oldman, Pearce, and Chastain, it apparently stars Shia LeBouf. When I saw Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, I had to keep reminding myself that the film was actually about LeBouf because he just seemed so forgettable and watching the trailer for Lawless, I find myself wondering how, if LeBouf couldn’t even summon up enough charisma to hold the screen against Michael Douglas, how is he going to handle being in a film with Tom Hardy, Guy Pearce, and Gary Oldman?
Well, since my less than glowing review of The Avengers (not that it was all that negative — I just said it was an okay superhero flick, not the greatest thing to ever happen in the history of the world, as some were claiming) didn’t get me tarred and feathered, I thought I would avail myself of the opportunity that this site provides me to take a look at some other films that I don’t get around to reviewing on my own site, http://trashfilmguru.wordpress.com, all that often because they just don’t fit in with the overall ethos (there’s my pretentious asshole bit out of the way) of what I try to stick to (for the most part, at any rate) over there. Our erstwhile semi-empress, Ms. Bowman, assures me that pretty much anything goes around here, though, so without any further ado I’m going to start up a little on-again/off-again series where I take a look at the various summer blockbusters Hollywood is serving up this summer — something which I did, in fact, do on my own site last year, where it pretty much went over like a lead balloon, given that my readers don’t tend to stop by there looking for much by way of mainstream movie criticism. I trust folks around these parts won’t mind, though, since the mainstream isn’t something my fellow scribes here shy away from.
First up is the newly-released The Dictator, the third collaboration between supposed comic “talent” Sacha Baron Cohen and director Larry Charles. First off, let me state for the record that I have no particular objection to crass, vulgar, tasteless humor. In fact, I rather like it. But The Dictator feels less like it has an actual script than a belabored series of barely-strung-together, often overly-complicated, tremendously belabored set-ups for various gross-out gags that you can see coming from a mile (at least) away. Granted, Cohen was never going to get away with pure ad-libbing of the sort that he did in Borat again, and even the half ad-libbed/half-scripted shtick he pulled in Bruno was probably going to be a bridge too far as well, but no way in a million years did I think his first truly non-spontaneous film was going to be this, well, clunky. It just doesn’t flow at all and it’s that blatant telegraphing of oncoming supposed “jokes,” rather than the nature of said jokes themselves, that makes this flick feel like such an insult to the audience’s collective intelligence.
Plus, there’s a none-too-subtle political agenda at work here that I find particularly underhanded and reprehensible. Let’s be honest — in between wasted cameos from the likes of Megan Fox and John C. Reilly, and criminally wasting the talents of Ben Kinglsey (who, sadly, has shown is recent years that he’ll do anything for a buck), The Dictator has one driving message from start to finish : Ahmadinejad (who Cohen’s Aladeen character is clearly based on) is a crazy loon, Iran (which the country of Wadiya that Aladeen rules over is clearly based on) is not to be trusted, the Iranians really are building nuclear weapons no matter what they say, they really want to wipe Israel off the map no matter what they say, and everyone, even cool Hollywood liberals, should get on board with the idea of bombing/and or invading them right now.
Seriously, I swear I’m not being paranoid or reading too much into things here. Before he gets lost in New York after being deposed (momentarily) by his uncle and falls in love with Anna Faris while working at her food co-op, Cohen’s Aladeen snickers as he denies his nuclear program is for peaceful, energy-producting purposes, and guffaws and snickers as he promises to leave Israel alone. Of course, the US news media assures us that Iranian “dictator” (he’s not really even the head political force in the country, but hey, whatever) Ahmadinejad does, indeed, intend to build nuclear weapons (even though more or less every international regulatory body and every truly independent defense analyst and Middle Eastern policy analyst disagrees) and he did threaten to wipe out Israel and denied the Holocaust ever happened (even though accurate translations of his comments show he’s never said anything of the sort and has been intentionally, and quite shamelessly, misquoted), so obviously Cohen’s just taking his material right from the headlines, right? Besides, didn’t I say earlier that Cohen and Charles were cool Hollywood liberals? Why, just look at that admittedly quite spot-on piece of satire at the end of the film (which also marks more or less the only time at which Cohen and Charles hit the right notes) where Aladeen lampoons each and every facet of the so-called “war on terrorism” — he’s clearly not in favor of Bush-Cheney (or maybe that should be Bush-Cheney-Obama, since nothing in this regard has changed since the Texas oilmen left office) policies, so where do I get off thinking they’re trying to push us into another stupid war (and yes,”another stupid war” is what I object to — I’m not in any way saying that Ahmadinejad is a great guy or that Iran isn’t a country in desperate need of wholesale reform from top to bottom — all I’m saying is that bombing and invading them is blatantly hare-brained idea)?
Oh, how short our memories are. Let’s not forget, friends, that we only went to war with Iraq after we had the so-called “opposition” on board, and that a good 75% of House and Senate Democrats voted for that ill-thought-out (to put it mildly!) scheme. Quite clearly Cohen and Charles know who their audience is, and their goal isn’t to push right-wing conservatives into supporting an attack on Iran — after all, they already do — but is rather to convince the so-called “left” (what remains of it, at any rate) that it’s a good idea, as well, since that’s the only quarter any opposition to this idea might possibly come from. And hey, let’s be honest — if Cohen and Charles really understood progressive politics at all, they wouldn’t have a picture of Barack Obama hanging on the wall of Faris’ food co-op. Ralph Nader, maybe, or Bernie Sanders, or Dennis Kucinich — but Obama? Don’t think so. These guys have clearly never spent so much as a minute in a real co-op.
Still, reprehensible as this film’s political chicanery is, it’s not the most offensive thing about The Dictator. Sorry, that still goes to its tremendously lead-footed pacing and insultingly obvious joke set-ups. Seriously, this is a movie that spends over five minutes leading up to a gag about losing a cell phone inside a woman’s vagina, and spends even longer than that cobbling together a lame punchline featuring Aladeen’s even dumber double milking a woman’s boobs into a pail. Comedy 101 — the set-up to a joke should never be more complicated than the joke itself, and when the jokes are this half-assed, they don’t require any more than the briefest of lead-in time. It’s that complete and utter non-spontaneity, ineptly handled and in service of puerile, juvenile shenanigans that hardly even deliver much of a payoff, that marks a bigger crime, in a strictly cinematic sense, than trying to push us into another useless and counterproductive war with a wink and a nudge.
Here is the trailer for the film that many people are predicting will be the major Oscar contender later this year, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (in 3D, as all films are nowadays). I’m not totally sold on the idea of Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby (it seems like such a predictable and safe choice, to be honest) but I think Carey Mulligan is a great choice for Daisy and Tobey Magurie was born to play Nick Carraway. Judging from the trailer, this film is either going to be brilliant or it’s going to be a huge mess. Speaking as someone who loves F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel and who has often wished that her own voice might sound like money, I’m hoping it will be brilliant.
For nearly a year now, we’ve been seeing teasers and trailer for the film Battleship and we’ve all smirked and laughed. “Really? A film based on an old board game? Alien battleships that look like they’ve escaped from a Transformers film? Action scenes that look like Battle L.A.? AND LIAM NEESON!?”
Yes, we’ve all been prepared to hate this film. In fact, the most popular thing I ever tweeted (RT’d by 22 people within minutes of being posted, I might add) was a joke about how Battleship looked like it was a film specifically made for people who thought Battle L.A. was too complicated. So, after all this build up, I finally saw Battleship on Friday and you know what?
While I wasn’t one of the many people who applauded at the end of the movie, I actually kind of enjoyed it.
(Does that make me a bad person?)
Battleship is the story of two brothers, a somber-looking admiral, and an alien invasion. Stone Hopper (Alexander Skarsgard) is a Commander in the U.S. Navy. In a genuinely amusing scene, his irresponsible younger brother Alex (Taylor Kitsch) is arrested while breaking into a closed convenience store so he can get a chicken burrito for Samantha Shane (Brooklyn Decker, a great name) who is the daughter of Admiral Shane (Liam Neeson). Stone arranges for Alex to avoid jail by joining the U.S. Navy.
Jump forward seven years and Alex is now a lieutenant, engaged to Samantha, and hated by his future father-in-law. When five alien ships crash into the ocean, both Stone and Alex Hopper are on the battleships sent out to investigate. They quickly discover that the aliens are not friendly and soon, the future of humanity rests on the untested shoulders of Alex Hopper. Well, Alex Hopper and a street-wise sailor played by Rihanna…
I really, really expected that I was going to hate Battleship and I was even kind of looking forward to coming back to the TSL Bunker and writing up my snarkiest post since my review of Avatar. Therefore, imagine just how shocked I was as I watched the actual film and discovered that it’s actually not that bad of a time waster. Yes, the film is predictable and the script is full of clichés and dumb dialogue but the difference between Battleship and Battle L.A. is that Battleship is aware of its own stupidity and is even willing to encourage the audience to laugh at the pure silliness of actually basing a movie on a board game. Even the film’s final act of heroism — which features a lot of inspiring speeches and a return to duty by an iconic battleship of the past — feels less like typical third act posturing and more like a very deliberate parody on the conventions of recent U.S. Military Vs. Alien Invaders films. Whereas films like Battle L.A. and Acts of Valor often feel like recruiting films for the military, Battleship feels like a recruiting film for movies about the military. The CGI looks good, the battle scenes are nicely done and director Peter Berg seems to be having fun finding ways to visually remind us of the original Battleship game. Taylor Kitsch makes for a surprisingly likable hero, Liam Neeson grimaces through his 6-minutes of screen time, and Alexander Skarsgard is to die for in his white naval uniform. Even Rihanna appears to be having fun uttering silly lines like, “Boom” and “Mahalo, motherfucker.”
Now, don’t get me wrong. Battleship is hardly a masterpiece. It’s about 20 minutes too long and there’s a few times, especially during the middle of the film, when Battleship seems to run out of momentum. Fortunately, every time this happens, Taylor Kitsch delivers another hardboiled line or Liam Neeson grimaces as he stares out at the alien fleet and the film picks back up again. Battleship isn’t a great film and it might not even be a good film but it’s hardly the crime against humanity that I was expecting.
Last night, as I attempted to drift off to sleep, I turned on the Lifetime Movie Network and I watched the Canadian thriller, Deadly Hope.
Why Was I Watching It?
First off, it was on the Lifetime Movie Network and that’s always a good sign. Secondly, how can you not watch something called Deadly Hope?
What Was It About?
So, Joanne (Alana De La Garza) is an obstetrician whose life is turned upside down when her partner at the fertility clinic is murdered by a mysterious assailant. Joanne deals with her grief by having a one-night stand with a random stranger and soon, that random stranger is also murdered by a mysterious assailant. Could the two crimes be connected and will the audience notice that all the locations in the film look rather Canadian? That’s up to Detective Denise Landers (Sandrine Holt) to figure out.
What Worked?
Oh my God, this movie was scary! Now, I know what you’re doing. You’re laughing at me because you’re all like, “C’mon, Lisa — it’s a Canadian Lifetime movie!” Well, all I can say is that you weren’t there. Okay, the killer doesn’t just strangle or shoot people — instead, he stabs them with this little hypodermic needle that he carries around with him and it just looks like a really painful way to die. Add to that, the killer just keeps popping up out of nowhere, much like the murderer in Dario Argento’s underrated giallo Opera.
Though she might not be a household name, Sandrine Holt is one of my favorite actresses, mostly because she always seems to be so unimpressed with everything happening around her.
What Did Not Work?
Actually, most of the film didn’t work and it was largely because Joanne was such an unsympathetic character and it didn’t help that quite a few otherwise likable characters ended up getting killed just because they made the mistake of knowing her. As played by Alana De La Garza, Joanne seems to be more annoyed by the inconvenience of having to deal with multiple murders than anything else.
Add to that, even by the standards of a Canadian movie, the film’s final twist kinda came out of nowhere.
“Oh My God! Just like me!” Moments
I’m tempted to say that there were absolutely no “Oh my God! Just like me!” moments in this film but that’s not quite true. For instance, Joanne gets annoyed when her annoying neighbor just wanders, unannounced, into her living room and I would have the same reaction.
And, of course, every time Joanne has a one-night stand, it ends in a bloody murder. That’s nothing like me … or is it? *Cue ominous music*
Lessons Learned
Not everything made in Canada is as good as Degrassi.
For the past year or so, I haven’t been able to go to a movie without seeing the trailer for the new film from the creators of Borat, The Dictator. The first few times I saw the trailer, I chuckled at a few scenes and I rolled my eyes a few times and I thought to myself, “Maybe I’ll see that.” And then I had to sit through that trailer another 79 times and I stopped laughing and rolling my eyes because I had reached the point where I could practically recite the entire damn trailer by memory. For a while there, I told myself, “There’s no way I’m going to waste my time seeing this.” But, just a week ago, I realized that, after seeing the trailer 139 times, I had no choice but to see it.
I needed closure.
I finally saw The Dictator last Wednesday and my reaction to the film can best be summed up by a mild chuckle and a shrug of my shoulders. It’s not a bad film by any stretch of the imagination. It’s just a rather forgettable one.
In the Dictator, Sacha Baron Cohen plays General Aladeen, the ruthless leader of the Middle Eastern country of Wadiya. Aladeen spends his time playing video games, rewriting the dictionary, ordering executions, and trying to develop a nuclear weapons program. Aladeen is a pretty bad guy but he’s also strangely likable because 1) he’s more stupid than evil and 2) he’s played by Sacha Baron Cohen. Anyway, Aladeen goes to New York to deliver a speech to the United Nations and while there, he’s kidnapped by an assassin (a hilarious John C. Reilly) who was hired by Aladeen’s uncle Tamir (Ben Kingsley, who has pretty much cornered the market when it comes to playing evil uncles). Though Aladeen loses his beard in the process, he manages to escape the assassin and he soon finds himself lost and unrecognized on the streets of New York City. With the unwitting help of a clueless pro-democracy activist (a very funny Anna Faris), Aladeen attempts to figure out a way to thwart Tamir’s plan to introduce democracy to Wadiya.
Watching The Dictator is something of an odd experience because, while the film itself is full of funny moments and Sacha Baron Cohen shows an admirable willingness to follow his character to the most of logical (and illogical) of extremes, it’s also a strangely forgettable film. It’s certainly funnier than the typical episode of Family Guy (I hate that freaking show, by the way) but it’s nowhere near as profound as a below-average episode of Community (which was the best show on TV last season, in my always correct opinion). Director Larry Charles doesn’t seem to be sure whether he’s trying to make a thought-provoking satire or if he’s just trying to make a broad, gross-out comedy that just happens to have an international backdrop. The end result is a film that is extremely uneven, a film that climaxes with a speech that feels like it was taken straight out of the Occupy handbook despite the fact that the movie has just spent the last 70 minutes poking fun at the Leftist stridency of the Occupy movement through the character played by Anna Faris.
(Personally, I preferred the film when it was simply content to be funny as opposed to when it tried to be important.)
Watching this film, it became apparent to me that, for all of his comedic talent, Baron Cohen works best when his cartoonish (if well-played) characters are placed in a recognizable reality. Baron Cohen needs a “straight man” to play off of and unfortunately, The Dictator doesn’t provide him with that. Everyone’s equally cartoonish in this film and, as a result, the movie makes us laugh but it never really makes us think.
There’s a part of me that always wants to declare that I’m officially “burned out” on Sacha Baron Cohen because, seriously, it’s become rather trendy to claim to be a huge fan of his work. Seriously, I’m at a point now where if I one more person brags to me about how much they loved Borat (always speaking in a tone as if to suggest that only they have seen and appreciated this “obscure” film), I am going to scream. However, every time I get close to getting on twitter for the sole purpose of making snarky remarks about the guy, I see him give a surprisingly good performance in a film like Hugo. The Dictator may not be Sacha Baron Cohen’s best film but I still look forward to seeing what he does in the future.
Or should that be “Okay, so I saw Marvel’s The Avengers ?”
In any case, I wasn’t going to. I was determined not to participate in the so-called “biggest event of the summer” because I’m flat-out tired of seeing Marvel (and, by extension, Disney) rake in hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars off the fruits of Jack Kirby’s imagination while “The King’s” estate gets more or less nothing (although in fairness — or should that be unfairness — they do get some sort of pittance for anything featuring Captain America in it, since he’s officially recognized as Cap’s co-creator along with Joe Simon). Stan Lee’s recent comments about Jack didn’t do much to up my enthusiasm level for this latest blockbuster either, and basically reaffirmed my opinion that he’s a major-league asshole who was lucky enough to glom onto the works a true creative genius that now he doesn’t even have the decency to acknowledge, much less thank, so yeah — it’s fair to say I was pretty cool to this whole thing and found most of the absolute gushing over it that’s been infecting the internet, Twitter in particular, to be annoying in the extreme.
But then the folks who are trying to put together The Jack Kirby Museum came up with a novel idea — donate the price of your ticket to their brick-and-mortar fund, so that future generations can have an actual, physical place to go and experience first-hand the power of the unfettered creative genius that everyone else but his family has gotten rich off. That sounded good to me, so for the price of a $7.50 admission and a matching $7.50 donation, my conscience was suitably assuaged — hey, I guess I always knew there was some price at which my principles could be sold out, but it’s rather depressing to think that it could be so cheap. Still, best not to spend too much time dwelling on that —
Anyway, before I kick over the hornet’s nest of fan opinion, let me state for the record that I found The Avengers to be a perfectly fun, generally-well-executed, thoroughly entertaining superhero romp. But (and you knew there was a “but” coming, didn’t you?) — that’s all it is.
Sorry, assembled hordes of fandom, but it’s not “groundbreaking,” it’s far from “the best superhero movie ever,” (hello? The Dark Knight? Batman Begins? Spider-Man 2? Superman : The Movie?) much less “the best comic book adaptation ever,” (hello again? American Splendor? Ghost World? Sin City? A History Of Violence?) and it doesn’t “prove” that co-writer/director Joss Whedon is a “visionary,” or the “new master of the superhero genre.”
And all those quotes I pulled are, frankly, just a sampling of some of the less effusive praise I’ve seen bandied about online in regard to this flick. I’ve also seen it called “the new benchmark by which all others will be judged,” “the summer blockbuster to end them all,” “a singular work of astonishing breadth and scope,” and “the defining cinematic statement from the undisputed master of the craft.”
In this armchair critic’s opinion, unpopular as saying so is bound to make me, it’s none of those things. Not even close. Whedon has concocted a nice little script and brought it to life in an appealing and pleasant manner, but this isn’t a movie that bears any authorial signature whatsoever — if the credits were blank and someone told you it was directed by, say, Jon Favreau, you’d believe it, because it plays out pretty much exactly the same, in tone and style, as either of the two Iron Man films, and it doesn’t have anything like the individualistic flair of Kenneth Branagh’s Thor or Joe Johnson’s Captain America : The First Avenger. Hell, it even completely overuses the tedious inside-the-helmet perspective shots of Robert Downey Jr.’s head that Favreau is so annoyingly fond of.
In addition, our guy Joss shows no particularly deft touch with his cast. The acting ranges from surprisingly good (Mark Ruffalo positively nails it as Bruce Banner) to completely lethargic (Scarlett Johansson is completely listless as the Black Widow and is the least-convincing Russian superspy in movie history). Downey plays himself, as always, and the talented Jeremy Renner is criminally underutilized as Hawkeye, while both Chris Hemsworth’s Thor and Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, the central villain of the piece, came off much better in Branagh’s flick. Samuel L. Jackson pretty much owns every scene he’s in as Nick Fury, but I don’t think there was ever really any doubt that he would. All told, the whole thing has the feeling of a director who just told his cast “okay — have at it” and then let the cameras roll.
In his favor, fandom’s newest and biggest crush does do a nice, pacy job with the action sequences, of which there are many (although even he can’t make the bog-standard CGI alien invaders that attack the Earth at the end and, yawn, double-cross Loki seem interesting), and doesn’t overplay his hand in the pathos department — he gives each and every character a nice little individual “story arc” that never taxes the imagination too much and remains dimly interesting without seeming intrusive vis-a-vis the “bigger picture” — which is, of course, to show all these folks coming together and fighting a menace big enough to require their assembled talents and abilities. And while Whedon has an annoying habit of defusing every potentially tense situation with a pithy little quip of some sort, on the whole the interplay between the various characters is reasonably well-handled and plausible (as far as these things so).
So The Avengers has some pluses in its favor, as well as some minuses working against it. It’s good, solid, mindless summer entertainment with a nifty, if thoroughly uninspired, visual sensibility; it plays to what the fans want in a generally competent manner; and it keeps you at least modestly interested in the proceedings throughout. It doesn’t have the mythic scope of Donner’s Superman, nor does it redefine the possibilities inherent in the superhero genre in the way Nolan’s Batman films do. It doesn’t take the time to examine the gap between what these characters symbolize and who they actually are in the way that Marvel’s two far superior summer blockbusters of last year (again, Thor and Captain America : The First Avenger) did — hell, it doesn’t even have much of anything to say about the human condition, much less the superhuman condition. And while it’s all pretty fun to look at by and large, it doesn’t have the inventive, groundbreaking, downright operatic visual flair of Burton’s forays into Gotham City. So it’s fair to say that even the things this movie does well have been done a lot better in other films of this same genre.
But it is fun. Not as fun, or as immediate, or as dramatic, or as dynamic, as the classic Avengers stories brought to life by Jack Kirby that it’s essentially a modernized (and, frankly, watered-down — proof that “The King” could do more with a pencil than Whedon can with a couple hundred million bucks) rehash of, but a good time nonetheless — and in a society as desperate for diversion and spectacle as the one we live in, I can certainly understand why it’s such a big hit. But please. Let’s stop pretending it’s anything more than what it is — modestly-well-realized, lively, big-budget summer fun that doesn’t demand anything from its audience apart from kicking back and enjoying the ride. And let’s stop venerating Joss Whedon for what’s essentially a director-for-hire project executed in what’s basically become Marvel’s “house style.” Sure, there’s a good possibility that the financial success of The Avengers means he might be able to write his own ticket in Hollywood from here on out — and more power to him if that’s the case since other projects he’s helmed (most notably the excellent sci-fi TV series Firefly) do indeed show that he’s capable of distinctive, highly imaginative drama — but it’s just as likely that Marvel will replace him on this film’s inevitable sequel with some youthful up-and-comer who can deliver essentially the same product and will work for half the price.
Once the novelty of having all these superheroes on screen together wears off, I predict that we’re going to realize we’ve been had a little bit here — but seeing as how we had a pretty good time in the process, there’s no real harm done.
When Jeff and I recently went to see The Five-Year Engagement, we literally had the entire theater to ourselves. Seriously, that evening, we were apparently the only two people who took a look at the showtimes for the AMC Valley View and say, “Let’s see the Five-Year Engagement.”
Now, I’m not complaining because, quite frankly, we enjoyed having that theater to ourselves. However, later that night, I found myself thinking about the empty theater and the fact that very few of the film lovers in my circle of friends had expressed much interest in The Five-Year Engagement. The critics, in general, have been kind to the film but audiences seem to view it as a Netflix film at best.
That’s a shame because, oh my God, The Five-Year Engagement is such a sweet film! Seriously, I loved this movie!
Produced by Judd Apatow and directed by Nicholas Stoller, The Five-Year Engagement is a romantic comedy about a chef (played, quite well, by Jason Segal) and a psychologist (played by Emily Blunt, who is apparently destined to star in 65% of the romantic comedies released this year) who get engaged and end up remaining engaged for the next five years as the marriage ceremony is continually delayed by everything from Segal’s best friend marrying Blunt’s sister to the couple moving to Ann Arbor when Blunt gets a job working at the University of Michigan. Along the way, various relatives die while still waiting for the blessed event and Segal and Blunt’s relationship struggles to survive against the distractions of everyday life.
The Five-Year Engagement isn’t a perfect film. As often seems to happen with films produced by Judd Apatow, the film is about 20 minutes too long and sometimes the mix of sentimentality and crudeness is a bit awkward. I could have done without an extended sequence in which Jason Segal (after having settled into life in Michigan) is revealed to have briefly turned into a crossbow-weilding survivalist.
However, in the end, those flaws don’t matter because the Five-Year Engagement is, at heart, a sincerely sweet movie. Jason Segal and Emily Blunt have a very real and very likable chemistry. They make for a cute couple and you really find yourself hoping that they stay together. Playing, respectively, Segal’s best friend and Blunt’s sister, Chris Pratt and Alison Brie both provide strong comedic support. One of my favorite moments features Brie attempting to give a toast at Segal and Blunt’s engagement party and quickly dissolving into teary gibberish. (Admitedly, one reason I loved this scene is because I did the same thing when I attempted to give a toast at my sister Megan’s wedding.) Brie and Blunt also have another hilarious scene where they find themselves discussing realtionship matters while pretending to be Elmo and Cookie Monster. It’s an odd but ultimately truthful moment.
Ignore the naysayers. The Five-Year Engagement is sweet movie that deserves to be seen.
