Monthly Archives: September 2010

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On The Couch #34: Taking Woodstock

Now that I’ve seen Taking Woodstock, I’m really surprised by all the negative reviews I remember it receiving when it was first released in theaters. I enjoyed it very much. Ang Lee hit all the right notes in taking this huge event that was the Woodstock concert and bringing it down to the level of how it affected one small town family. Were people expecting a broad comedy because Demetri Martin is in it? Demetri Martin’s stand up can be subtle, so I think he’s a perfect fit here. In this movie, he reminded me a lot of Zach Braff in Garden State with his mannerisms, and they kind of look alike too. Somebody cast these two as brothers. I promise you at least one ticket sale.

Taking Woodstock: Come for Demetri Martin, stay for Liev Schreiber in drag.

Demetri Martin being in this movie was my main reason for wanting to watch it. His stand-up special, Demetri Martin: Person, and his TV series, Important Things, are both hilarious. Seriously, go watch them both.

Dear Comedy Central, Season 3? Please?

When I saw Jonathan Groff’s name in the opening credits, I was excited. I’m a big fan of Spring Awakening. I then forgot he was in the movie until the end credits, when I was trying to find out who played Michael Lang and found out it was Jonathan Groff. Throughout Taking Woodstock, I kept thinking, “The guy playing Michael looks really familiar. Who is that?” I don’t know why my brain completely erased the fact that Groff was in the movie.

Maybe I’m just not used to the vest and mop of curls?

One of my favorite activities (or annoying habits depending on your point of view) is that I like to use the IMDB app on my iPhone to look up trivia about the movies I watch and then share said trivia with my friends. Okay, I can see how this is annoying, but I don’t do it during the movie unless it’s something we’ve all seen a hundred times, so it’s not that bad, right? Right?

In any case, IMDB has a great piece of trivia about Taking Woodstock that I had to share with you (Because I care. And because I can’t stop sharing IMDB trivia. I have a problem. I acknowledge it). The producers of Taking Woodstock had a hard time casting extras, because they wanted people that didn’t look like they went to the gym every day, and had pubic hair. I found that hilarious. I can picture the casting director saying “Okay, I like your lack of muscle tone, now let’s see that forest.”

No Woodstock movie is complete without the orgy on acid scene.
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At The Theater #30: Easy A

What’s the only thing better than a free movie? A free movie that you already wanted to see. I’ve lucked out on quality free movies this year, now batting three for three with Easy A. I probably would have seen Hot Tub Time Machine if it wasn’t free. I definitely would have seen Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World if it wasn’t free. And I was planning on seeing Easy A once it came out, but luckily Bryan, Julie and I were given the opportunity to collectively save about $36 AND see Easy A before its release date.

They’re all wondering where her Zombieland shotgun is hiding.

Easy A is very funny. The plot is basically Can’t Buy Me Love, but from the girl’s point of view. While Emma Stone is great as Olive, the main character of Easy A, the real stand outs are some of the grown-ups. Stanley Tucci is awesome as Olive’s dad. I’ve gone on and on in the past about how fantastic I think The Tooch is, but seriously, I think he’s the only one who could have played the role of Olive’s dad. He fills Olive’s dad with subtext. Without the subtext, the characters lines would come across as arrogant or cocky. But coming from Stanley Tucci, they’re a self-effacing arrogance, which turns out to be very funny and charming.

The Tooch lays down some fatherly wisdom.
…And kinda looks like he’s checking out his daughter’s chest. Not cool, Tooch, not cool.

Thomas Haden Church is the other adult who really brings his A game to his role in Easy A. He plays the teacher that every teacher watching this movie wants to be (I’m pretty sure I saw Bryan jotting down notes). Church’s Mr. Griffith is smart, can joke with his students without seeming like a joke himself and even pulls off cliches well. If I was still in high school, I’d want as my teacher Easy A’s Mr. Griffith over Glee’s Mr. Schuster any day of the week.

I was very happy to see Dan Byrd in this movie. As soon as he came onscreen, I blurted out “Justin!” It doesn’t matter how famous Dan Byrd gets in his career; I will always refer to him by his character’s name on Aliens in America (just as Thomas Haden Church will always be Lowell no matter how long Wings has been off the air).

Despite what this photo might have you believe, Easy A is more Can’t Buy Me Love 2 than Grease 3.

In a year full of plenty of stinkers, Easy A is definitely worth seeing, even if you have to pay to see it.

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On The Couch #33: The Ugly Truth

About three quarters of the way through The Ugly Truth, I sat bolt upright, turned to Bryan and Julie and said “This movie is terrible.”

I’m pretty sure that the only reason we made it all the way through The Ugly Truth is that right before starting it, we watched about five minutes of Taintlight on Netflix instant streaming. Taintlight is a Twilight parody that is, in terms of quality, on the same level as The Room, but without the unintentionally funny parts that keep people coming back to The Room. Taintlight’s average rating on Netflix is one star. One star! Netflix doesn’t let you rate a movie any less than one star. The only reason we even turned it on is because we were trying to figure out if with this movie Netflix was now streaming soft core porn. It’s not, I think. There plenty of soft core porn set-ups in the first five minutes, but they don’t pay off. Taintlight is a failure on every level. The acting is terrible. The writing is worse. If you make it all the way through Taintlight, let me know. I’ll nominate you for whatever is the movie watching equivalent of a Purple Heart.

Taintlight: Making The Room look good since 2010.

It really is a stretch to call The Ugly Truth a romantic comedy. For one, there’s not much romance between the main two characters. Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler spend most of The Ugly Truth hating each other, but (and SPOILERS here…if you care) after two sips of a mixed drink and a Latin dance, Katherine Heigl is all over Gerard Butler in the hotel elevator like a drunk bridesmaid at a wedding after party.

Enroll now is Gerard Butler’s Dance School and learn how to send a woman from hate to lust in one easy to master dance routine!

The story in The Ugly Truth comes across like the first draft of a bad spec script. The writing is completely on the nose. No one means anything other than EXACTLY what they’re saying. The funniest parts of the movie are all in the trailer, and the trailer wasn’t exactly big on the jokes.

Avoid this movie. Not only is The Ugly Truth bad, but after playing the movie, my PS3 refused to run the Netflix instant streaming disc. The Playstation 3 basically said “Taintlight? The Ugly Truth? No. No. No. No more. Uh-uh.” I originally blamed this problem on the recently released PS3 firmware update 3.42, but I’m more than certain that Taintlight and The Ugly Truth are the real culprits here.

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On The Couch #32: It’s Complicated

I didn’t really want to see It’s Complicated at first, but when dad’s other suggestions are Death at a Funeral (No!) and $5 a Day (Huh?), it seemed like a good pick.

I give It’s Complicated an A, for awkwardness. Watching It’s Complicated with my parents was at times more awkward than going to see The Hangover with them. If you know one thing about It’s Complicated, it’s probably that the movie is about people in their upper-middle-ages having sex. People around my parents’ age. Shudder.

Why do people in movies always have so much clothing on post-coitus?

When John Krasinski first appeared in It’s Complicated, I thought they were wasting his comedic talents, since he seemed like little more than a background character. But John Krasinski ended up having the funniest scenes in It’s Complicated. His reaction to finding out about Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin’s affair and his efforts to keep this secret from their children are hilarious. Definitely not wasted casting and I’m very glad they cast him for this part.
 

Don’t rent Denise Richards: It’s Complicated by mistake. Trust me.

 
I liked It’s Complicated more than I thought I would. If you’re stuck at a Red Box trying to decide between this and Green Zone, go with It’s Complicated. Especially if your parents are with you.

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On The Couch #31: When in Rome

I was very surprised by When in Rome. Surprised I saw it. I wasn’t expecting to watch it this year. When in Rome’s poster is just dumb looking. Why’s Kristen Bell biting her finger with that silly look on her face? Why is Rome colored taxi cab yellow?  The preview didn’t help. It made When in Rome come across like a not-so-great romantic comedy that I’d end up catching on TBS one lazy Sunday afternoon.

It was my brother’s fiancé’s pick at the Red Box on this particular rainy Cape Cod evening, which caused When in Rome to move up dramatically in my lifetime movie watching queue. Sorry TBS. Sorry lazy Sunday afternoon.

You want to watch a movie named When in Rome, but you’re not a fan of Kristen Bell? The Olsen twins have the solution!

Out of the two romantic comedies that take place in Italy that I’ve seen this year, When in Rome wins over Letters to Juliet. When in Rome’s main strength over Letters to Juliet is that Kristen Bell and Josh Duhamel have infinitely more chemistry than Amanda Seyfried and Christopher Egan (Any chemistry is infinitely more than no chemistry, right? I know at least one math teacher reads this blog. Can you check my work?).

Kristen Bell and Josh Duhamel are clearly excited that I liked When in Rome better than Letters to Juliet.

When in Rome is also funnier than Letters to Juliet. Even considering Letters to Juliet’s unintentionally hilarious Grandma-likes-to-watch scene, When in Rome still wins. This is mainly because of Will Arnett and John Heder, who are very funny as two of Kristen Bell’s mystically-motivated suitors.

Dax Shepard’s funniest scene (shown here) is in the deleted scenes.

Now that I’ve seen When in Rome, I kind of want to watch Leap Year. I don’t know why these two movies are linked together in my mind. Maybe it’s because both When in Rome and Leap Year came out around the same time this year, have very blah-yet-eerily-similar posters and feature pretty American girls heading to Europe for love. Hopefully Leap Year is more When in Rome and less Letters to Juliet.

Going solely by posters, you might think Leap Year is the same movie as When in Rome, only greener.

When in Rome gets a thumbs up from me, but I still can’t figure out why Kristen Bell is biting her finger like that on the poster.

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On The Couch #30: Green Zone

When the producers of Green Zone saw The Hurt Locker, they must have said “Fuuuuuuuuucccccccccckkkkkkkkkk!” Compared to this year’s Oscar winner, the Green Zone comes across as clichéd and by the numbers.

Better movie.

I think any action movie starring Matt Damon is going to suffer from two inherent problems.

Problem #1: It probably won’t be as good as The Bourne Identity. Even The Bourne Supremacy had this problem. Matt Damon starred in a near-perfect action movie when he was in The Bourne Identity. I think it might be as good as it gets for Matt Damon action films.

Better movie.

Problem #2: In action movies like Green Zone, you’re getting MattScreamy (he really yells a lot in Green Zone) as opposed to MattDreamy (see Hunting, Good Will). If my girlfriend’s reaction is accurate to the wider population, people prefer MattDreamy.

MattScreamy
MattDreamy

This was our second Red Box pick in Cape Cod. The three days of rain we had in Cape Cod made us good friends with the local Red Boxes. This time we picked our movie ahead of time on the website, which prevented others from experiencing from us the most frustrating thing about renting at a Red Box, which is being stuck behind someone using the machine who has no idea what they want and just keeps scrolling through each screen (aka us during our previous Red Box trip).

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On The Couch #29: The Blind Side

Back during Oscar season, I really wanted to watch The Blind Side. But as soon as the Oscars aired, my drive to catch the nominees I hadn’t seen yet dropped dramatically. I had already seen the ones I was very interested in, which left The Blind Side and the movie I will probably never watch, Precious, to fall by the wayside.

I was in Cape Cod this past week on vacation. After a long day of driving, I looked forward to doing something low key our first night there.

Enter: The Red Box. I haven’t had much experience with these rental-DVD vending machines in the past. A friend once showed me that you can look up what’s in a particular Red Box on the internet, which I thought was amazingly cool, but outside of that, I had never used one myself.

I thought it would be difficult to find a movie that my mom, dad, brother, his fiancé, my girlfriend or I hadn’t see already (sorry Youth in Revolt), would want to see (sorry Repo Men), and was family-appropriate (sorry The Crazies). Somehow none of us had seen The Blind Side.

I didn’t realize The Blind Side was based on a book by Michael Lewis until a credit popped up on the screen saying so. Before that, I thought Sandra Bullock’s opening monologue sounded like it was written by a sports writer and not a mom. Turns out it was.

Sandra Bullock was good in The Blind Side, but it’s her character’s young son who steals the show. Jae Head as S.J. Tuohy is so energetic and cute that he should be an honorary Culkin.

If they make a Kathie Lee biopic, this picture alone should get Bullock the part.

Another highlight was seeing the cameo appearances of numerous college coaches, playing themselves at the schools they were coaching at the time. I’m not the biggest fan of college football and could only recognize a couple of them, but I’ve always enjoyed people who aren’t actors playing themselves.

The real life Michael Oher wasn’t too happy with the movie because it portrayed him as barely understanding football before joining his high school team. I can understand his frustration here. But every Hollywood biopic is going to take liberties with the real lives of the people involved, so I guess that was to be expected.

Little know fact: Sandra Bullock was originally cast to play Cyclops in X-Men. Contract disputes caused her to be replaced by James Marsden.

The Blind Side is entertaining. There was surprisingly little football in the first hour of the movie, but the last 20 minutes is pretty much all football. If anything, it’s a good way to spend a couple of hours with your family during a night in Cape Cod.