Monthly Archives: September 2011

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On The Couch 2011 #24: Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement

The look on Anne Hathaway’s face in the poster for Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement isn’t a look of surprise about having to marry to obtain the throne, it’s a look directed at the movie’s viewer, asking “Are you sure you want to watch this? I’ve been in much better movies.” Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement should be shown in the classrooms of film schools around the country so that the future writers and directors of tomorrow can learn what to avoid when crafting their future projects. The jokes in the movie are the perfect storm of corny, dumb and over-explained.

I get that I’m not in the target audience for Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, but that doesn’t make it any less a terrible movie. There are plenty of movies that are aimed at children that can be enjoyed by adults, some even with Princess in their names (The Princess Bride, anyone?) so clearly it can be done. I wasn’t expecting to particularly like Princess Diaries 2, but I also wasn’t expecting to hate it this much either.

What’s remarkable about Princess Diaries 2 is the number of high quality actors it took to help make such a bad movie. Anne Hathaway, Julie Andrews, Hector Elizondo, John Rhys Davies and a very big-haired Chris Pine all share this stinker on their resume.

Trim that bush, Chris Pine!

Without a doubt, the best part of Princess Diaries 2 is Director Garry Marshall explaining during the deleted scenes of why he really liked a scene that wasn’t good enough to make it into this movie that is entirely made of scenes that aren’t good enough to make it into a movie.

Stanley Tucci is not in Princess Diaries 2, despite me thinking he was. But even The Tooch couldn’t make this a good movie. A better movie? Definitely. A good movie? Even The Tooch has his limits.

See this movie if you want to learn how not to write. Or if you have the Rifftrax. Or if you think I’m joking about how bad it is.

The only thing preventing me from ranking this lower than Wedding Daze on the list of movies I’ve seen this year is that Princess Diaries 2 had a song by Julie Andrews in it, her first since her throat surgery in 1997. Though the follow-up duet with Raven-Symone has me second guessing whether or not Wedding Daze was actually the worse movie.

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At The Theater 2011 #11: Conan the Barbarian

A teenage obsession with Magic: the Gathering and a friend who really liked the Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan the Barbarian led to me seeing the new Conan the Barbarian. The Rotten Tomatoes score of 24 had me not expected much. But I’m happy to say I enjoyed Conan the Barbarian. I don’t think it deserves its very low score of 24 on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s a fun summer blockbuster, though with its $10 million first weekend take, I guess blockbuster is the wrong choice of words. But I thought it was good. I enjoyed it a hell of a lot more than I did 300. There were thankfully no extended slo-mo scenes in Conan like 300 used ad nauseum. If I had to choose between Conan and the upcoming Immortals, I’d definitely go with Conan, but maybe that has more to do with Immortals looking like they took 300 and changed the name to Immortals.

We saw the 2D version of Conan the Barbarian. From what I understand, only 20% of the 3D version is actually in 3D. While watching it in 2D, I couldn’t figure out where the 3D parts would be in the movie. Nothing really jumped out at me as an obvious choice.

I think what helped me like Conan was the amount of humor the movie had. It wasn’t as slapstick as Thor, but it had some funny lines throughout that helped make the movie more enjoyable. My favorite line is the movie came right after Conan was about to kill a particularly goblin-looking bad guy, but was stopped by his eventual love interest Tamara. Then the following exchange happens:

Bad guy: You lie, whore!
Tamara: (to Conan) You can kill him now.

There was some unintentional humor in the movie as well. Tamara and the other women who were being guarded by the monks all reminded me of Zoot and her compatriots that Galahad encounters in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I kept waiting for one of them to say “Bad, bad Zoot! Wicked, naughty Zoot.”

The other unintentional piece of humor in the film was Jason Mamoa’s resemblance to Brendan Fraser playing Encino Man during a few scenes in the movie. Basically any time Mamoa was looking up with his head facing down, he looked like Encino Man. I think he did this to look grim, but I just expected the Wuh-hees-el to jump out behind him. Actually, that would have been an awesome cameo, Pauly Shore in barbarian gear. Almost everyone else in the cast looks like they just stepped off the stage of an 80’s hair band concert; the Weasel might have fit right in.

Actual footage from Conan the Barbarian.

Mamoa is an awesome Conan though, and really feels like he’s the character brought to life. Besides just being freaking huge, he’s a good actor.

Rose McGowan plays the evil witch Marique. She looks very, very strange in this movie. Unfortunately, I don’t know how much of it is Marique and how much of it is her own botched plastic surgery. Anyone else see how strange she looked in Law & Order: SVU last season? It’s sad, because I used to have a huge crush on Rose McGowan. She used to be very pretty.

Note: This is not her Conan make-up. Rose, what happened?!?

At one point in Conan the Barbarian, our titular hero has to hunt down the bad guys who are holed up in Skull Cave, which to its credit, looks like a skull. I get the feeling that caves shaped like skulls are as common in Hyboria as Hudson News are in Penn Station. Maybe it would help to name your skull caves a little more specifically so that Conan doesn’t show up at the wrong Skull Cave, which causes him to fail to save the girl and stop the evil wizard, thus sending us into a dark age like no other. This particular skull cave had a water fall coming out of its lower jaw. Why not call it Drooling Skull Cave?

Conan the Barbarian is definitely very bloody. The movie begins with Conan literally being born on the battlefield. Later in the movie, Conan sticks his fingers into the cavity of where one of his adversary’s nose used to be. I cringed. It was awesome.

If you’re looking for a fun movie and like a bit of sword and sorcery mixed with your action, Conan the Barbarian may be the movie for you.s

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On The Couch 2011 #23: Young@Heart

Young@Heart hooked me right at the open. An elderly woman with a British accent is belting out The Clash’s Should I Stay or Should I Go almost as if it were spoken word poetry before being joined in at the chorus by the rest of her choir.

You haven’t heard “Should I Stay or Should I Go” until you’ve heard this lady sing it.

While watching Young@Heart, I couldn’t help but wish that I have the high levels of energy and enthusiasm that these senior citizens have on display throughout the entire film. Even when their choir director Bob picks a song for them that they don’t initially like, they jump into it, learn it and end up singing it in a way that I think any of the writers of the songs featured in the movie ever envisioned them being sung.

But man, Young@Heart is vicious movie. Unlike The Expendables, not everyone is makes it out of this documentary in the end. It was like watching Lost: as soon as I was really into one of the people in the movie, they died. The fact that these are real people and not characters made it even harder to accept. But Young@Heart turns the deaths in the movies into positive messages. At its core, the movie is about living life to its fullest, and picking up and carrying on when a loved one passes away.

I immediately gave this movie five stars after watching it. I kind of want some of the songs on my iPod as well.