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On The Couch #18: The Lives of Others

If The Lives of Others isn’t in your Netflix queue already, go add it right now. Seriously, right now. I’ll wait.

Okay, welcome back. Wait, what do you mean what do I mean welcome back? You didn’t click away from this page to Netflix and add it to your queue? You were just waiting me out? Wow, I thought we had a trust thing going here. Guess I was wrong. Okay, hopefully I can convince you to add it by the end of this entry. But I’m still a little hurt.

The Lives of Others takes place in 1984 East Berlin and is about Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, who starts the movie as the textbook definition of asshole East German bureaucrat. He specializes in sniffing out enemies of the state and is willing to bury people for the slightest infractions against East Germany. If this guy was a cop, he’d be the kind that gave out jaywalking tickets on empty streets.

For zie last time, I um not Herr Moby!

Because of his tenacious zealotry to the state, HGW is his boss’s top choice to spy on and build a case against Georg Dreyman, a playwright who is believed to be conspiring to produce propaganda against East Germany. Over the course of listening in on Dreyman’s daily life, HGW’s heart grows three sizes. Combine this with HGW finding out the motives of his bosses have more to do with greed and lust than preserving the state and HGW begins to subtlety turn on them.

All this makes for a very intense and sometimes thrilling drama, but there is one big unintended comedic bit. HGW’s boss, Grubitz, looks exactly like Principal Ed Rooney from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. He’s got it all: the awkwardly parted red hair, the bushy moustache, the gray suit. During a tense confrontation between Grubitz and HGW, I was hoping that Yello’s Oh Yeah was going to start playing. Sadly, this movie has exactly zero scenes of Grubitz being chased by a Doberman.

Vee are listening to youuuu…

The Lives of Others takes place in 1984 East Berlin, but draws parallels to the United States. How different are the Stasi round-ups from the internment of the Japanese in World War 2? A viewer could also see this movie as a warning about how slippery the slope is between the Patriot Act and the East Germany of the 1980s.

While writing this post, I came across a listing on IMDB saying that there is an American remake of The Lives of Others slated for 2011 release. The details were scant, but I did see that it will have the same writer, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, which is a good sign. This new version will take place in America and be about an FBI agent. It will be interesting to see when it will take place, post-9/11? The 1980s? The 1990s when McVeigh and Koresh were in the headlines?

My recommendation is to not wait for the remake and add The Lives of Others to the top of your Netflix queue today. And don’t worry about your shenanigans earlier at the top of the page; we’re cool.

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At The Theater #18: Date Night

I should have known that Date Night was going to be a disappointment right at the first scene. Steve Carell, playing New Jersey accountant Phil Foster, is in a meeting with that annoying SNL couple that call each other babe all the time and ignores whoever they’re talking to. A couple of questions: Does anyone anywhere find these characters funny on SNL? Does even Jason Sudeikis hate these characters enought that they had to replace him from a role he started on SNL?

Speaking of SNL, Kristin Wiig also has a minor part in the movie. You might not recognize her, because she’s not playing the Target Lady. Until now I was convinced that the Target Lady was the only character Kristin Wiig could play. I can’t be the only one who thinks that every one of her characters on SNL is the Target Lady in a different outfit.

When your movie revolves around how boring the main characters’ marriage is, you have to be very careful to not bore your audience. Unfortunately, no one seems to have told the makers of Date Night this. The movie has some very funny comedic high points, but for the most part, it just meanders around why Phil and Claire’s marriage is a snooze fest, which causes those scenes to be a bit of a snooze fest.

I can’t hate on Date Night completely. Looking at the graph, you can see that I thought there were some very funny bits in it. And it’s true, the jokes that work really work. There just aren’t enough of them, and one of the jokes that worked, Phil and Claire being given a hard time about taking another couple’s dinner reservation, is beaten to death so badly that I think they rehash it more times in the movie than I saw it seeing the preview a few times. I don’t feel bad about spoiling this joke, since it’s in the preview, but I won’t spoil any of the other parts I found funny, because that will just rob the humor out of them if you see the movie, and Date Night doesn’t have that many funny parts to spare.

Mila Kunis and James Franco are great as the couple whose dinner reservation Phil and Claire steal. In fact, their spot in Date Night’s preview made me want to see the movie. Unfortunately, they’re not in the movie much longer than they are in the preview. I really hate when that happens, when the characters in a preview that convince you to see a movie are barely in the movie and the preview gives away most of the funny parts.

We’re in this blog post longer than we’re in this movie.

Ray Liotta plays a mob boss in Date Night. Don’t make this the reason you see Date Night. If you loved Good Fellas to the point that you want to see him play a gangster again, watch Good Fellas again; you’ll definitely enjoy it more. If you want to see him do comedy, find a theater showing Snowmen; he’s funnier in that.

We saw the movie at Park Slope’s Pavilion movie theater. Avoid this place. Tickets are $12 and the theater does not live up to the ticket price. The seats that aren’t broken smell of a fine mix of mildew and body odor. The theaters are about the size of your living room and the screens aren’t much bigger than a home projector. I remember enjoying this theater in the past; I used to find it charming in the same way I find the Cobble Hill Theater charming. It was definitely one of Brooklyn’s best theaters not too long ago. I don’t know what’s caused it to drop into such a state of disrepair.

After Date Night, Julie mentioned that she thought we saw more good movies in 2008 when we first did this movie a week thing than we are so far this year. I’m hoping this trend reverses soon.

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At The Theater #17: Paper Man

While I didn’t see Paper Man at the Tribeca Film Festival, it is a Tribeca Film Festival film that I saw while the festival was running. We made it back to Brooklyn from our free Snow Men screening with time to spare to catch the 9:30 Saturday night screening of Paper Man at Brooklyn Heights Cinemas. Woo-hoo! Double feature!

I probably would have liked Paper Man less if I hadn’t seen Greenberg. While watching Paper Man, I couldn’t help but think “This is what Greenberg would be like if that movie wasn’t so annoying.” Similar to Greenberg, Paper Man is about a man with mental issues and without social skills who finds himself trying to get by in a new environment. Greenberg has an awkward relationship a personal assistant played by Greta Gerwig. Paper Man’s Richard Dunn, played by Jeff Daniels, has an awkward friendship with a local high school student played by Emma Stone. Greenberg vents his frustrations to his English best friend who didn’t talk much. Dunn vents all his frustrations to his imaginary best friend named Captain Excellent, a superhero played by Ryan Reynolds. In every one of these match-ups, Paper Man wins. But then again, being better than Greenberg isn’t that much of a compliment.

I wasn’t excited about Ryan Reynolds being cast as Green Lantern Hal Jordon in the upcoming Green Lantern movie. Out of all the stars of Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place, I thought Nathan Fillion would have been the much better choice as Hal Jordan. Besides looking like Hal Jordan, Fillion proved he can do outerspace action in Sci-Fi’s short-lived Firefly.After seeing Ryan Reynolds here, I’m more excited than I was before about Reynolds as Green Lantern. The guy can carry himself like a superhero. Though the costume designer in Paper Man seems to have borrowed so much from Miracleman for Captain Excellent that I kept expecting him to yell out “Kimota!”

Never let your imaginary friend drive, even if he is a Super Friend.
The best part of Paper Man is Emma Stone explaining how easy it is to make soup. She explains that soup is the easiest thing to make, because you just take all the things you have lying around that aren’t maybe in tip-top shape anymore and instead of throwing them in the garbage, cook them in some chicken broth and you’ve got soup. Hmm, that sounds less appetizing than how she described it.
I’m really glad I didn’t pay $16.50 + $3.50 to see this movie. There’s an important lesson to be learned from this weekend. Very few movies are probably worth what Tribeca Film Festival charges for tickets. You’re better off waiting until they make it to your theater or to Netflix. That said, in a little less than a year I’ll once again be anticipating the Tribeca Film Festival and the Tribeca Family Festival coming to town.
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At The Theater # 16: Snowmen

Late April brings the Tribeca Film Festival to New York City. When the film guide became available, I pored through it, surprised by how many movies I wanted to see. Last year, I couldn’t find one movie that caught my interest. This year, I had a list of 40. I narrowed this way-too-large list to a much more manageable list of three movies I’d really want to see if I could score tickets. With tickets to this year’s festival running $16.50 each, $4 above the average cost of a movie in Manhattan and $6.50 more than I’m used to paying in Brooklyn, I knew I’d be able to justify seeing one movie.

That number dwindled when I tried buying tickets to Beware the Gonzo, a teen comedy that looked enjoyably quirky. On top of the $16.50 ticket price, there was a processing fee of $3.50 per ticket. Stacked on top of that, there was another $4 charge to print my tickets at home. How is that it costs four bucks for me to use my own printer, ink and paper to print my tickets? The prospect of paying $22 per ticket had me convinced that I wouldn’t see any movies at the Tribeca Film Festival this year.

This is why it seems odd that I saw two movies from the festival on Saturday.

Despite not seeing any movies at the festival, I was happy to attend the Tribeca Family Festival on Saturday, May 1. If you’ve never been to the Tribeca Family Festival, you should definitely go to it next year. It’s my favorite part of the Tribeca Film Festival and my favorite NYC street fair. Unlike most street fairs, it’s not the same sausage booth, beer booth and sock vendor repeated for a mile. Instead, the Tribeca Family Fest has good food provided by nearby restaurants, live entertainment, and cool demo booths from companies like ESPN and the NY Knicks. Bloomberg even gives out free popcorn. That’s the company Bloomberg, not the mayor. And, as I’ve mentioned in the past, I love popcorn.

While I was passing a random live entertainment stag, the director of Snowmen, Robert Kirbyson, walked on with Josh Flitter, one of the stars, and announced they were handing out free tickets to a screening later tonight. Snowmen wasn’t on my list of festival movies to see, long or short. But in my book, a free movie = score!

Snowmen centers around a boy named Billy, a cancer patient who wants to leave a lasting legacy that will cause people to remember him after he’s gone. Most of the people in the audience at the Snowmen screening were either elementary school kids or their parents. Before the movie started, Robert Kirbyson said that the movie is uplifting, but also acknowledged that it deals with some heavy subject matters. He wasn’t kidding. Five minutes in, Billy and his two best friends discover a dead body in a mound of snow. That’s all it took for the kid in front of me to demand that his mom take him somewhere, anywhere else.

It’s too bad he left, because he missed a good movie. The director was right. The movie does deal with some heavy topics, which reminded me of Stand By Me, in that they’re both movies that are aimed at kids, but neither talks down to the audience and deals with more meaningful topics than most kids films.

There are some big stars in Snowmen. Ray Liotta is great as Billy’s dad, a used-car salesman who does everything to get on camera and push his car lot. It’s the kind of over-the-top role that is perfect for Liotta. Doug E. Doug and Bobb’e J. Thompson play Billy’s recently transplanted neighbors from Jamaica. If I knew earlier that Doug E. Doug was in this movie, it would have at least made it to the long list of movies to see based on that alone. There aren’t enough movies with Doug E. Doug in them. The guy was awesome in Cool Runnings and helped make Bill Cosby’s late-90’s CBS sitcom Cosby a funny show.

There’s a scene in the movie where Billy and Bobb’e J. attempt to set an airtime record for sledding off a huge ramp (with disastrous results) and I couldn’t help by think that they should have first asked Doug E. Doug for advice. The guy was on the Jamaican Bobsled team, after all.

I just heard the wildest thing, Jamaica’s got a bobsled team.

If you have kids, I recommend taking them to see Snowmen if it makes it to a theater near you. I wouldn’t recommend it for kids under 8. The heavier topics might be too much for them and I doubt they’d have patience for the slower scenes, though they’ll definitely get a kick out of the giant snowball fight.

Despite Ray Liotta, Robert Kirbyson and Josh Flitter being in attendance, there was no Q&A afterwards, which is too bad, because the post-movie Q&A with the director and cast is always a movie festival treat. But that did leave us enough time to get the next movie we would see that night, so who am I to complain?

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On The Couch #17: Raising Arizona

If this week has taught me anything, it’s that Nicolas Cage isn’t the best father-figure out there. The question isn’t if he’s a bad movie-father (he’s not); it’s in which movie is he a worse father, as Kick-Ass’s Big Daddy or Raising Arizona’s H.I. “Call me Hi” McDunnough?

Round 1: In the Beginning…

Let’s start out with his past life. In both Kick-Ass and Raising Arizona, Nic Cage plays a former inmate. Kick Ass’s Damon Macready, the man who will one day become Big Daddy, was an honest cop set-up by a dirty cop on bogus drug charges and gets sent to maximum security prison.

In Raising Arizona, Hi McDunnough is in and out of jail constantly for smaller crimes, but they are crimes he actually committed, so we’ll have to give him the point.

Someone skipped career day. 

Winner*: Hi McDunnough!
*Winning in these categories isn’t a good thing.

Round 2: Looks

Hi McDunnough – creepy moustache, weird haircut.

I call it Wolverine-chic.

Big Daddy – creepy moustache, cosplay outfit.

 
 “Okay, honey. Time for daddy to teach you about eyeliner.”

Winner: Tie!

Round 3: Parenting Style

Big Daddy is very hands on. He makes his daughter memorize details about weapons and shoots her while she’s wearing a bullet-proof vest, because when you’re training your daughter to become a deadly avenger of the night, preparation is everything.

Hi is the opposite. Call him too laid back, but you have to give him credit in that he never fires live rounds at Nathan Jr.

Leaving the baby in the middle of a highway might cost you a point.

Winner: Big Daddy!

Round 4: Known Associates

On Big Daddy’s side, you have Kick-Ass, who is about as useful as the Hi’s pals the Snoats brothers, but with worse hair. Then there’s Red Mist, who also like the Snoats brothers can’t be trusted. Big Daddy has a cop in his corner, his former partner who attempts to double as his conscious. Unlike Hi, Big Daddy has Hit-Girl in his corner, who has to be the baddest-ass middle school kid outside of my favorite Japanese novel Battle Royale.

This book is awesome. Just skip the movie version; it’s crap. 

On Hi’s side, you have Ed McDunnough, Hi’s wife. She’s a former cop, that’s a plus. And then you have his two jailhouse buddies, Gale and Evelle Snoats. If you were to judge a man based on the rockabillyness of his hair, then Gale would be considered a titan. But really, these guys are so bumbling, they make Hi look highly educated. And they can’t be trusted. But their double-cross doesn’t lead to Hi’s demise, so…

Winner: Big Daddy!

Round 5: Enemies

A man’s enemy can put his family in danger. Just ask Hit-Girl as she was being shot through an open window. Big Daddy is taking on the mafia. As far as NY crime goes, that’s about as big as it gets. He also has to contend with double-crossing heroes and people constantly telling him that he ripped off his look from Batman.

Seriously man, you owe Batman some royalties.

Hi McDunnough has the law to contend with, but the law in his locale shoots as straight as a Cobra trooper. But hot on his heels is The Lone Biker of the Apocalypse. He looks like an extra from Mad Max, bleeds fire, and is armed to the teeth. He even wears a pair of ashen baby sneakers on his chest like a trophy. The guy is hardcore. I would prefer to go up against the combined organized crime families of Kick-Ass, The Sopranos and The Simpsons before facing The Lone Biker of The Apocalypse.

While it looks badass, it turns out strapping grenades to yourself isn’t the best idea.

Winner: H.I. McDunnough!

Round 6: The Kids are Alright

In the end, the best way to judge someone’s parenting skills? Check out the kids. Nathan Jr. goes on to be a star football player in school and gets into college. Hit-Girl ends up attending middle school with Kick-Ass as a normal girl, though one who doesn’t take any crap from bullies. Both kids seem reasonably well-rounded. Sure, Hit-Girl is going to have some very costly therapy sessions later in life, but with parents like the Arizonas, the same could be said for Nathan Jr.

Catholic school is a lot tougher than it was in my day.

What’s really interesting is that in both cases, Nic Cage gives up his parenting duties. I think even he knows he’s a bad father. Hi McDunnough returns Nathan Jr. to the Arizona family and Big Daddy also relinquishes his parenting duties, though not by his own choice. In the end, the result is the same: No Nic Cage = well adjusted child.

Winner: Tie!

Tallying that all up, we have 4 points for Hi McDunnough and 4 points for Big Daddy.

It looks like we have a tie! That’s right, if you’re in a movie where Nic Cage is your father, run and don’t look back, because chances are, you’re not going to have a good childhood. Especially if he has a creepy moustache.

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At The Theater #15: KIck-Ass

Leaving the 34th Street AMC Theater after watching Kick-Ass, I couldn’t help but think “Ugh, that was way too much popcorn.”

Before the movie, I bought a large popcorn to split with Julie and Bryan, and put in on the ground in front of my seat as I got situated. Unfortunately, someone sat down in the seat in front of me and leaned back, sending my popcorn flying. Picking up the bag, I saw that about a quarter of the bag’s contents were now in a nice pile between my legs. This is all before I took a piece of popcorn out of the bag.

I went back to the concession counter, explained what happened and asked the guy if he wouldn’t mind topping me off. He said sure, and while refilling the bag, realized it was a large and told me that there are free refills on large popcorns. Still, it was nice that initially he was refilling the bag out of kindness than out of policy-awareness, so I’m giving the concession staff at this AMC a big A+.

The free refill policy would prove to be my undoing.

By the time we hit the Iron Man preview, half our popcorn was gone, and not to the floor this time. I turned to Bryan and Julie and asked if I should get a refill before the movie started. They didn’t answer, so I asked again. Julie pointed out that if I have to ask more than once if we should refill the popcorn, clearly I want more popcorn. Point taken. I ran out for a refill.

As I was walking to the concession stand, I took fistfuls of popcorn in my mouth. Hey, if they’re going to refill it to the top, then I’m just leaving popcorn in the bin if I don’t do this, right?

The concession guy filled me back up quickly and I made it back inside the theater, only missing half of the Iron Man preview, which I’ve already seen many, many times in the past few weeks.

About a third of the way through Kick-Ass, our Sprite was running low and Julie decided to get a refill. The popcorn was about half full, so I asked her to refill that as well. Hey, if she’s going out there anyway, right?

At the 1:10 mark, my stomach said “Please, I beg you, no more popcorn.” I complied. Looking at the bag, there was about half a bag left. I think that both times we refilled, there was about a third to half a bag remaining. That’s a lot of popcorn not in the bag. It seemed fitting that I had a mound of popcorn under my feet, because at this point, I felt like I was all popcorn.

Take heed of my tale of woe and be wary of the free refill policy at AMC.

My paper bag downfall.

“Um, that’s great, but I’m here to read about Kick-Ass.” Right. Sorry about that.

At the start of Kick-Ass, Dave Lizewski, the boy who would be Kick-Ass, asks why out of all the comic book fans out there, how come no one decided to start running around in a costume fighting crime. After getting stabbed and run over on his first mission as Kick-Ass, he seemed to answer his own question. The beginning of the movies is a warning to fanboys: Unless you find yourself bitten by a radioactive spider or discover that your parents were from a far off, doomed planet, leave the crime-fighting to the cops, especially if you’re underweight and have no fighting skills to speak of.

While the violence starts out pretty realistic as first (underweight crime fighter with no fighting skills is quickly sent to the hospital), it gets more and more over the top as the movie goes on. They’re pretty slick about it though. I didn’t notice how ridiculous things had gotten until towards the end, when Hit-Girl runs down a hallway, firing her handguns until they’re empty, pops the cartridges, tosses two new ones in the air, catches them inside the guns and keeps firing.

I wonder what goes through your mind as a tween beats the crap out of you.

If they make a Kick-Ass sequel, they should let Kick-Ass retire to the countryside and focus solely on Hit-Girl. Hit-Girl is awesome to the same extent that Kick-Ass is annoying. Anytime she came on screen, the audience in my not so packed theater howled. But what else would you expect when an 11-year old dressed like Robin calls someone a cunt before eviscerating him.

Kick-Ass 2 Hit-Girl: The Movie

I’m putting it out there right now; you will see at least one Hit-Girl at whatever Halloween party you find yourself at this year. It’s going to be this year’s Heath Ledger as The Joker.

Speaking of The Joker, towards the end, Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s character, Red Mist, says “Wait ‘til they get a load of me,” and I thought “How many lines are they going to steal from Batman?” until I realized that is was Bryan who said “Where does he get those wonderful toys?” and not someone onscreen.

I enjoyed Kick-Ass and think you should see it if you like movies based on comic books (in which case you’ve probably already seen it), the action scenes in films by Robert Rodriguez, or movies about fathers with creepy moustaches and the daughters who kill for them.

I don’t know what’s scarier, the wall of guns or the moustache.
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On The Couch 16: The Informant!

Yes! Finally! A Matt Damon movie where my girlfriend isn’t swooning over him. It would be pretty hard to in The Informant! Damon sports a bad toupee, big glasses, and a moustache. His character, Mark Whitacre looks like your middle-aged distant relative that dances funny at family weddings. You know who I’m talking about. That guy that you’re not sure how you’re related and you rely on your parents to remind you of his name because you only see him once every three years. Yeah, that guy. In other words, Matt Damon looks nothing like Matt Damon. He pulls a Charlise Theron from Monster in this movie, but in a funny way, and not a “Oh my God, are you effing kidding me? That’s Charlize Theron?!? No, burn my eyes out!” kind of way.

According to my girlfriend, this is my competition. Nice.

In The Informant!, Mark Whitacre works for ADM, a company that’s responsible for putting corn in everything we eat. The government decides to go after them, not for poisoning us with a diet of corn, this isn’t Food Inc., but for being involved in a global price-fixing scheme. When Scott Bakula, inhabiting the body of an FBI agent, shows up to investigate the company on a different matter, Whitacre spills the beans to him about the price-fixing and starts working as possibly the worst FBI informant ever. Somehow while loudly speaking into his microphone, showing off his briefcase tape recorder to an independent contractor, and letting people know about a raid in advance, he manages to help the FBI build a case against ADM. He also manages to royally screw himself over with all parties involved. Remember kids, greed plus ineptitude will get you into trouble.

Bad dog! Give Matt Damon back his toupee!

The Informant! has a lot of stand-up comedians playing FBI agents. I don’t know if this was done as a dig against the FBI. “Those FBI guys are a bunch of clowns!” Stephen Soderbergh might have yelled, “Let’s cast a bunch of stand-up comedians and the Quantum Leap guy as agents to show that!” “Wait, why include Scott Bakula? His show was sci-fi, not comedy,” his casting agent would ask. “Because Quantum Leap was ridiculous!” screams Soderbergh. “Have you ever seen it? He’s helped by a hologram holding a solar calculator with a bunch of Legos glued to it! Get me Bakula!” I’m not sure why I pictured Soderbergh being so maniacal in that casting meeting.  It might be because of the exclamation point at the end of The Informant!

This is what future-tech looked like in the late 80’s.

But there really are a lot of comedians playing FBI agents. This is quite possibly the second most serious role Joel McHale has ever played (the first of course being the Loan Officer in Spider-Man 2). Patton Oswalt and Paul Tompkins are also feds in this movie. It was like the government went out and recruited based on how many times Comedy Central plays your stand-up special at 3 AM.

You can judge the seriousness of any Joel McHale role based on the height of his hair.

Writing this entry, I’ve discovered how annoying it is for a movie to have punctuation in its title. Writing The Informant! in this sentence makes it look like I don’t know that capitalization goes at the beginning of a new sentence.

Since the majority of the movie takes place between 1992 and 1995, and Soderbergh uses specific dates on the screen, I was able to watch this movie and figure out what I was doing in my own life while these events were playing out. “Oh, look at that. The FBI raid happened on June 26, 1995. That was 2 days after my birthday and the day after I graduated high school.” Or… “April 2, 1992? That was the same night I stayed home from a school dance and watched a Return of the Jedi for the 978th time.” Needless to say, I wasn’t that popular in high school, but you know what? I have all my hair, no gut and no child molester moustache, so take that Matt Damon in The Informant!

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At The Theater #14: How to Train Your Dragon 3D

While watching How to Train Your Dragon 3D, I couldn’t help but think that the whole movie was a big metaphor for coming out of the closet. Hiccup, the main protagonist, is not like the other Vikings in his town. He’s not a testosterone fueled muscle-head, which pretty much describes every other man here. He’s shunned by his peers for not being athletic, and his father wishes he wasn’t so different.

After a fierce battle with some dragons, dad leads a Viking horde to hunt the dragons on their home turf and sends his son to dragon-killing school, which if you’re still following my metaphor is the equivalent of one of those camps parents on the religious right send their to kids to purge them of their homosexual tendencies. Hetero-camp, um, I mean dragon-hunting school backfires, as Hiccup realizes that he cannot bring himself to kill any dragons and begins to pacify them in ways he learns from training his secretly kept pet dragon.

Hiccup sneaks off to frolic with his pet dragon every chance he gets. He has to do it in utter secrecy though. If the other Vikings found out that he had befriended a dragon, they would scorn him and kill his new friend. Unfortunately, he is found out, his dragon is locked up and dad wishes he never gave Hiccup his helmet fashioned from Hiccup’s mother’s breastplate. Hey daddy Viking, if you’re so ashamed of your son’s gender identity issues, don’t ask him to wear his mom’s bra on his head and call it a helmet. Just sayin’…

In the end, as can be expected in these stories, Hiccup proves to his dad that his skills as a dragon whisperer are worthwhile when Hiccup and his pet dragon save the day. This is the equivalent of the dad finding out that his son might be gay, but damn, the kid can still play football.

I graduated high school with a guy who looked
a lot like America Ferrera’s character Astrid.
Skirt by Hot Topic.
Boots by Ugg.

Don’t agree with that metaphor? How about this one? How to Train Your Dragon 3D is all about the recent financial crisis. Late in the movie, it’s revealed that the dragons aren’t actually evil, they raid the Vikings’ sheep pens not for themselves, but for a big-bad king-dragon that will eat them if they don’t bring it something else. Big-bad king dragon is your too-big-to-fail bank like AIG or Citi. The other dragons are smaller banks that are trying not to be eaten up by the big boys, and the sheep are the taxpayers dollars needed to prevent big-bad from exploding out of his mountain home and wrecking havoc with the sheep and armor markets. The Vikings are the US taxpayers, left footing the sheep bill for big-bad.

Metaphors aside, the oddest thing about How to Train Your Dragon 3D is that despite being the scariest dragon the Vikings have ever encountered, so dreaded that no Viking has ever seen one and lived to tell the tale, the terrifying Night Fury looks like a Digimon that has been upgraded with the cuteness of Puss N’ Boots from Shrek. Since the next dragon down the fright-o-meter ignites itself on fire when attacking you, I was expecting something a little less cute. But the night fury does fly too fast to see while shooting proton torpedoes out of its mouth, so I can see why the Vikings, with their axes and wooden shields, when faced with a dragon sporting the firepower of a the Millenium Falcon, would be on the scared side.

The Night Fury: so deadly, so cuddly.

I cannot begin to explain how happy I am that this movie was good. After a week of some very bad movies back-to-back, I didn’t think I could take another disappointment. That one-two punch of Remember Me and Greenberg did me in. But How to Train Your Dragon 3D definitely gets a thumbs up and a “go see it” recommendation. I would put it up there with Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs as an all-ages movie that adults will enjoy.

We saw How to Train Your Dragon 3D at Cobble Hill Cinemas. A word of warning to anyone seeing this, or any 3D movie at Cobble Hill: the usual Tuesday/Thursday discount of $6.50/ticket does not apply. I thought they would tack on $3.50 to the discounted price to cover the 3D glasses and bring the total up to $10, but that wasn’t the case. All 3D movies there are $12, now matter what showtime you see. When you consider that a regular movie will run you $12.50 in Manhattan, and a 3D movie $15-$16, Cobble Hill is still a deal. Plus it’s a great, old school theater. I recommend this theater to everyone…unless you talk during a movie, in which case, have fun at Court Street.

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On The Couch #15: Bruno

Wow, this has been a really bad weekend for me and movies. Four days straight of watching movies, and the best of the bunch is Couple Retreat. Couples Retreat! I could not have predicted this going into the weekend. If you check the rankings to the left, you’ll see that the bottom movie on bost lists came from the past four days.

If you judge a comedy based on how much you laugh, then Bruno is definitely a failure. I was shocked, and I mean shocked, by how unfunny the movie was based on how hilarious I thought the Borat movie was the first time I saw it. Is Sacha Baron Cohen resting on his laurels? Did he phone this one in?

Like Borat, the best comedy in this movie comes when Cohen, in his Bruno character, interacts with people who don’t know they’re being put-on. Bruno goes on a daytime talk show with an entirely African-American audience, and plays show-and-tell with the African baby he traded for a limited edition iPod. Bruno interviews Paula Abdul (and in the deleted scenes, Pete Rose and LaToya Jackson) using Mexican gardeners for chairs. He even hosts an anti-gay rally full of rednecks that turns into a man-on-man sex show. But that’s maybe 12 minutes of good content in this hour and 21 minute movie.

One of the few funny scenes in Bruno.

Unfortunately, Cohen goes for more of the shock value comedy that made for a very funny scene in Borat, but largely falls flat here. In the naked wrestling scene in Borat, I thought a lot of the comedy came from the extremely large black rectangle they used to blot out Borat’s penis. Since the movie was “made” by Borat, it came across as the fictional host running wild with his ego. Cohen saw the laughs generated by that scene though and decided to fill Bruno with numerous scenes of male genitalia and the extremes of homosexual sex, some involving Rube Goldberg-like machines. It comes across as filler though, and didn’t generate more than a few laughs from me. It’s very awkward and off-putting to watch a comedy and not hear any laughter.

The Blu-ray is packed with bonus content. There are over 40 minutes of deleted scenes. Some of the scenes are more boring and monotonous than what made it into the movie, but some are funnier than the final package. Why not include both the Pete Rose and LaToya Jackson interviews. Both showed how out of touch celebrities, even minor ones like Jackson can be. Both were more than content with sitting on bent over Mexicans as chairs, with Rose even moving one into position. LaToya Jackson was even willing to eat sushi off the body of naked Mexican gardener; she only balked once Bruno took her brother Michael’s number from her phone.

Another shining spot in the deleted scenes was Bruno’s attempt to bring about peace in the Middle East by talking to representatives from Israel and Palestine. In it, he confuses hummus and Hamas, which I thought was one of the funniest things on the disc, but after watching the hour and 21 minute movie followed by 40 minutes of deleted scenes, maybe my expectations were lowered.

If you liked Borat and you still haven’t seen Bruno, I’m guessing that like me before this weekend, you’re going to ignore any warnings about the low quality of the movie and see it anyway. But really, you’re better off without it. Don’t want to see Borat again? Watch Couples Retreat instead. At least there you’ll get a few more funnier jokes and see Kristen Davis in her underwear.
In Couples Retreat vs. Bruno, Couples Retreat wins.
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At The Theater #13: Greenberg

Dear Noah Baumbach,

In your attempt to create a movie that could be described as Garden State for old people, you succeeded in some respects. Unfortunately, you decided to mimic possibly the worst parts of Garden State in Greenberg.

You got a lot of the surface elements right. Ben Stiller plays Roger Greenberg, a single guy on a bunch of psych meds who isn’t certain of his place in the world, similar to Zach Braff’s character Andrew Largeman in Garden State. Also like Garden State, he meets a girl who changes the way he looks at and interacts with the world. You included an indie-music heavy soundtrack. You even had Roger stand in front of garish wallpaper in one of the early scenes, but without the matching shirt.
Garden State: like Greenberg for young people…and much better too.

What you failed to capture was any of the charm that made fans of Garden State fall in love with that movie. Before, I could never understand why some of my friends hated Garden State so much. But watching your movie, I now have more of an understanding of their opinion. If the charm of Garden State was lost on a viewer, I think his experience would resemble mine while watching Greenberg.

I find it hard to believe that you could be responsible for one of the best movies I have seen this year, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, and one of the worst, Greenberg. The Fantastic Mr. Fox is full of humor and has a great plot, two things lacking in this movie. Some might point out that The Fantastic Mr. Fox was an adaptation, but to I would point out to them that I have enjoyed your original work as well. I thought The Squid and the Whale was a good movie, even though some of my peers labeled it as pretentious crap. I’d point out the great comedic bits, like anything involving Ivan the tennis instructor or eldest son Walt’s lifting of a Pink Floyd song as his own in a school talent contest. But where’s the humor in Greenberg?
If the point of Greenberg was to show just how unglamorous Los Angeles could be, then congratulations, mission accomplished. Also Greenberg succeeded in making me more afraid of being 40 and single and Couples Retreat did of making me afraid of 40 and married. And if it was any way your goal to make a movie that I would like less than Remember Me this year, good try. You weren’t successful on that last one, but I can appreciate attempt.

The blame for me watching and not enjoying your movie does not only fall on your shoulders. I would like to take to task both the Cobble Hill Cinema and the Angelika Film Center for subjecting me to so many multiple viewings of the Greenberg trailer that it seemed almost preordained that I see this movie. Why were they cramming this movie down their audience’s throats?

Sincerely,

Tuesday Night Movies

PS: Garden State had a better soundtrack