Tag Archives: Cape Cod

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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.