On The Couch 2011 #11: Dinner for Schmucks

More than any other movie I’ve watched on the couch this year, Dinner for Schmucks has been the one I’ve been recommending to people. It had me laughing throughout the whole movie. Paul Rudd is back on my good side after he fell from grace with How Do You Know.

The characters in Dinner for Schmucks fit the actors perfectly and every comedian in the movie batted 1.000 here. Especially funny was The Flight of the Conchords’s Jemaine Clement as Paul Rudd’s potential romantic rival, the sex crazed artist Kieren.

Little Known Movie Trivia: Kieren was based off baseball painter Graig Kreindler. Check out the sexual energy exuding from DiMaggio’s eyebrows.
(check out graigkreindler.com for more awesome art)

My new favorite John Lennon quote is “You may say that I’m dreamer. But I’m not.” How great is that line? I can’t believe that no one has thought of shortening Lennon’s lyric for humor before. I love it.

Not a dreamer.

If you watch this on Blu-Ray, make sure to watch the special feature on the guys who designed the taxidermied mice for the movie. They are as out there as any of the dinner guests.

Watch Dinner for Schmucks. I doubt you’ll regret it.

How They Rank: At the Theater 2010

Here they are, all 52 movies I watched in the theater in 2010, with my thoughts on my top 5 and bottom 5 for the year.

1. Toy Story 3 (viewed 6/15/10):  It’s rare for the third installment of a franchise to be a winner, but Toy Story 3 definitely is. Where else are you going to find toys getting existential trying to figure out what happens when their owner grows up.

2. Youth in Revolt (viewed 2/3/10): Proving once and for all that Michael Cera isn’t just George Michael Bluth.

3. True Grit (viewed 12/23/10): My pick for this year’s Oscar winner. The Coens hit a home run here.

4. The Fighter (viewed 12/29/10): Weeks after seeing The Fighter, I’m still thinking about it. I’m looking forward to seeing this again.

5. Iron Man 2 (viewed 5/13/10): Action movie sequels don’t have to suck. Sometimes they’re just as good as the original.

6. The Town (viewed 10/4/10)

7. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (viewed 8/9/10)
8. Inception (viewed 7/17/10)
9. The King’s Speech (viewed 12/21/10)
10. Winter’s Bone (viewed 12/21/10)
11. Today’s Special (viewed 12/14/10)
12. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (viewed 11/20/10)
13. Exit Through the Gift Shop (viewed 5/31/10)
14. The Social Network (viewed 10/10/10)
15. The Fantastic Mr. Fox (viewed 1/12/10)
16. Inside Job (viewed 12/21/10)
17. Sherlock Holmes (viewed 1/7/10)
18. Easy A (viewed 9/14/10)
19. Mega Mind 3D (viewed 12/3/10)
20. Despicable Me (viewed 7/21/10)
21. Black Swan (viewed 11/18/10)
22. Tangled (viewed 12/31/10)
23. Unstoppable (viewed 12/16/10)
24. 127 Hours (viewed 11/29/10)
25. It’s Kind of a Funny Story (viewed 10/7/10)
26. Love and Other Drugs (viewed 12/7/10)
27. Red (viewed 11/8/10)
28. How to Train Your Dragon 3D (viewed 4/15/10)
29. Kick-Ass (viewed 4/27/10)
30. Fair Game (12/17/10)
31. Hot Tub Time Machine (viewed 3/15/10)
32. Up in the Air (viewed 1/21/10)
33. The Ghost Writer (viewed 3/25/10)
34. An Education (viewed 2/10/10)
35. Due Date (viewed 12/8/10)
36. Cyrus (viewed 7/5/10)
37. Oceans (viewed 7/20/10)
38. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (viewed 1/26/10)
39. The Last Station (viewed 2/18/10)
40. Grease Sing-A-Long (viewed 7/16/10)
41. Snowmen (viewed 5/1/10)
42. Letters to Juliet (viewed 6/22/10)
43. Paper Man (viewed 5/1/10)
44. Date Night (viewed 5/6/10)
45. Little Fockers (viewed 12/13/10)
46. Tron: Legacy 3D (viewed 12/30/10)
47. Alice in Wonderland (viewed 3/8/10)
48. A Single Man (viewed 3/5/10): See The King’s Speech instead to get your Colin Firth fix.

49. How Do You Know (viewed 12/21/10): Not even the combined cuteness of Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson and Paul Rudd could save this one. This was the weakest link of Super Tuesday.

50. Mademoiselle Chambon (viewed 7/2/10): I’m amazed I didn’t fall asleep during this boring French adultery film.

51. Greenberg (viewed 4/10/10): I wasn’t ready for a movie this bad only two days after Remember Me.

52. Remember Me (viewed 4/8/10):  The Wackness of 2010.

At The Theater #48: How Do You Know

To end Super Tuesday, I caught a 7 PM screening of How Do You Know at the AMC on 19th and Broadway with some friends. The final movie of Super Tuesday was also the most disappointing. Oddly, it was also the only movie where I felt no regrets before the movie started. Don’t worry, those came afterwards.

Lesson learned from How Do You Know: Just because I find Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd and Owen Wilson adorable does not mean the combination of the three of them guarantees a good movie. The three of them were adorable in the movie, but they all played adorable but annoyingly dumb characters.

Reese Witherspoon is a cute as How Do You Know is annoying.

How Do You Know is also about a half hour too long. There was no reason for this film to be two hours. I’m still trying to figure out what the plot of the movie was.

That’s the look of an actress who regrets saying yes to a movie role.

Watching How Do You Know felt like watching the filmed version of a first draft of a screenplay. Who greenlit this movie? A friend told me the rumored budget of How Do You Know was $120 million, roughly the same price as Terminator 3. How does he know? I didn’t ask. Big name actors carry big number price tags. Unfortunately they didn’t spend money on a good script. Or was this a case where a movie was rewritten so many times that it ended up a complete mess. Who knows?  How do they know?

“Why are we in this terrible movie?!?”

So that’s it for Super Tuesday. I went from 44 movies at the theater to 48 in one day! I’m feeling good heading into the last week of the year. I’m currently trying to figure out what movies I’d like to see to finish things out. I really want to see True Grit and Somewhere. I said in the past that 2010 in a bad year for movies, but with the exception of How Do You Know, December is really redeeming it.

At The Theater #41: Little Fockers

IT’S FINALLY HERE! THE EPIC CONCLUSION TO THE FOCKERS SAGA! EEEEE! AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

Okay, maybe I’m overreacting a little bit. No one is going to line up for a midnight screening of the latest sequel to Meet the Parents.

I loved Meet the Parents, but I have yet to make it all the way through Meet the Fockers. I’ve tried. More than twice. The closest I’ve come so far was making it to just around the halfway mark when it was on TBS recently. Amazingly, never finishing Meet the Fockers had no impact on my ability to understand Little Fockers.

Meet the Fockers had a similar drop in quality from Meet the Parents as Father of the Bride 2 had from Father of the Bride. Thankfully there wasn’t a equal drop in quality with Little Fockers. Little Fockers was about as good as Meet the Fockers. This bodes well for Father of the Bride fans who never gave up faith for a third movie.

The major upsides of Little Fockers are definitely Robert DeNiro and Owen Wilson reprising their roles from Meet the Parents. If they decide to make another Fockers movie and Robert DeNiro doesn’t want to do it, they need to call it a day. Without DeNiro’s ex-CIA Type A father-in-law Jack Byrnes, Little Fockers would fall completely flat on its face.

I really like Owen Wilson in roles like this one, where he plays the super-nice guy who still manages to dick people over. He always means well, and his heart is in the right place, but he never quite seems to get the negative impact he has on people around him. I’m pretty sure he plays the same character in the soon to open How Do You Know. Wait, I’m pretty sure he plays that character all the time. I’m cool with that.

According to a recent unscientific poll, I am the only one of my friends who wants to see How Do You Know.

Is anyone else always surprised by how buff Ben Stiller is? My friend and I were talking about this after Little Fockers. Maybe it’s because he’s usually not in tight fitting clothes, but then WHAM, there’s a scene where he’s wearing a snug t-shirt and you’re sitting in the theater thinking, “Damn! Gaylord Focker is ripped!”

I’m not sure who decided December 2010 would be the month of boner pill movies, but here we are. First there was the Anne Hathaway’s breasts/Viagra vehicle Love and Other Drugs and now there’s Little Fockers, where Greg Focker earns extra money by promoting an off-brand Viagra. Both movies deal with the side effect of the pill working too well, and to their credit, both have different, but still very funny takes on what happens next.

Better title than Pequeño Fockers?

I can’t honestly recommend spending money on seeing Little Fockers. Wait until TBS does a marathon and catch it right after you finally finish watching Meet the Fockers.