Horrible Bosses

“Kill my boss?” Homer Simpson once asked “Do dare live out the American dream?” In this summer’s second big R-rated comedy, Jason Bateman and company attempt exactly that. Though the film deserves some kudos for playing off a revenge fantasy we’ve all had at some point, the movie’s inherent flaw is evident to the astute among you simply by looking at the above poster…

Because Nick (Bateman), Dale (Charlie Day), and Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) are all hampered in their otherwise-enjoyable jobs by their bosses-from-hell, they decide to be proactive and kill their respective antagonists. With the aid of their “Murder Consultant” (Jamie Foxx), they take it too the proverbial ‘man’ (or ‘men’ or maybe ‘men and woman’): Dave Harken (Kevin Spacey) a manipulating schemer and all-around S.O.B., Bobby Pellitt (Colin Farrell) the coked-up douchebaggy son who acquired his company from his father without doing a day’s worth of work in his life, and Julia Harris (Jennifer Aniston) a nymphomaniac dentist who wants to… have sex with Dale…

I feel like I should take a moment before continuing to type in the obligatory “sexual harassment in whatever form is always wrong without exception”. Now that that’s over, I can safely say that it’s more than a bit of a stretch to empathize with a man who wants to kill Jennifer Aniston for the simple reason that she desires sex from him. Heck, if I killed everyone who wanted to have sex with me, the human race would never die. Day’s character’s love for his fiancé become something of fascination, especially when contrasted against the more concupiscent attitudes of the film’s other characters. It would have been much more relatable (certainly ‘humorous’) had Aniston’s character been played by an actress who looked a bit less like, well, Jennifer Aniston…

That being said, this is a movie that thrives on its casting and characters. The jokes are less overtly ‘ha ha’ –one of my favorite lines in the movie is in Bateman’s opening monologue when he says “My grandmother came to this country with twenty dollars in her pocket. She worked hard her whole life and never took shit from anyone. When she died she had turned that twenty dollars into two thousand dollars. That sucks.”– but are still more than enough to bring a knowing smile to the audience’s collective face. Subtle to be sure, but I don’t know about ‘smart’ as it relies a bit too much on the misogynist, racial, and homophobic material (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Not one to necessarily seek out, but that doesn’t mean that if you find it on TV in the not-too-distant future, that you should shy away either…

The Perfect Host

If you’re anything like me, the first thing you’ll want to do after seeing The Perfect Host is hop on a flight bound for Hollywood, break into M. Night Shyamalan’s house, savagely beat him to within an inch of his life, and then force him to watch this film all the while screaming “THIS IS HOW YOU DO TWISTS YOU FUCKING SWINE!!” It’s not as smart as it thinks it is, but I still found it endearingly clever, much, I suppose, as a dinner party with a sociopath would be…

Watching the trailer for last year’s Sundance darling, released theatrically July 1^st, it becomes immediately clear that this is a movie that will live and die around David Hyde Pierce’s performance, and thankfully, he delivers. John Taylor (Clayne Crawford), a bank robber fresh off his latest score -though not unscathed- decides to lay low for the evening by conning his way into the home of Warwick Wilson (Hyde Pierce), who is at that very moment, preparing for a dinner party. After that, things take a turn for the weird…

Take From Dusk Till Dawn, remove the vampires, and add in the organized chaos of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and you’ve got the basic recipe for The Perfect Host. Well, take Tarantino’s writing credit off it too, because the dialogue gets a bit forced after Warwick reveals himself to be psycho. Yes, Hyde Pierce is really able to sell the crazy, but the tension quickly turns into tedium and the psychological cat-and-mouse game taking place before you just becomes rather boring…

Even more so than Hyde Pierce’s acting (he’s really one of those actors I wish would get more roles, because I always seem to like him in whatever he does), it’s the twists that make this movie and they more than redeem for the eventual slowing of the flow as well as the real lack of meaningful character development. It’s a film that doesn’t want to be pigeonholed, dabbling at various points in ‘heist’, ‘mystery-thriller’, and ‘comedy-noir’, though not wanting to be defined as any one of those genres. Not a great movie, but like most decent dinner parties, you’ll walk away amused, puzzled, but ultimately sated…   

The Conspirator

Watching Redford’s stunning and yet hauntingly-threadbare visuals, I couldn’t help but think that this must be what it would be like if Samuel Beckett directed an episode of Law and Order that took place in 1865. The poignance of The Conspirator unfortunately gets lost in the film’s sermonizing, and of course the accents in which those sermons are delivered certainly don’t help…

The film recounts the events following Lincoln’s assassination on April 14^th, 1865, and the trial of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright – formerly ‘Penn’), the mother of the only conspirator to escape capture, and the proprietress of the boarding house where the men met. Focusing around Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy) a young Union war hero and lawyer who is persuaded by his mentor, the Senator and former Attorney General Reverdy Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) to defend Surratt against the kangaroo court her military trial is fast becoming.

Remember the movie To Kill A Mockingbird? Of course you do, but do you remember where the movie (and novel) took place? The answer, if you didn’t know, is Alabama. Now, if you remember To Kill A Mockingbird, then you remember Gregory Peck’s Oscar-winning performance as Atticus Finch, the one Southerner with a moral compass. Do you remember Peck’s Atticus needing to deliver his lines in some put-on Southern patois? No, because he didn’t . Now I’ve nothing against theatric accents (cf. that other moral Alabaman played by Mr. Tom Hanks), but this film just delivered it a little too thick. Throwing out the fact that McAvoy is a Scot (his accent is actually fine in that Hugh-Laurie-as-House sort of way), it felt like just about everyone apart from Kevin Kline’s Edwin Stanton was ‘doing’ an accent not their own. While Wright’s drawl was a bit melodramatic (it seemed like she wanted so bad to be Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind), Wilkinson’s (being a Brit trying to do is best ‘Southern patrician’) is downright ludicrous, though neither are as bad as Alexis Bledel’s whatever-the-hell-accent-she’s-trying-to-do whine, which almost makes the viewer hope that Aiken ultimately gets with Surratt’s daughter Anna (Evan Rachel Wood)  instead, as her accent is the only passable one of the bunch…  

The other major hindrance to this film is its obvious agenda, which is on parade throughout. Now I’ve got nothing against political messages within a film, and I’m as much a fan of habeas corpus as the next guy, but when what you’re showing almost makes the viewer glad that Booth pulled the trigger, well, you might have oversold it.   

In the end, it’s one of those films that isn’t going to leave a warm fuzzy feeling, but unsettling though it is, it has its merits. This is not a film for everyone – don’t watch it if you merely need something stupid to veg out in front of, and don’t expect any lovin’ afterwards if you take a date to see it (unless your partner’s turn-ons include injustice and autoerotic asphyxiation in which case, I envy you). BUT if you want to see a movie about what happened after Lincoln got shot, The Conspirator won’t disappoint…    

Game of Thrones (through episode 4)

When I learned last Fall that HBO was preparing a series based on George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, I remember feeling palpably ill at ease. Martin’s magnum opus, in addition to being unfinished (though hopefully the critical and financial success the series has thus far received will light a fire under Mr. Martin’s rather rotund ass – and may already have; I personally having pre-ordered my copy of A Dance with Dragons which is due out July 12^th) was, I had firmly believed, un-filmable. There is simply too much happening among too many complex characters for the silver (or indeed ‘small’) screen to adequately portray anything worthy of Martin’s prose. Now, having watched just under half of the first season’s ten episodes, I can say that I’ve been pleasantly surprised…

I’ll spare a summation of the story so far as the episodes have followed the novel quite closely, and will instead begin by wondering aloud about those viewers who are coming to the series with the novels as requisite reading. The mythology of Martin’s work is exceedingly rich (or ‘dense’ depending on which semantic choice you’d prefer) and it’s hard for me to imagine how someone without the proper background can appreciate the intricacies of the institutions of Westeros, because in their rigid adherence to the novels,  a direct explanation is not provided. Perhaps the creators are hoping that, because it’s HBO (because really, what other network could properly show Game of Thrones?) the sex, guts, and cursing will keep the uninitiated on the hook long enough until their sufficiently filled-in (or, dare I dream, motivated to go read the books?!).   

My main qualm with what I’m seeing right now is about the future. Yes, Sean Bean’s ‘hail-the-glorious-dead’ face has been plastered on virtually every piece of publicity that’s been produced (including, I noticed at the bookstore today, the paperback reissue of Game of Thrones itself) and the performances he and Mark Addy’s Robert Baratheon are giving are nothing short of masterful, the fact of the matter is they’re going to be dead soon, and at the current clip the episodes are going, very soon. Martin has no problems with killing off character’s but among the ones that do survive for some length of time (at least the next two tv seasons, if we go a book a season), while there are some veterans such as Lena Heady and Peter Dinklage (who’s overacted Tyrion Lannister has easily become the best character of the series) the remainder of those who ‘survive’ are really unknown quantities, many without a single other acting credit to their names. These are admittedly minor criticisms (even I realize that I’m reaching when my primary gripes concern things that won’t happen until years in the future!) though I hope that the show’s producers have also considered them, and will prepare in kind…

So, unless these next six episodes go completely to hell, the series really isn’t something to be missed. Even now, as I type these words to you, I can’t help but look forward to next Saturday’s Game of Thrones session (complete with wings and Root Beer floats!). Watch it; it’s really just that simple…

Bridesmaids

By about the 10 minute mark, this film reveals itself to be the cinematic monster-baby of Sex in the City and Californication; a compromise-candidate for young couples who wouldn’t have otherwise been able to agree on what to see. Unfortunately, like all bastards, Bridesmaids inevitably suffers from the internal torpor of not having a home to call its own.  

The latest product of the Judd Apatow comedy machine, Bridesmaids is the first of his films to not only focus around women, but to be written by two of them (star Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumulo) as well. This offers the potential for something heretofore unseen in an Apatow film – a three dimensional portrayal of women. That lofty goal is never realized however, and we are instead provided the same formulaic swath of female film clichés that have been utilized ad nauseam: wealthy women are spiteful and subversively catty, fat women are disgusting (both physically and in terms of their sexual appetites) though funny because of that disgustingness, virgins and undersexed women are more ignorant and naïve than their oversexed compatriots, and marriage is the ultimate goal of all women everywhere. This, combined with the depiction of men (who are always swine within Apatow films) makes for a particularly underdeveloped and unsympathetic character-set.

The movie tells the story of Annie (Wiig), a down-on-her luck thirtysomething who’s best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) gets engaged and asks her to serve as Maid of Honor at her wedding – and the hilarity that ensues thereafter. The narrative itself moves jerkily from scene to scene, due in large part to the seeming identity-crisis the film has throughout. Not certain whether it wants to be a traditional ‘Rom Com’ or an R-rated (read ‘guy’) comedy but with women, both angles are attempted but then deserted, with the obvious result that neither has any degree of success. My favorite example of this begin-it-and-then-abandon-it attitude is the character of Annie’s love interest, Officer Nathan Rhodes (Chris O’Dowd), a policeman with a heart of gold. O’Dowd is an Irish actor and makes no attempt to mask his accent in the film, though apart from two in-passing references (one of them being Jon Hamm’s salient observation “you talk funny”) nothing is made to develop the character’s back-story or to explain how an Irishman became an American citizen and then a police officer in Wisconsin.

That’s not to say that the movie’s unfunny. There’s jokes, and though they’re a bit crass (again the usual Apatow fare of sex, semen, and at one point in time Annie calls a young girl a “cunt”, which I guess is the joke) they’re still funny and will garner laughs. The timing (particularly Wiig’s, who might be the best actress in film comedy at present) is well-done, with Jon Hamm’s portrayal of today’s modern douchebag particularly noteworthy.

Had they not listed the writers’ names in the credits, I would have guessed that this film was the collaborative efforts of a 15 year old boy, who’s only experience with women was via the O.C. (or whatever adolescent melodramatic has currently hooked the youth of today), and a middle-aged cat lady who’s greatest fear is dying alone. There’s no denying such a pairing would be amusing – just not to the tune of £6.50…