What’s Your Number?

Posted on September 29, 2011 at 6:09 pm

Even the delectable Anna Faris cannot get us to root for the character she plays in this charmless, distasteful dud. The first scene is weirdly identical to the opening of “Bridesmaids,” and one of the movie’s scarce pleasures is the opportunity to consider how the same introduction to both characters can make us see Kristin Wiig as needy but sympathetic and Faris as insincere and manipulative. And it’s downhill fast from there.

Ally (Faris) has lost her job but what really worries her is an article in a woman’s magazine about what your “number” says about you. That would be the number of men she has slept with, and hers is 20 after series of terrible choices, most recently a drunken encounter with the boss who told her she was being laid off (Joel McHale of “Community”). Believing she can never get married if her number goes any higher (because of some vague “study”), she decides to go through her reject pile to see if anyone from her past might be her Mr. Right. She enlists the aid of the hunky guy across the hall (Chris Evans of “Captain America” and “Puncture”) to help her track them down. Meanwhile, her sister (Ari Graynor of “Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist”) is getting married and her mother is putting a lot of pressure on her.

So, the ingredients for a sparkly rom-com are in place: plucky heroine in need of a self-esteem boost after some romantic stumbles meets Prince Charming who uniquely appreciates the real her. And there’s even a chance to give bit parts to an array of handsome and talented actors as the exes.

The problem is that the gaping disconnect between the movie’s view of Ally as an adorable heroine and Faris’ game attempt to play her that way quickly collide with the inescapable unpleasantness of the characters and their actions. Ally swears she will not have sex with anyone else and then gets drunk, gives her engaged sister a mean-spirited and crude toast, and sleeps with her finger-smelling ex-boss (don’t ask). As a teen, when her boyfriend was away, Ally promised to wait until he returned so they could be each other’s first time. Then for no reason she impetuously has sex with a random dweeb just so we can see Andy Samberg with braces on his teeth and a puppet on his hand, making weird sounds while she looks bored. This might be an interesting movie if Ally was an unashamed advocate of sex for pleasure or if she acknowledged that her past behavior was trashy and self-destructive. Instead it seems a sad relic of the discredited “every player gets a trophy” school of self-esteem. Evans tries to make up for his character’s complete absence of any personality beyond running out on his one-night stands and taking off his clothes but there’s only so much anyone can do with this material.

The set-ups are weak: Anthony Mackie plays an ex who is a closeted gay man. Martin Freeman (“Love Actually”) is an ex whose English accent inspired Ally to lie about who she was and pretend to be English, too. Faris’ real-life husband Chris Pratt (“Moneyball”) is engaged to someone else and thinks their accidental encounters mean she is stalking him. The resolutions of all of these encounters are even weaker.

Ally is self-absorbed without having any self-respect, and the same can be said of the film. It is depressingly unaware of its own failure to give us one reason to care about a girl who does not seem to care about anyone but herself. It is sad to think that this miserable mess was inflicted on Faris — and us — by a female novelist and two female screenwriters. Anna Faris is beautiful, smart, funny, and fearless. Is it that hard to write her a comedy that lets her show it?

(more…)

Related Tags:

Comedy Romance

A Treat for ‘Say Anything’ Fans — Deleted Scenes!

Posted on September 6, 2011 at 8:00 am

It’s the movie Entertainment Weekly called the greatest romance of the past 25 years. Boom boxes have come and gone, but the iconic image of John Cusack holding his over his head so that Ione Skye can hear their song is all-but-universally recognizable. “I used to think I had a crush on John Cusack,” a 20-something friend told me. “But I really had a crush on , Lloyd Dobbler.” A lot of the teen girls in the audience (and even the grown-up women) identified with Corey, DC, and Rebecca, who said, “If you were Diane Court, would you honestly fall for Lloyd?” “Yeah.” “Yeah.” “Yeah!”

Diane (Ione Skye), the high school valedictorian memorably described as “a brain…trapped in the body of a game show hostess,” does fall for Lloyd, then breaks up with him after pressure from her father (John Mahoney), then comes back to him when it turns out her father, the person she trusted most, was stealing from his nursing home residents to get money to give Diane lavish gifts.

Susannah Gora of Salon notes that writer-director Cameron Crowe (“Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” “Almost Famous,” and the upcoming “We Bought a Zoo” with Matt Damon) has been posting deleted scenes, just the screenplay, not footage, on his website.

Gora says:

Crowe had based the Lloyd character on a real-life man named Lowell Marchant, who was his neighbor in Santa Monica during the time he was working on this script. Marchant was an optimistic 19-year-old kickboxer from Alabama, who, as Crowe told me when I interviewed him for my book “You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried,” “would knock on the doors of his neighbors to make friends. And you’d answer it, and he’d be like, ‘Good afternoon, I’m Lowell Marchant. And I would like to meet you. I’m your neighbor, and I’m a kickboxer. Do you know about kickboxing?’ And he would wipe off his palm on the side of his pant leg, and shake your hand. And it was just such a great thing.” Crowe told me that Marchant’s simple, thoughtful gesture of wiping his palm before going for the handshake “was the first little spark for the bonfire that would become getting the character right.”

But what struck me as perhaps the most interesting and most significant finding in all the newly released material was this: Originally, Lloyd had a line at the very beginning of the film in which he asks one of his friends, “Did ever say anything about me?” The line was ultimately scrapped, which may seem insignificant if not for one thing: That was the only time that Cusack’s character ever uttered the phrase that was the title of the film. As it stands, that phrase, “say anything,” is spoken many times — but only by Diane and her father.

It is a lot of fun to read over the script for the famous dinner scene and see the stage directions, and understand how much Mahoney, Skye, and Cusack brought to the film, and to see the portions that Crowe wrote but did not use. And if it inspires you to watch the movie (again or for the first time), that’s good, too.

One Day

Posted on August 18, 2011 at 6:32 pm

A gimmick that sort of worked in a novel becomes an obstacle that trips up this love story based on best-seller by David Nicholls. It is better at telling us to care about the two characters than it is at making us feel anything for the couple who stumble their way toward each other for almost 20 years.

The gimmick is that we check in on Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dex (Jim Sturgess) every year on the same day, July 15, known in England as St. Swithin’s Day, less a holiday than a Groundhog Day-style harbinger of the weather. So instead of following them on days when especially significant or illuminating events happen, we see whatever happens to be going on each July 15. Sometimes it is an important moment but most often it is more indicative than revealing. In the book we had their internal perspective on what was going on. Dex’s dead-on assessment of Emma’s room in the first chapter was as revealing about himself as it was about her. It was so astute that it made up for his cluelessness about himself and frequent boorishness for many years to come. On screen, even Hathaway’s radiance and Sturgess’ charm cannot persuade us that these two people would have stayed in touch, much less been dear friends, over decades.

The gifted director Lone Sherfig (“An Education“) resists the temptation to throw in a lot of signifiers of time passing, but inevitably we get distracted by the shifting hairstyles and conversion from typewriters to laptops and phone booths to cell phones. Covering 20 days over two decades means that there is very little time for each update, and without the interior monologues that gave the novel’s characters more substance, it feels more like a perfume commercial than a story. There is more wit in the interplay of the digits of the passing years with the action of the scene than in most of the interactions between Emma and Dex. Nicholls, who adapted his book for the screen, is too attached to details that do not work in a movie. It would have been much better to jettison as many as half of the days to give us a chance to catch our breath and see how the friendship actually works. There is too much of Dex’s “VH1 Behind the Music”-style descent into alcohol, drugs, and one-night stands (even in the book, he seemed hardly worthy of the loyal and principled Emma) and too little of the characters around them who are supposed to have been an influence. And there is much too little of actual events. It is Emma’s experiences as a teacher that lead her to find her voice as a writer. How do I know that? From reading the book. It all feels rushed and abrupt and unsupported, and the ending feels like a maudlin cheat.

(more…)

Crazy, Stupid, Love

Posted on July 29, 2011 at 9:55 am

This painful comedy about the agonies of love has some deftly observed moments and strong performances but its essential tawdriness overwhelms its efforts to be cuddly and life-affirming.

Everyone is miserably in love with the wrong person. Steve Carell plays Cal, married for almost 25 years to his teenage sweetheart, Emily (Julianne Moore), who tells him in the opening scene that she wants a divorce. Their 13-year-old son, Robbie (Jonah Bobo) is in love with their 17-year-old babysitter, Jessica (the heart-twistingly vulnerable Analeigh Tipton). Jessica has a crush on Cal. Emily slept with her co-worker, David (Kevin Bacon). Cal goes to a bar to drown his sorrows and meets someone who is not miserable and not in love: Jacob (Ryan Gosling), who takes a different beautiful woman home from the bar every night. Jacob tells Cal that he lost Emily because he lost his sense of what it means to be a man. For Jacob, being a man means pitching the New Balance shoes and ill-fitting suits and manipulating women to have sex by pretending to listen to them. Cal is soon channeling his inner playa, first seducing a teacher named Kate (Marisa Tomei in a thankless role) and then a series of montaged lovelies. Meanwhile, Robbie is texting romantic pleas to Jessica and Jessica is following the advice of a classmate and taking nude photos of herself to give to Cal and Emily is dating David, whose role seems to be nice guy whose unfitness for love is demonstrated by everyone’s intended-to-be-funny-but-not-funny-at-all inability to pronounce his last name correctly.

Got that? Then, just as Jacob’s method begins to work for Cal, it stops working for Jacob. The one woman who turned him down is Hannah (Emma Stone), a recent law graduate studying for the bar exam. Circumstances lead her to return to the bar to proposition Jacob and back at his sleek bachelor pad something unprecedented happens — a night of real intimacy, talking and laughing. Now Jacob needs advice on his uncharted territory: how to be a part of a relationship that lasts more than 24 hours.

There’s an inexpressibly lovely moment as Emily calls Cal, not realizing he is right outside their house because he sneaks over at night to maintain the garden (metaphor alert). She tells him she is in the basement trying to restart the pilot light but he can see she is upstairs and just needed an excuse to call. And Stone continues to be one of the most endearingly honest, intelligent, and expressive performers on screen. She shows us how the flurry of mixed emotions she feels that first night with Jacob flicker across her face as she tries to manage her feelings of confidence and fear, longing and logic.

But that is not enough to make up for the smarminess of the story’s assumptions and the characters’ behavior. There’s an excruciating climactic scene in which two of the characters made humiliating public declarations that are intended to be gallant but come off as self-indulgent and completely inappropriate. And other than Hannah, the characters are just not very nice. Jessica keeps telling us she loves Cal because he is such a kind man and great father. Not from what we see. He shows little concern for what his children are going through with their parents’ separation or anything else they are going through. He does not know who his son’s teacher is. And he is awful to the women he sleeps with, which the movie seems to think is fine. When one of them becomes angry at him because he never called her, she is portrayed as shrewish and unreasonable. Jacob, whose only evidence of responsibility or being aware of anyone else’s needs or feelings is his decision to help Cal become a lady-killer, provides very little reason other than hotness for deserving Hannah’s love or making any effort to earn it. The film is as callous toward the one-night-stands who get tossed aside as Jacob and Cal are. There is no suggestion that someone should give them pointers on how to respect themselves enough not to fall for manipulative cads. Even worse is the treatment of the Jessica/Robbie relationship. She is, we are repeatedly told, 17. Taking nude pictures of herself to give to a man is not just seriously bad judgment and a terrible signal to a prospective romantic partner but probably a crime. Giving those pictures to a 13-year-old is portrayed in the film as an act of compassionate generosity when it is not just seriously bad judgment and a terrible mixed message but definitely a crime. The movie is going for a wistful romanticism. For me it was more like a pervy sociopathy.

(more…)

Related Tags:

Comedy Date movie Romance

Friends With Benefits

Posted on July 22, 2011 at 6:45 pm

“Shut up, Katherine Heigl,” says our heroine, as she passes by a wall of posters for another fungible romantic comedy that should be sued for deceptive advertising. Jamie (Mila Kunis) is an executive recruiter who wants to believe in love but has had a series of relationships with guys who took her heart and stomped that sucker flat. Dylan (Justin Timberlake) is the hotshot design guy she recruited to move from a web job in California to GQ in New York. While Jamie wants intimacy too much, Dylan wants to avoid it.

And while we all want a good, old-fashioned (but not too old-fashioned) date movie romantic comedy, we don’t want the same old Jennifers and Jessicas getting into the same old situations. The problem is that it is harder and harder to find reasons for keeping the couple that the audience knows is destined to be together from having sex for a whole 100 minutes. And so we get the second movie in seven months that tries to turn the usual story upside down. Let’s let them have sex right away but then learn how much they love each other. It works better here than in No Strings Attached because it has a cleverer script and better chemistry. There’s a terrific beginning as we see Jamie and Dylan on the phone with her waiting in front of a theater and him explaining that he isn’t really late. We think they’re talking to each other when it turns out they’re on opposite sides of the country and both about to be dumped (great cameos by Andy Samberg and Emma Stone). So Dylan is recruited by Jamie for the GQ job and as she sells him on New York, complete with a flash mob in Times Square, they have the rhythms of a couple who are destined to be together. But in the immutable laws of movie romance, both must learn important lessons (and look gorgeous while doing so) before they figure that out. So they decide to have sex as friends without becoming boyfriend and girlfriend.

It’s a movie with a couple of references to “Seinfeld,” but apparently everyone missed the 1991 episode called “The Deal,” in which long-time exes-turned friends Elaine and Jerry decide they can have sex without an emotional attachment or romance. It doesn’t work, and there is something a bit off-putting about characters who think it can. Elaine and Jerry were famously “no learning, no hugging” people who were hilariously superficial and self-involved. But Jamie and Dylan are supposed to get us on their side and talking and behaving like people for whom sex does not mean anything creates a hurdle we have difficulty getting over. While the film avoids some of the pitfalls of the romantic comedy formula, it falls into others, with sketchily-drawn back-stories and distracting detours like an un-funny part for Shaun White and a silly repeated joke about whether pilots are important in landing a plane. Kunis and Timberlake are as great on screen as individuals and as a team and there are some funny and entertaining moments, especially when Dylan explains his childhood affection for Kris Kross. Ultimately, though, it is as formulaic as the movie-within-a-movie they watch together. That one stars Jason Segal and Rashida Jones and has a sly dig to the fake NY locations filmed in LA and some outtakes over the end credits. It — or something just like it — should be in theaters soon.

(more…)

Related Tags:

Comedy Romance