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1 Movie Rec & 1 Movie Poison
At the Actual Movies: (Why yes, we still go to those, although I mentally weep at full price tickets and think fondly back to the days of $6 showings, back when we could go to the movies *whenever* we felt like it, BUT ANYWAY.)
Bridesmaids: So funny, so funny, so funny! A lot of it in the "so wrong it's funny" category, but I didn't care. There were all these great little touches, like the party favors at the ultra-rich character's bridal shower (labrador puppies = d'awwww!) or the world's most fiercely fought tennis match. Like all good comedies, this one had a lot of serious themes at its heart, and some of those were things that generally aren't discussed. For example, what do you do when it looks like your best friend is abandoning you for someone else, and that someone else is everything you're not, or aspire to be? What's appropriate as a gift when you really can't afford anything at all? The answers the story provides are varied and entertaining, and I laughed, a lot. Honestly, though, I also felt rather sorry for the main character, who appeared to have just been through a series of terrible setbacks: the business she'd sunk a lot of money into failed, her boyfriend left her when said business failed, and when the story starts, she's working in a retail job she's obviously ill-suited for. And then her best friend gets proposed to and all her problems start to snowball. Although I wouldn't have handled some of things the way she did, I can see why she reacted the way she did. (Anyone with serious embarrassment squick may be better off avoiding this movie, although I do think the comedy's good enough that it's worth getting past to enjoy the main story.)
There was a lot of B.S. about men not going to see this movie. "A bunch of women? Why would I see a movie like that? Excuse me while I continue this testosterone experiment a DERP DERP DERP." (I was making my goofiest face while I typed that last sentence.) I would like to state for the record, that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
yebisu9, who is indeed a man, enjoyed this very, very much and said later that it didn't matter that all the main characters were women, that it was simply a funny film and a good story. And to any studio exec who thinks that men can't ever see a movie about women (the horror!), I'd like to point out that at the screening we attended, there were a lot of men (I'd estimate about 40% of the audience) and they were laughing just as hard as the women around me. As long as we think that men can't see movies by/for/about women, we're going to be to stuck in a cultural and intellectual patch of quicksand and unable to move forward. It's 2011, people, and the world did not end. Let's do away with outdated gender stereotypes.
(Seriously, all soapboxing aside: it was funny! And awesome! And that scene with the glass of lemonade is hysterical.)
On DVD:
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: This was... disappointing. The first one was so good, the second was reasonably OK, but this third installment was, for lack of a better phrase, dead in the water. I tried to pinpoint what the problem was: the special effects were mostly very, very good. (The minotaurs looked fantastic! Hhmm. That sentence might already have identified the major problem.) The main actors were all good; the script wasn't too bad, although there was some very heavy-handed religious symbolism at the end (that's largely Lewis' story's problem, though.) But the editing was terribly confusing--at one point, the story skipped from late at night to early morning with no warning or prompting whatsoever, leaving the audience to only guess at what had just transpired. Likewise, during the fight scenes, I had no idea of what was going on.* Add to this the problem of Eustace. Eustace is a tricky character. He's a whiny brat with no initial storytelling purpose other than annoying the main characters, Edmund and Lucy. And while he does change through the course of the story, it takes too long and the screenwriters seemed to think we'd be sympathetic to him faster than I was comfortable with. However, ultimately what really seemed to hold this movie back was its unwillingness to trust that Edmund, Lucy, and (now King, and easy on the eyes but light on presence) Caspian could carry the story. There were constant flashbacks to Susan, Peter and the White Witch, and even when they weren't in the scene directly, they were mentioned every 15 minutes or so. I think the screenwriters wished that the stronger characters from the first two movies could be around, but there was no way to do that without utterly desecrating what Lewis had written. In the end, as Yebisu wisely observed, "for a movie supposedly about magic, there's not much of it in here."
* Although this seems to be a problem with *all* movie fights and action scenes these days. I know editing is often difficult, but I'd give all editors bribes to slow down their work in action movies, just so I could find out what had really happened.
Bridesmaids: So funny, so funny, so funny! A lot of it in the "so wrong it's funny" category, but I didn't care. There were all these great little touches, like the party favors at the ultra-rich character's bridal shower (labrador puppies = d'awwww!) or the world's most fiercely fought tennis match. Like all good comedies, this one had a lot of serious themes at its heart, and some of those were things that generally aren't discussed. For example, what do you do when it looks like your best friend is abandoning you for someone else, and that someone else is everything you're not, or aspire to be? What's appropriate as a gift when you really can't afford anything at all? The answers the story provides are varied and entertaining, and I laughed, a lot. Honestly, though, I also felt rather sorry for the main character, who appeared to have just been through a series of terrible setbacks: the business she'd sunk a lot of money into failed, her boyfriend left her when said business failed, and when the story starts, she's working in a retail job she's obviously ill-suited for. And then her best friend gets proposed to and all her problems start to snowball. Although I wouldn't have handled some of things the way she did, I can see why she reacted the way she did. (Anyone with serious embarrassment squick may be better off avoiding this movie, although I do think the comedy's good enough that it's worth getting past to enjoy the main story.)
There was a lot of B.S. about men not going to see this movie. "A bunch of women? Why would I see a movie like that? Excuse me while I continue this testosterone experiment a DERP DERP DERP." (I was making my goofiest face while I typed that last sentence.) I would like to state for the record, that
yebisu9, who is indeed a man, enjoyed this very, very much and said later that it didn't matter that all the main characters were women, that it was simply a funny film and a good story. And to any studio exec who thinks that men can't ever see a movie about women (the horror!), I'd like to point out that at the screening we attended, there were a lot of men (I'd estimate about 40% of the audience) and they were laughing just as hard as the women around me. As long as we think that men can't see movies by/for/about women, we're going to be to stuck in a cultural and intellectual patch of quicksand and unable to move forward. It's 2011, people, and the world did not end. Let's do away with outdated gender stereotypes.(Seriously, all soapboxing aside: it was funny! And awesome! And that scene with the glass of lemonade is hysterical.)
On DVD:
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: This was... disappointing. The first one was so good, the second was reasonably OK, but this third installment was, for lack of a better phrase, dead in the water. I tried to pinpoint what the problem was: the special effects were mostly very, very good. (The minotaurs looked fantastic! Hhmm. That sentence might already have identified the major problem.) The main actors were all good; the script wasn't too bad, although there was some very heavy-handed religious symbolism at the end (that's largely Lewis' story's problem, though.) But the editing was terribly confusing--at one point, the story skipped from late at night to early morning with no warning or prompting whatsoever, leaving the audience to only guess at what had just transpired. Likewise, during the fight scenes, I had no idea of what was going on.* Add to this the problem of Eustace. Eustace is a tricky character. He's a whiny brat with no initial storytelling purpose other than annoying the main characters, Edmund and Lucy. And while he does change through the course of the story, it takes too long and the screenwriters seemed to think we'd be sympathetic to him faster than I was comfortable with. However, ultimately what really seemed to hold this movie back was its unwillingness to trust that Edmund, Lucy, and (now King, and easy on the eyes but light on presence) Caspian could carry the story. There were constant flashbacks to Susan, Peter and the White Witch, and even when they weren't in the scene directly, they were mentioned every 15 minutes or so. I think the screenwriters wished that the stronger characters from the first two movies could be around, but there was no way to do that without utterly desecrating what Lewis had written. In the end, as Yebisu wisely observed, "for a movie supposedly about magic, there's not much of it in here."
* Although this seems to be a problem with *all* movie fights and action scenes these days. I know editing is often difficult, but I'd give all editors bribes to slow down their work in action movies, just so I could find out what had really happened.