Month: April 2023

There was a brief moment, gentle reader, when the stars of 1990s and early 2000s screwball comedies transitioned into more adult-themed comedies. Whereas films like Happy Gilmore, Wedding Crashers, and Starsky and Hutch dominated the box office, their stars (Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn) kind of grew up a little and made comedies that dealt with adult concerns: families, marriages, and that sort of thing (see also Grown-Ups). This film fits into that mold.

In it, four close friends and their spouses and children are celebrating a child’s birthday when one couple, Jason and Cynthia (Jason Bateman and Kristen Bell) announce that after the stress of trying to have a baby, are considering divorce. As a last ditch effort to save their marriage, they want to go to an exclusive couples retreat on a resort island, and they want their friends to come along as well so they can get a group rate. The other couples reluctantly agree, thinking that they can lie on the beach whilst Jason and Cynthia go through the therapy exercises, but they discover that everyone must participate. So they do under the tutelage of a hippy-dippy psychologist played by Jean Reno. And each couple confronts their own relationship faults brought to light by the therapy.

So, it is a comedy, but it touches on real relationships and how they can stagnate.

The film lacks the “we all take drugs and do something crazy” motif that you find in modern comedies because that’s not what adults do.

I wonder if the impulse to the adult comedy, or at least in the wide cinematic release adult comedy, faded around that time, or if they just moved to streaming platforms in recent years with smaller niche audiences. Maybe a little of both, but this movie and Grown-Ups had heart which most R-rated comedies lack.

Two of the wives are played by Kristen Bell and Kristin Davis, whom I recognized. But Vincent Vaughn’s Dave is married to Ronnie, played by Malin Akerman, and I was not familiar with her at all.

Continue reading “Movie Report: Couples Retreat (2009)” →

This is a Rob Schneider film. So if you know what that means, you know what you’re getting: Rob Schneider acting whacky in absurd situations. Which did not prove to be a particular winning formula at the box office–well, winning enough to get a Deuce Bigelow sequel, but not winning enough that most people know what a Rob Schneider film is like. Unlike, say, an Adam Sandler film, which most people will know involves a man-boy of some sort thrust into a position of adult responsibility and having to grow up. Everyone has seen at least one, although that one is probably not Little Nicky.

At any rate, Schneider plays a civilian employee of the police force who keeps trying to get into the police academy via a physical competition/obstacle course race, and every year he fails (and wets his pants, this being a Rob Schneider movie and all). But after an automobile accident in the wilderness leaves him close to death, a strange doctor heals him with the help of animal parts. The animal parts give him strength and abilities, but also tend to give him animal impulses that he struggles with (this being a Rob Schneider film and all). So he gets to become a police officer after an incident, and he woos a nature lover/animal shelter operator played by Colleen Haskell, a participant in the original Survivor who had a brief pop culture moment which was mostly starring in this film. But The Animal starts having blackout incidents that coincide with animal mutilations in the area which leads him to worry that perhaps he should be return to the scientist and live there away from others he can hurt.

It was amusing in that Rob Schneider film way–I even liked Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo. But it’s not for all tastes, for sure.

The film also had John C. McGinley as a police sargeant antagonist. McGinley has had a long career playing similar types (as well as one of the Bobs in Office Space against type). I’ve seen him here and there enough to recognize him, but for some reason, I sometimes confuse him with Tony Goodwyn. Maybe it’s because they’re often in those second banana roles or antagonist roles. I dunno. But there it is.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to check the video library to see if I actually own Deuce Bigelow or if I have to remember to watch for it.

This film comes from the 1990s, when the movie industry let Joe Pesci star in comedies (such as My Cousin Vinny). I mean, you could consider this an ensemble cast as it includes Dyan Cannon, George Hamilton, David Spade, and Todd Louiso (who was also in High Fidelity, so apparently I am on a Todd Louiso kick like my recent Wesley Snipes and Sandra Bullock kicks, but accidentally).

This film combines comedy with Pesci’s mob roles as he plays Tommy, a transporter who is commissioned to take the severed heads of 8 members of a gang from the east coast to the west coast as proof that a hit occurred. On the flight (in the 20th century, I suppose one could suspend disbelief that a man could carry on a duffel bag with heads in it), his duffel is mixed up with that of a college student on his way to go on vacation with his long-distance girlfriend’s parents. Hijinks ensue when he takes the duffel bag to a Mexican resort and discovers its contents. So the guy tries to keep anyone from discovering the grisly remains, to keep from getting arrested, and to dispose of them while Tommy tries to find where the kid has gone and to get them back.

So it had amusing moments, but underwhelmed me a bit.

But if you’re a Todd Louiso completeist, you must see it.

I picked this film up not long after I watched The Art of War with Wesley Snipes a couple of weeks ago. Like that film, this DVD was a little deeper in the archives–meaning I did not buy it this year–but I figured that I would not be quite so primed to watch a Snipes film, especially an obscure Snipes film, as I would be right after another Snipes film. Well, this is the third in relatively short succession as I did watch Demolition Man recently even though I did not report on it–because when I ordered it, it came as part of a four-pack of Sylvester Stallone films, and I didn’t move it to the review staging area because the set has three more films in it. Sorry, I have let you down.

Also, I guess this means that I am on a Sylvester Stallone kick since I also recently watched The Expendables. But that’s neither here nor there.

So: Wesley Snipes plays Painter, a spotter who identifies targets for precision bombing. He proves how good he is in an exercise, but he has a dark past: He mistakenly “painted” the wrong target, leading to his support team getting killed. He’s drawn into a mission to identify a decommissioned nuclear plant in Chechnya before terrorists can re-start the nuclear reaction and blow it up, creating devastation and killing hundreds of thousands. However, it becomes clear that some sort of double-cross has occurred, and it’s the American missiles that will destroy the already reactivated power plant. So it’s a race against time to rescue what scientists he and his team can and to rectify the errors–and he’s not sure whom he can trust from above.

So a better film than The Art of War, although in 2005, the Russians, or certain hardline elements of the Russians, were the bad guys, some where good guys I guess? Then, as now, the internal politics and policy goals of a foreign people are difficult to ascertain. The movie itself plays a lot like a good direct to cable movie or a B movie would have been back in the day. Better than, say, Hell Comes To Frogtown or Warlords, with a bigger budget, but the Internet says they recycled some film from higher budget spectacles outside the generic military-in-the-industrial-facility scenes.

Still, not bad.

Also, it has an older (but younger than I am now) Emma Samms as a, um, psychologist/handler/love interest for the Wesley Snipes character.

Continue reading “Movie Report: The Marksman (2005)” →

This film is based on a Philip K. Dick story, so you know that it deals with messed-up memories. Not to be too meta, I’d seen this film before–whether I’d rented it from the video store or recorded it on a DVR and watched it, I am not sure–I do know (or do I?) that it’s not in my current watched video library which I am getting familiar with as I am now actually dusting it semi-weekly instead of once every six months unless the DVD is behind others, as the video library at Nogglestead is also doublestacked (or because someone did not want me to see the film again). So I picked it up in February and watched it in late March.

And, gentle reader, in keeping with the spirit of it, I had forgotten the plot of the movie. Or had it been erased from my memory, by whom, and why?

At any rate, I will post it here so that I do not forget again as long as they let me keep this site active. Ben Affleck plays an engineer, Jennings, who does work for high tech firms under strict non-disclosure agreements which involve having his memory wiped for the period of the contract. He can only work eight weeks at a time, and as his friend Shorty (Paul Giamatti) wipes his mind after his latest job, Shorty notes that it’s getting harder to do and that it’s getting risky. But a long-time acquaintance and billionaire offers Jennings a job that will make him millions but will last two years. So he agrees, and only moments seem to pass for Jennings, but he’s done what they’ve asked, and he’s released from the secure facility. He checks the value of his stock options, which have grown to a value of $90 million dollars. When he goes to cash out, though, he finds that he himself had only a couple of weeks before surrendered his options and apparently replaced the personal belongings he brought with him to the facility with seemingly innocuous items.

So he has to figure out what’s going on. Clearly, a conspiracy of sorts, as he is hunted by Federal law enforcement for treason and by others who want him dead.

I won’t spoil it for you, gentle reader who is likely me in a decade or so when I have forgotten the details of the film. It’s a pretty good bit of paranoid fiction. Ben Affleck is not Harrison Ford or Arnold Schwarzenneggar, but he does a good job here. The film also features Uma Thurman as the love interest, so clearly I am on an Uma Thurman kick (having also recently watched My Super Ex-Girlfriend). But, as with that previous post, I am not posting pictures of Ms. Thurman, insisting instead that you refer to Kim du Toit’s post which is fading into the history of the Internet already.

I bought this film as part of my February buying spree, which means it was part of my March binge. Which is a couple of movies a week, so I am not sure that that counts as a binge in 2023.

I just read the book–in this case, “just” means almost two years ago. So I will steal the book’s plot summary as the film is pretty true to the book:

So. The story of the book is that the protagonist, a 35-year-old record store owner named Rob Fleming gets dumped by his long-time live-in girlfriend for the guy who formerly lived upstairs from them (and the two move in together elsewhere), which triggers Rob’s reflection on his relationships and his life which seems to have stalled. Prone to making a list, Rob lists his top five heartbreaks of all time and gets in touch with those women and moons over Laura, whom he met while he was DJing at a defunct club. She has gone onto become an attorney at a big law firm in London, which creates a gulf between them in Rob’s mind, and he’s starting to get a little bitter.

That’s the size of it, except the location is changed to Chicago.

In the film, Rob (John Cusack) breaks the fourth wall a bunch to talk directly to the audience, which actually works to capture some of the first person narration of the book. The film also wraps up and closes pretty quickly after the funeral, when Rob and his most recent girlfriend reconcile–the end part of the book where Rob dotes a little on the reporter for the local alt paper goes on a bit much, and his future with Laura, the girlfriend with whom he reconciles, is left more in doubt. In the film, as I said, this is minimized, and it looks like Rob has actually grown up and changed, whereas the book left that in doubt.

The film resonated with me, perhaps more than it did when I first watched it. Rob’s kind of at a loose end, getting older and not really accomplishing much these days aside from sticking in his rut and then bolting from relationships. It’s been a while since I have had a project that I spent time on–I’ve started to think that the things I start or try are pretty much doomed to failure as I tend to get to a certain point with them, encounter some difficulty, and then set them aside and the tide of life washes over them, and suddenly six months or six years have passed.

I’m fortunate, though, that I’m still married and I don’t have to deal with that particular angst of dating and finding someone. I just need to remember I have her more.

So a better film than a book, strangely. Perhaps a bit anachronistic to the younger people, although who knows? It certainly did not seem anachronistic to me because I lived it contemporaneously.It also has nice casting, including Jack Black as one of Rob’s employees and Tim Robbins as the pony-tailed martial artist and Zen master neighbor that Laura shacks up with.

And one of the parts of the film is Rob reaching out to women who broke his heart–although he relearns that he was often the dumper and not the dumped. The film casts many lovely actresses as Rob’s former girlfriends.

Continue reading “Movie Report: High Fidelity (2000)” →