Blog Archives
Night at the Museum (2006)
Night at the Museum works because of the possibilities of its fun premise whereupon all the dusty items at New York’s Museum of Natural History come magically to life when the sun sets. I think every wide-eyed kid at some point had the same dream. Whether the movie taps into that childlike wish or panders to it is up for speculation. No doubt, this is a special-effects heavy family film that doesn’t aim its sights very high. Some storylines misfire like Ben Stiller’s tour guide love interest, Teddy Roosevelt (a very game and well cast Robin Williams) and his unrequited love for Sacagawea, and, in fact, a lot of it comes across as amusing but not very funny. The emotive bits feel awfully clumsy. But Night at the Museum has just enough to stay lively and remain unexpected enough to delight. Stiller works his usual shtick but remains the best comedic meltdown actor we have. The biggest surprise was seeing 86-year-old Mickey Rooney serve up some beat downs. I could easily see this becoming a franchise and I’m sure the studio has the same thing on their mind. Night at the Museum is a fun diversion for the holidays and will surely increase museum attendance nationwide. There are worse things than a film inspiring renewed interest in history.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Cars (2006)
While I’d never call Pixar’s latest animated film a disappointment, it is the company’s first speed bump in their unprecedented reign of unmatched quality. Cars is technically dazzling; it’s almost redundant to say a CGI film is the best-looking ever because the technology keeps improving with time but Cars is incredible to watch. The lushly painted vistas, the way light gleams on surfaces, the blurs of color, the near-photographic likeness of cars themselves, this is a beautifully animated film, obviously. What isn’t as beautiful is the lackluster storyline. I can feel Pixar’s heart in the right place but they don’t put enough effort to touch our own hearts. Cars lacks the depth of Pixar’s other features. The two Toy Story films managed to take a kiddy concept of the secret life of toys when no one’s watching and infuse it with serious moral dilemmas and a mature insight into mortality and community. In Cars, the main storyline involves a cocky hot rod Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) who lives in a glitzy world that revolves around him. He goes off the beaten path and finds himself trapped in Radiator Springs, a tiny town that’s all but been dried up since the interstate took folks away from them. There, Lightning learns there’s more to life than material riches from this eclectic mix of good, honest small-town folk. What I’ve just described to you could be the plot of hundreds of movies championing the likes of small town folk. They surprisingly never really go much deeper, though Paul Newman is terrific as an old time car that had a taste of the glory and arrogance way back.
This is the first Pixar movie to exist in a world without humans, which begs the question how living automobiles were able to construct their world minus opposable thumbs. Cars themselves are weirdly inexpressive creatures.
The climax to Cars is suitable and heartfelt but the movie, at two hours in length, sputters a while in the middle. This is the first film directed by Pixar’s big cheese, John Lasseter, since 1999’s Toy Story 2, so excuse me for expecting a little more. Still, the movie is certainly fun, exciting, more cute than funny, and it has a genuine sweetness to go with its visual prowess. I just wish the 8 credited screenwriters, including Lasseter himself, had revved up their imaginations a bit more beyond the conceptual stage. Cars isn’t a great movie, but coming from Pixar, it’s still very good. Hey, anyone that can make the voice of Larry the Cable Guy tolerable deserves my thanks.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Wedding Crashers (2005)
My friend Amanda Evans is quite possibly the biggest Vince Vaughn fan in the United States, nay, the planet Earth. She used to watch Dodgeball every day. Her brother-in-law even went so far as to stage an intervention for her Vaughn addiction. She has been talking about Wedding Crashers for months and months and counting down the days like a kid waiting for Christmas. It’s safe to say that Amanda loved the movie but how would your otherwise non-obsessed moviegoer feel?
Jeremy (Vaughn) and John (Owen Wilson) are divorce attorneys by day and ladies men come nightfall. Both men crash weddings they were not invited to with the strict purpose of getting laid by horny bridesmaids. They have got their honey hunting down to a science, from what relative they’re related to, to when to cry, to whom to slow dance with to convince those bridesmaids that they’re sweet gentlemen. Jeremy says that one day when they?re old men they’ll both look back on these days and smile. John retorts, “We’re not that young.”
The Super Bowl of all weddings is the daughter of the Secretary of the Treasury (Christopher Walken). John has his eye on his other daughter Claire (Rachel McAdams) while Jeremy sets his sights on the Secretary’s other daughter, the wild and vivacious Gloria (Isla Fisher). The only problem for John is that he’s actually falling in love with Claire, oh and she’s engaged to a real jackass (Alias‘ Bradley Cooper). Jeremy and John are such big hits at the wedding that the Secretary invites them both to vacation with his family at their summer home. Jeremy is hesitant and wants to stick to the love-em-and-leave-em lifestyle he and his buddy are so accustomed to, but John drags him along convinced he can win Claire over.
Vaughn kills in every single scene. He hits punchline after punchline like some king of comedic prizefighter. His mile-a-minute delivery gels ever so nicely with Wilson’s homesy charm and drawl. These two have never been matched before as leading men but now their marriage seems like a match made in heaven. Their chemistry is off the chart. Wilson is essentially the straight man to Vaughn. In most comedies, “straight man” is just another term for boring. However, Wilson gets his shots in as well especially with his give and take with Vaughn, who is in a comedic zone all his own.
Not to be out done by the men, both McAdams and Fisher give great performances. McAdams (Mean Girls) is a rising star and it’s easy to see why. She’s a beautiful woman but also has some good teeth for comedy. In comedy terms, she’s the romantic interest, which means she’s an even straighter (read: boring) man than Wilson’s straight man. And handed with all this, McAdams still shines as a leading lady you can fall in love with. The true scene-stealer of Wedding Crashers is Fisher (Scooby-Doo), who goes hilariously tit-for-tat with Vaughn. You might walk away believing she’s truly out of her mind. Fisher has a physical gift for comedy that hasn’t been showcased before, but with Wedding Crashers she gets unleashed and we?re the better for it.
After the brilliant work of McAdams and Fisher, most of the supporting cast’s performances comes off as being too forced. Cooper is a wide-eyed grinning jackass that?s obvious from the get-go. He plays the role so big that his eyebrows seem permanently pressed to the top of his head. There’s also the weird introverted son who Typical Crazy Grandma berates as being “a homo.” But not only is he gay hes also a freak. The role seems quizzically garish and even a bit homophobic. Jane Seymore jumps at her role as mom in heat, but the film forgets about her fast after an awkward encounter with Wilson. Walken can make me laugh just by watching him stare (and he did), but even he isn’t given much more to work with besides the supportive dad role. It seems odd for a comedy with such huge belly laughs to have several supporting players grind the film’s funny down. All of this is excusable though because the far majority of the film’s attention and laughs are derived from our central quartet.
Wedding Crashers is a raunchy delight. You know you’re in good hands when, in one scene, Wilson and Vaughn are dipping bridesmaids on the dance floor and it cuts to these same bridesmaids now falling topless onto hotel beds. This is one R-rated comedy that proudly wears its rating on its sleeve. And for a sex comedy, there’s a surprising amount of laughs mined just out of an adult discussion on sex, which cannot be curtailed or couched with euphemisms and soft language. I don’t know whether to credit the screenwriters or the off-the-cuff improving of Wilson and Vaughn, but Wedding Crashers proves there’s still more under the sun to talk about and giggle.
Usually with movies revolving around hedonistic characters, they meet one of two ends: 1) they find that One True Girl that makes them want to go straight, or 2) they meet their hedonistic match and rethink their ways now that the shoe is on the other foot. Wedding Crashers doesn’t give you one of these options, oh no, it gives you both. Sure things gets awfully predictable after a great rush out of the gate, but the interplay between Wilson and Vaughn and some genuinely funny gags should keep most laughing until the surprise cameo at the end by the founder/guru of the wedding crashing rule book (it should be no surprise if you’ve seen any movie with Wilson and Vaughn the last three years). The climax is a bit drawn out and Wedding Crashers is still another comedy built around deception whose climax involves apologizing for said deception. It’d be tiresome if the movie weren’t so damn funny.
Despite the sleazy premise, Wedding Crashers has a sweet and gooey center. These are two men who know exactly what women want and they’re eager to give it to them. They just don’t know what they really want, but when they find it both Jeremy and John set their minds to romantic conquests outside of the bedroom. It’s this gooey center that makes the characters likeable despite any misgivings an audience may hold over their wedding crashing plot.
Two hours is a near eternity for most comedies and Wedding Crashers seems to lose its sprint in the last 20-30 minutes. The film starts getting repetitious and overly predictable with few laughs to cover up. Wilson and Vaughn still make it work but the setup seems to have been taken as far as it will go and then some.
Wedding Crashers is a loud, jovial, ribs-in-the-elbows funny return to the crass classics of the 1970s R-rated comedy. Vaughn and Wilson are perfectly matched and McAdams and Fisher shine like stars. Wedding Crashers is a bawdy good time that will leave you aching from laughing so hard. This movie is profane, simple, crude, and joyously so. It does run out of gas toward its protracted climax and some of the supporting performances feel forced, but Wedding Crashers is easily the funniest film of the year. Amanda was foiled in seeing the film three times the weekend it opened. She had to settle for only seeing it twice. I don’t think she has slept since (UPDATE: Amanda has since seen the movie five more times).
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Starsky & Hutch (2004)
The big screen adaptation of yet another 1970s television show has about one joke in it that the 70s were funny. So after scene after scene of people with funny hair, in funny clothes, and talking funny, Starsky and Hutch doesn’t so much coast as it skids to a flat, lifeless halt. Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson are an amiable duo and Vince Vaughn makes a credible cocaine creep, but director Todd Phillips (Road Trip) is left to unsuccessfully hammer his film with sight gags. Scenes and jokes will stretch on much longer than their recommended shelf life. Will Ferrell makes a welcomed cameo to give the film its only moment of juice. Snoop is wasted. You may laugh at all this but the Beastie Boys did it better with their “Sabotage” video and that was ten friggin’ years ago.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Meet the Parents (2000)
Ben Stiller is adept at playing everyman nice guys the audience yearns for to succeed. Something in his look, a twinkle in his eye – I don’t know. What I do know is put skilled comic Stiller, add a dash of stodgy Robert DeNiro as a foil counterpart, mix with ongoing catastrophe of errors, bake for twenty minutes at 450 and you have hilarity. Or at least, Meet the Parents. The premise is nothing new (in-laws from hell), but ‘Parents’ manages to find new laughs with an old concept. The chemistry between Stiller and the gruff DeNiro is fantastic and proves to produce numerous humorous situations. The laughs are genuine and keep stacking as the film continues on with more and more calamities happening for Stiller. Supporting characters all add something to the mix. Meet the Parents is likely the funniest film you’ll see all year without a man being stabbed in the head with a penis. What? I’m sentimental.
Nate’s Grade: B
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The Haunting (1999)
Is this what passes for horror these days? Get an Irish Jedi, a Spanish sword fighting hot tamale, an indie queen, and the co-writer of Rushmore and Bottle Rocket in a creepy home and have curtains blow in the shapes of faces? Is there anyone out there truly terrified of curtains?
From Jan de Bont, the director most known for making cows fly, comes possibly the weakest horror pic ever assembled on two legs. This is no different than the weekend drive-in where they showed all the wretchedly corny movies of people in giant plastic costumes slowly walking and terrorizing young teenagers in love. Except now the costumes are far more expensive. Beyond that nothing has changed.
The story is a bit of a mystery. It’s light when there needs to be more meat, and heavy when it needs to explain itself. It even goes a step further into fulfilling the dreams of many by making Catherine Zeta-Jones bisexual. And of course then there’s the contrived happy ending that seems like something they tacked on from the outcome of a test screening.
The best asset The Haunting has is the utterly beautiful and breath-taking house and sets. You’ll hear it’s name around Oscar time for set designs, and most likely on the winner’s ballot as well. I was wrapped up in the scenery and fell in love with it. Maybe this is a trick by the movie so you don’t notice how bad it really is, well it almost worked. But this isn’t an episode of This Old House, though that might have been scarier.
With the aid of some cheap jump scares and splashy effects, The Haunting registers nothing in the world of frights and fear. It’s really unintentionally funny at many many parts. In fact the audience I saw this with was laughing far more than they were screaming. So you could label The Haunting as the funniest movie of the summer if you wanted. Some movies are just born bad.
Nate’s Grade: D+
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