2010 Movies: #23-21

 What's the worst date you've ever been on?

I know mine. The year was '99, and I was a high school senior. We went to Madison's Eastgate Cinema and saw the Usher Raymond-captained Light it Up, in which he and some comrades including Rosario Dawson and Onyx's Fredro Starr take a school under siege. I just read on imdb that it was called High School Jack in Japan.

I think we may have held hands at one point. I remember the movie being pretty bad, and I have no idea why it was that one that was decided upon. The last thirty minutes of the movie, I was starving, and trying to contain my gurgling stomach. I asked if she wanted to get some food on the way home. She said she wasn't hungry, but it'd be fine if we stopped. Being relatively out of money following the film, my options were more or less the fast-food gauntlet on East Washington Ave. I chose Taco Bell.

I didn't want to look like a glutton; rather, I didn't want to make a bad impression by pulling out my usual 3-4 item order that I would get late nights on weekends with the boys. So I got a chili-cheese burrito and I purchased her some cinammon twists that she picked at while I tried to eat as civilized as I could for it being the eatery at a local Taco Bell.

No such luck on the civilty thing--I took too big of a bite and liquid-hot chili and cheese exploded out of the back of the burrito, landing on my hand and my shirt. My date was very friendly and cordial, willing to help with the clean-up and all that. I waved her off with a "that's okay, it's not necessary." But as I ducked into the bathroom for a brown paper towel and water clean-up session, I knew it was basically over. We never went on another date, and she ended up in a long-term relationship with a good buddy of mine not too long after that. Maybe it was the choice of movie, maybe it was the choice of the cuisine. Either way, I blew it. Clearly, I was quite the charmer in high school.

And now, the three BEST date films of the 2010 year.

#23 Date Night

No matter how bad the burrito incident date was, I can't imagine it or any date being worse than the one embarked upon in Date Night. Fey and Carell are Claire and Phil Foster, a suburban mom and dad that are too exhausted to make time for dates. Phil wants to change that, so he tries to take her to trendy NYC joint Claw. They're packed to the gills and scolded for not making a reservation first. So he does something out of character--he takes another couple's; they become the "Trippelhorns". Little do they know, the Tripplehorns are in just a little bit of trouble with a corrupt D.A. for stealing information on a flash-drive, which Claire refers to as a "computer-sticky-thing".


Hilarity ensues as the Fosters fight for their lives and attempt to track down the Tripplehorns (Franco and Kulis, using aliases). Their wild chase takes them through Central Park, puts them a flashy sports car, sinks them in a harbor and eventually into a rather ridiculous adult club. Their chemistry is of course great, maybe at its best in there moments of cute sincerity. A good trick that they do a couple of times is have discussions in the voices of other couples they see out at dinners.

It was only a matter of time for the two of them to work together. When I read that theThursday night juggernauts were teaming up on Date Night, my first reaction was "Why did it take so long?" Clearly, a lot of other people thought the same thing, because this movie features everybody. Leighton Meester is their babysitter, Mark Ruffalo and Kristin Wiig are friends whose relationship is rocky, It-girl Olivia Munn is a bitchy hostess, James Franco and Mila Kunis are low-level thugs, Common and It's Always Sunny's Jimmi Simpson are "cops", Taraji P Henson is a by-the-books detective, Curb Your Enthusiasm's J.B. Smoove is a cab driver, and Mark Wahlberg is a millionaire playboy that helps them along the way. Quite a supporting cast, no?

#22 Going the Distance

Guy-meets-girl and girl moves out of town (or vice-versa). This format is of course not new, but in Going the Distance it's pulled off in a really great and engaging way. A lot of it has to do with the script--it was penned by newcomer Geoff LaTulippe--which feels very real and is a lot of times outrageously funny. The other thing is that for as good as Drew Barrymore and Justin Long are, the supporting cast one-ups them at each chance, that being Long's pals Jason Sudekis and Charlie Day (the latter is his roommate) and Barrymore's sister and brother-in-law, played by Christina Applegate and Jim Gaffigan.

Barrymore is Erin and Long is Garrett. They meet at a bar, plugging quarters into Centipede. They hook up, but he comes to find out she is only in town for the summer as a journalist intern at a New York paper; she's back to San Francisco at the end of the summer. She shocks him with cool-girl wit and good taste in music. He makes her laugh. So of course when it comes time for summer to be over, it's not an easy break. It never is. But because of the whirlwind nature, they decide to give it a go, which is of course super complex and exhausting. Going the Distance is much more vulgar than you would expect, but here it works because both the relationship and the dialogue come across (with a couple of exceptions) as pretty realistic. Granted, I didn't have too many expectations for this one to begin with, but whatever ones there were got blown out of the water.

#21 Easy A

The clever double-entendre' employed by Easy A ("this class is an 'easy A'" and "this girl is an easy piece of A") works well in this modern day teenage comedy re-telling of The Scarlet Letter. This is Emma Stone's first leading role, and she carries it well as Olive, the girl at the epicenter of the gossip column. She creates a lie about losing her virginity--a funny scene in which she and a friend make animal noises and jump up and down on a bed at a party--and suddenly, everyone wants a piece. 

Maybe that's not a bad thing, Olive thinks to herself. She turns her newfound "slutiness" into a profit-making machine, asking anywhere from 20 to a hundred bucks just to say she hooked up with high-school losers. She wears an "A" sewn onto her scandalous tops in homage to the scarlet letter, a move that her teacher (Thomas Haden Church, great as always) and her counselor (Lisa Kudrow) consider to be a little bit misguided. It's all working for now, but when will her scheme catch up with her?

The script of this movie is fresh if not a little farfetched--her family, with Patricia Clarkson and a dynamite Stanley Tucci as her parents, basically talk to her like she's an adult and let her get away with just about whatever she wants as long as it's what she wants. Amanda Bynes leads a crew of hardcore Christians that pray for her and simoltaneously look to take her down, staging protests and the like. And Penn Badgely is Woodchuck Todd, the school mascot, maybe the only one in the whole bunch that really gets her, and their relationship develops nicely. Really enjoyed this one.

Back later with the top 20, or essentially, the 10 oscar nominated films and 10 other ones mixed in...