2010 Movies: #48 & 47

Let the countdown continue...

#48 Valentine's Day

Ah, chick-flicks. Cute, fluffy, require little thinking--the Pomeranian of film genres.

I'll admit, I myself suggested Valentine's Day on Valentine's Day knowing my special date wanted to see it, and I thought "how smart and original of me. A movie on Valentine's Day--such a simple date that it will come across as ingenious." As it turned out I was just like every other male chump in the Twin Cities. It was packed to the gills with couples in their late 20s and I was completely un-effing-original.

This comes down to the fact that if Valentine's Day had one thing going for it, it was brilliant marketing. The idea to come out with Valentine's Day on Valentine's Day was so simple that it came across as ingenious. The amount of young men hit with the phrase "Oh that looks super cute! I want to see this!" must have equaled the population of North Dakota.

There's nothing inherently wrong with seeing a chick-flick on Valentine's Day, nor is there anything inherently wrong with chick flicks in general. As long as they are executed right.

This one, however, was not.

There was something in the neighborhood of ninety A-List stars in this film, but that didn't matter. We (especially my gal) were able to predict each and every "twist" that the film threw our way as we, the eye-fluttering and hopeful viewer, navigated through a bunch of storylines in a Los Angeles version of our tuitular holiday. Ashton Kutcher runs a flower shop, it's the busiest day of the year and--say it ain't so!--he's got a plan to propose to his girlfriend...but she doesn't accept--oh no! Wouldn't it be something if his best friend of several years that he's secretly always loved magically became available on the same day? 

You get the picture. Julia Roberts as a female soldier returning home meets and talks with Bradley Cooper on a plane about the special "man" in her life. Taylor Swift & Lautner flaunt their fame which has since fallen into "no one cares" territory. George Lopez plays the wise old advisor of Kutcher's lovelorn schmo. Everyone's got their own unique take on love and everyone's story comes together. The little kid trying to get flowers for his crush is awwww! enough, and Jessica Biel's V-Day hating character serves her purpose, but Garry Marshall, one-time director of Pretty Woman, Overboard and the Odd Couple, looks more like his new self here--you know, the one that directed Georgia Rule and the one who is in the process of filming New Year's Eve, in which "The lives of several couples and singles in New York intertwine over the course of New Year's Eve." Pick a holiday, add a big city and you've got a blockbuster!

#47 The Losers
 (blogger's note: way too much time spent on the last one. Trimmed down from here on out.)

One thing you can do if you want me to immediately start disliking your movie is to blow up a helicopter full of Bolivian children. This happens in the first ten minutes of The Losers.

The explosion here is meant to resonate with the viewer; the villain in the film is meant to be so hateful and spineless that you yourself want him dead. But from there on out, the antagonist is so bad (played by Speed 2: Cruise Control's Jason Patric) that it's actually cartoonish. Which I suppose makes sense since I believe it was at one point a Comic Book.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan, The Wire's Idris Elba and Chris Evans are among a group of special ops team that gets left for dead after the failed mission in Bolivia. Zoe Saldana joins up with them to try and help them bring Max down, and from there a ton of sh*t gets blown up.

The Losers was of course entertaining, and it should be said that with the exception of the first couple of movies, I didn't straight-up dislike any movies this year. Chris Evans was great as the wise-cracking tech guy, Idris Elba was fun to watch as always, and Zoe Saldana was Zoe Saldana. The problem was in the clunky dialogue, the absurdity of its villain, and the various hokey double-crossings.