I just got moved into a new position at my school (7th and 8th grade English teacher) less than a month ago, and it's taking a lot more energy and time to get things together than I thought it would. So the countdown suffers a bit this time around.
I will have this done in time as per usual, but I may resort to describing movies via haiku.
Before I begin, I'd like to give a shout-out to my buddy Colin and let him know that perhaps I was a little too hard on The Bourne Legacy. The more I thought about it, there were a few movies that deserved to chart lower. So I'll re-adjust here. The Bourne Legacy, originally at 53, will move up a couple of spots. We'll begin this post with the new #53.
#53 Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
With a fistful of Middle-East oil money, a sheik begins a
project to bring his favorite pastime, fly fishing (how’s that for a plot
twist?) to the desert. The money and connections attract the attention of the
British Prime Minister (Kristen Scott Thomas) and her faithful assistant
Harriet (Emily Blunt), who track down the country’s most renowned fish expert,
Dr. Fred Jones (Ewan McGregor) and task him with making it happen. Like the
salmon in the movie, the plot pushes hard against the current, forcing a “will
they or won’t they” dynamic onto McGregor and Blunt as he tries to fix his
unraveling marriage and she waits for the return of her lover from Afghanistan.
Besides the added kind-of-interesting-at-most arc involving the logistics of
bringing salmon to the desert, the rest is a pedestrian snooze that fits snugly
onto director Lasse Hallstrom’s (Dear John, Safe Haven) sappy resume of late.
#52 Where Do We Go Now?
I worked at the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival this past year as a volunteer. For every 3.5 hours I clocked, I got a free movie pass, so I saw 7 for free over the course of the three weeks. Wicked! The closing night film was Where do we go Now. The film was an absolute smash hit in its home country of Lebanon, becoming the highest grossing film not directed by James Cameron. It takes place in a small Lebanese village, where there are constant and oftentimes violent tensions between Christians and Muslims, and Amale’ (Nadine Labaki, who also directed), with the help of other women in the village, begin staging elaborate goofs to try and ease the pain. They put weed into a huge batch of cookies at their local coffeeshop. They fake signs of visits from Christ. It doesn’t seem to work, and in a sense, neither did the movie. The problem with Where do we go Now? Is that it never seems to be able to find its tone. Is it comedy? Is it drama? Is it a political statement? It tries to be all of those things, but simply can’t juggle them effectively.
#51 Think Like a Man
A few years back, stand-up comedian Steve Harvey (he of Family Feud fame) wrote a dating advice book geared toward females, entitled Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man. As I looked over reviews of the book from news outlets to Aretha Franklin to amazon.com consumers, there was a general consensus that he knew what he was talking about and dished it up in a no B.S. fashion. This is the same impression our women protagonists in Think Like a Man get, and thus all of them (Gabrielle Union, Meagan Good, Taraji P Henson, and Regina Hall) look to this dating bible to either fix their current relationships (Union with Entourage’s Jerry Ferrara, basically playing Turtle) or make them successful in their new ones (Henson and Barbershop’s Michael Ealy, Good and 40 Year Old Virgin’s Romany Malco, Hall and Terrence Jenkins, best known for work on Kourtney and Kim Take Miami). As the ninth wheel, married Kevin Hart lends comic support in loud, miniature bursts. Basically what happens is, the ladies use the book to some accomplishments, the men get mad at how they’re being mind-gamed, they discover the women have been using the book, they try to use the book against them. There are plenty of cute moments, but I just can’t get behind the idea of these four gorgeous women needing to defer to Steve Harvey to save their love lives.
#50 The Bourne Legacy (reviewed last post)
#49 The Campaign
A couple of southern businessmen (Lithgow and Akroyd) put together a plan to take down long-seated district congressman Cam Brady (Will Ferrell) by recruiting local schlub and tourism manager Marty Huggins (Zach Galifinakis) to run against him. Huggins, Galifinakis has said, is based upon a character he created called “the effeminate racist”. Here, however, he brings nothing but goodwill to contrast the conniving, brash Ferrell. It’s good fun for a while (a highlight is Dylan McDermott as Huggin’s campaign manager) until the novelty wears off maybe two-thirds through, and you get kind of tired of both characters, and you realize you’re basically watching The Ballad of Ricky Bobby again.
#48 Haywire
Steven Soderbergh has had, in general, an impressive (Traffic, Oceans Eleven, Erin Brockovich)
and prolific (35 films, with 3 in the last calendar year) career as a director.
Haywire marks his first foray into a
full-on action movie, and it returns mixed results. The usual cooler-than-cool
Soderbergh jazzy soundtrack is ever present, as well as the snappy dialogue.
The plot is pretty simple—a CIA operative (professional MMA fighter Gina
Carano) gets set up on a job in Dublin, has to take down Michael Fassbender
(probably not too difficult a task when you are trained in Thai kickboxing) and
dish out revenge to her detractors, which include Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum
and Antonio Banderas, among countless other expendable gun-wielding muscle. Haywire is fun escapism, but it’s
brought down by the fact that while Carano can unequivocally kick some ass, she
can’t act her way out of a paper bag.
#47 That's My Boy
I have a soft spot for Adam Sandler comedies, like many
folks of my generation who grew up telling golf balls to “go in their home” and
singing “do you have any more gum?” to one another. Some Sandler comedies age
well and others don’t, kind of like our protagonist in That’s My Boy, deadbeat dad Donny Berger. In the opening sequence,
a teenage Donny sleeps with his teacher (Eva Amurri, daughter of Susan
Sarandon; Sarandon herself plays the grown-up version in the present) and the
credits show him becoming famous for the scandal. We flash forward to the
present—jean jacket, mullet, mixtapes, completely out of money. To pay off his
debts, he goes to see a trashy TV producer, who promises him 50 grand if he can
reunite with his son and the teacher in a jail visit. Donny then goes to track
down his hedge fund managing son Todd (Andy Samberg) and his fiancée (Leighton
Meester) in the Hamptons (?) to get his life back in order. Sandler is
definitely capable of more, and the movie itself was shitty and ridiculous (despite a decent script from Happy
Endings’ David Caspe), but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t at times
entertaining as hell. In a scene where Todd is ripping into Donny for his bad
parenting:
Todd: You never gave me anything!
Donny: That’s not true. I gave you a snake.
Todd: And it died when it ate all of your Quaaludes!
Donny: That’s the first time in history anyone ever seen a
King Cobra laugh, and I take pride in that.
...46-41 later today!
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