Review // This Is 40

It was maybe an hour and 45 minutes into This Is 40 when I thought, "Oh my god, this movie is never going to end." And I don't mean that in a funny "I'm exaggerating for effect; obviously, the movie will end" kind of way, either. I mean that I briefly considered the possibility that this purgatory of a movie would literally never end. I thought the boring lives of Debbie and (hold on a second while I look up his name) Pete had somehow turned into The Truman Show and would just keep going and I was bound to sit there forever, watching their boring, boring lives play out.

Okay, listen. That sounds pretty harsh. I didn't hate the movie. In fact, I found it pleasantly surprising for a while. I was paying attention and sitting up straight in my seat and by god, I was even laughing. The film felt on track to being perfectly adequate. It's hard to hate a movie like that. Really, it's hard to feel anything for a movie like that.

But then it just kept going and going, introducing new threads right up until the time that some beautiful person finally told Judd Apatow to end the fucking movie already, and so it just does.

There's no restraint. The movie gets bored with itself and decides to spice things up by casually trying on and discarding new plot lines like a 16-year-old girl picking an outfit for the big party at Todd's house tonight. These are the kind of plot lines that would normally get their own movie, like "a woman tries to reconnect with her biological but estranged father who has his own family," or "a man in financial straits needs to stop lending money to his lazy father who is taking advantage of him."

So the movie meanders absentmindedly from one story to the next, never really making progress anywhere, and I kept checking to see how much time had passed since I last checked. (Usually about eight minutes.)

There's too much going on, and the movie never feels enthusiastic about any of it. There's a fine premise in "Debbie and Pete come to terms with turning 40" for a comedy. It's loose enough that Apatow has plenty of room to sit back and tell jokes and get his characters in all sorts of hijinks. But when you start layering in all the other threads, like Pete's label is going out of business, and one of Debbie's employees is stealing money, and all the stuff with their parents, it chokes all the comedic potential right out of the movie.

The movie's biggest problem is Apatow's ambitious but misguided desire to make a meaningful comedy that
tries to be sad, heartfelt and funny all at once.

Think back to Superbad, inarguably Apatow's best film to date. What was the premise there? "Two friends go to a party." That's it. Apatow adds depth where it makes sense, like the fear of separation as the two deal with being accepted to different colleges, but he leaves it pretty open otherwise so he can just cram in whatever dumb, hilarious scenes he can.

It's not all bad, though. Jason Segel and Chris O'Dowd have a couple really funny scenes together addressing such hot topics as, "What is the difference between a gay man's mustache and a straight man's mustache?" and, "What the fuck is going on?"

Paul Rudd as Pete and Leslie Mann as Debbie both do a fine job, but their delivery sometimes feels jarringly unnatural, even for an Apatow comedy. The scene in the trailers where they talk about how Pete is actually "such a dick" is a good example.

The movie's biggest problem is Apatow's ambitious but misguided desire to make a meaningful comedy that tries to be sad, heartfelt and funny all at once. Funny People was good, but not nearly as funny as it should've been, and the same goes for This Is 40. Apatow throws as many attempts as he can muster at the wall to have some kind of emotional resonance that sticks, and none of them do. They just bloat an already bloated movie.

So This Is 40 ends up being not that funny, not that fun, and is so long that, for a fleeting moment, I actually thought it would never end. It has a few good laughs and is inoffensive enough that you could do worse, but I wouldn't recommend it if you have anything better to do. Seriously, anything at all.

This Is 40 / 2hr 13min / Released December 21, 2012

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Review // Lincoln

As I sat in the theater on Thanksgiving, sandwiched between my brother and a blond woman I didn't know, watching the third of an eventual five warnings either to silence or turn off my phone before the movie—this one featuring a clueless and charming Billy Crystal fretting that an incoming unknown caller might be important and answering to the horror that it's only his dry cleaner informing him that a stain couldn't be removed—I couldn't help but wonder: Who seriously answers their phone during a movie anymore? And when did Billy Crystal get so old?

I was there for Lincoln. Well, no. I was there for Daniel Day-Lewis, and he just happened to be in Lincoln. It's been my opinion for quite some time now that Daniel Day-Lewis is the finest actor alive today, and I was frothing to watch him take on the role of arguably America's finest president.

Though I couldn't help but notice, as the previews began to roll, that the aspect ratio of the screen was off, leaving huge gaps above and below the picture, and for some trailers, to the sides as well. I tried to put it out of my mind. Daniel Day-Lewis. Abraham Lincoln.

The movie began and everyone finally shut up. I was stunned by how easily Day-Lewis seemed to assume the role, how quickly he disappeared into it, how enrapturing his performance was. I was initially impressed with the focus of the movie, homing in specifically on the issue of the 13th Amendment alone, ignoring the greater conflicts at hand until the moments it needed to instill upon the audience just how great those conflicts were and how much pressure they put on the 13th Amendment and on Lincoln himself.

I started mentally taking notes: There are so many recognizable actors in this movie. Tommy Lee Jones is stealing the show. The soundtrack is overbearing, a little too broad and sweeping to really have an impact. It gives too much reverence and not enough reality. My god, Tommy Lee Jones is stealing the show.

Then the yawning began.

All around me, I could hear people yawning and growing restless. They would wake during the more intense scenes—Lincoln arguing with his cabinet, the members of the House of Representatives yelling at and insulting each other, Tommy Lee Jones being anywhere on-screen—but during the less gripping parts of the movie, the yawns began to chorus around the theater. Specifically, the woman beside me, and the woman behind me.

I don't think I've ever hated anyone
more than that man right then.

Now, let me just clarify: These were not the polite, quiet yawns of a normal, considerate person. These were audible yawns, comically loud and impossibly impolite. These were the kind of yawns you'd base an episode of Seinfeld on, the kind that annoys Jerry to the point that he ignores George's warnings and finally turns around to confront the offending yawner. Fast-forward to Jerry being escorted out of the theater. Well, I decided that I didn't want to be escorted out of the theater, so I just sat there instead, plotting how I'd passive aggressively get my revenge by complaining later on the Internet like any self-respecting modern man.

An ominous rumbling shook our theater momentarily. A few people looked around. It rumbled again. The sound was bleeding through from another movie like a half-naked Chinese man sprawled on your dining room table during a dinner party: noticeably. And then, it happened. It finally happened.

A guy actually answered his phone during the movie.

His phone rang. He didn't silence it. After all the melodramatic warnings, he answered it anyway, began talking, then stood up and began to walk out of the theater. "Hey, I'm in a movie," I probably heard him say on his way out. "Yeah, Lincoln. It's shit. Of course I'm still in the theater; so what? Well, fuck them, right? Hahahaha!"

I don't think I've ever hated anyone more than that man right then.

The woman beside me, one of the serial yawners, began to scratch her arm. You wouldn't think that would be a big deal, but it was like someone had just told her that she had a parasite in her arm that would kill her before the credits if she couldn't dig it out in time. It was deafening. And all the while, she had the raw, unfettered audacity to claim the entire armrest for herself.

Listen. I'll admit that Lincoln is not the most exciting film I've ever seen. It's too long, it's often meandering, and it putters across the finish line instead of roars because it didn't have the good sense to know when to end, trying to turn Lincoln into a god to be worshipped by suddenly deciding that it can't resist but needlessly tackle Lincoln's assassination in the most bizarre way imaginable: from the perspective of a different theater receiving the news. But it's certainly not so boring that it deserves to be yawned through. Really, Lincoln the film is a lot like Lincoln the man. It's deliberate. It takes a winding path to its destination, but it gets there eventually.

As we left the theater, my family started talking about what they thought of it:

"I don't think it's the kind of movie I'd watch more than once," my brother started, "but I really liked it."

"Oh, it was a fantastic movie," said my dad. He's the kind of person who falls asleep during movies and needs to be poked awake, so coming from him, that's high praise. "What great acting!"

"Yeah, I really liked that guy who played Lincoln," my mom agreed. "And Sally Fields did such a wonderful job. What'd you think?" They all looked at me. I kept walking.

"I think I need to get as far away from this theater as I possibly can."

Lincoln / 2hr 30min / Released November 9, 2012

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Spider-Man 3 is the worst movie in the history of movies.

I decided to take a break from PixelJunk Eden to watch Spider-Man 3 again.

What the hell was I thinking?


Let's rewind back to May 4, 2007, the day a piece of me died.

Spider-Man was awesome. Spider-Man 2 was awesome. The trailers for Spider-Man 3 have been badass, and now I'm sitting in the theater at the premiere with a row of my friends. I'm fucking giddy. This must be what heaven feels like.

Then the movie started.

One hundred and thirty-nine excruciating minutes later and the credits began to roll, but no one stood up to leave. The whole theater just sat there in complete silence. No one looked anyone else in the eyes, and it was painfully obvious why: they had just been sodomized.

Eventually I stood up and did the only thing I could do. I took my friend's straw, stabbed my eyes out, and then jammed it into my throat to end my misery.

If only.

No, finally a guy near the front stood up and said "Spider-Man 3 is the worst movie in the history of movies," and walked out. Everyone else began to follow him, but I just sat there wondering, what the hell happened? They must have known how bad that was when they were filming it. Obviously there is no god.

Fast forward to a few hours ago. A friend left his copy of Spider-Man 3 here and I thought I'd give it another shot, that maybe I'd just had unrealistic expectations before and enough time had passed. How wrong I was.

Let's do a quick countdown of the three worst things about Spider-Man 3:

3. Topher Grace

I like Topher Grace. I do. He was funny on That 70s Show and he was even pretty good in that one movie with Dennis Quaid. But Topher Grace had no business playing Venom. He's super skinny and he's not scary at all.

Before the Venom transformation, he was decent when contrasted with Tobey Maguire's embarrassing performance, but once he donned the black, it was a train wreck. He tried to make the role funny with clever quips and corny jokes like holding up Mary Jane and saying "my spidey sense is tingling... if you know what I mean."

What an awful casting job.

2. Worst Ending Ever

At the end of the movie, Venom dies in a cheesy explosion, Harry dies from being exposed to too many cliches, and Spider-Man and Sandman have a heart to heart about how much their lives suck until they both start crying, Spider-Man forgives him, and Sandman literally just flies away into the sunrise.

What?

So Sandman is still an escaped convict wanted for murdering Peter Parker's uncle, robbing a bank and a security van, causing millions of dollars in property damage, at the very least endangering the lives of countless citizens if not killing many, and attempting to kill Spider-Man, but that's all okay because his daughter is dying? Bullshit.

Bullshit.

This is Spider-Man, not Dr. Phil. Wipe your tears and go kick his ass.

1. Peter Parker

It was impossible to like Peter Parker in Spider-Man 3. He went from being a self-absorbed jackass to a total pussy to an insane person who, in the span of two minutes, goes from playing the piano and dancing in a jazz club to hitting women in the face, and finally back to being a pussy.

In Spider-Man 2, you could sympathize with the guy. His girl is engaged to someone else, his job sucks, he's failing his classes, his aunt finds out he was indirectly responsible for her husband's death, his best friend wants Spider-Man dead, he's losing his powers, and the city he's sacrificing it all to protect still hates him. Not to mention the dude with four mechanical arms trying to kill him.

But the reason why you cared was because he was a good, likeable person, and so you rooted for him. You wanted him to triumph. Had he been smacking Mary Jane around, dancing on tables and flipping his hair, you would've just been like, "whatever, man; he deserves it. Eff that guy." So by the end of Spider-Man 3, I wanted nothing more than Peter Parker's head on a pike. How could I not?

What I'm trying to say with all of this is that The Dark Knight was awesome. But if Christian Bale starts singing and jumping in front of American flags in Batman 3, people will die.

I'm a man of my word.

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