Mini Reviews: 6/11/14

First Circle:  2010 documentary about the American foster care system directed by Heather Rae.  It centers mostly on children being removed from homes with meth labs in Idaho.   It was interesting, but perhaps too narrow in focus.  There was a lot I didn’t know about the foster care system – babysitters and sleepover require background checks, and even haircuts have to be approved – but it felt like just dipping a toe in.  I wish there had been more, but it was decent.

The World’s End:  2013 sci fi comedy directed by Edgar Wright and starring Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan, Rosamund Pike, and Pierce Brosnan.  As teenagers, Gary King and his chums attempted and failed at an epic 12-stop pub crawl known as the Golden Mile.  Now in his late 30s, Gary hasn’t really moved on – I mean, he’s still wearing his Sisters of Mercy T-shirt – while the other boys have grown into responsible, relatively sober adults.  He convinces/guilts the old gang into taking another shot at the Golden Mile, but when they arrive back in their hometown it seems a lot has changed.  The townsfolk seem strangely . . . robotic?  Soon their pub crawl turns into a night of reopening emotional wounds, revisiting past crushes, and, you know, fighting for survival.

            It was really good, but my least favorite of the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy (the other two being Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz).  The acting is brilliant – Frost and Pegg continue to impress me.  And Eddie Marsan is just fantastic; he’s been given smallish roles in blockbuster movies like the Sherlock Holmes redux with RDJ, but he shines brightest in smaller films like this.  The scene where he’s confronted by his former bully was an emotional sucker punch and it just made me so happy to see him with enough of a role to stretch his legs.  Anyway definitely see it, but be prepared for it to fizzle out at the end.

The Grey:  2011 thriller directed by Joe Carnahan and starring Liam Neeson, Frank Grillo, and Dermot Mulroney.  John is a solitary, melancholy hunter at an arctic oil drilling site, literally keeping the wolves at bay while working side by side with guys he describes as “men unfit for mankind” – fugitives, roughnecks, drifters, and the like.  During a flight back home the company plane crashes, and he has to get his fellow survivors organized if they're going to make it back to civilization and fend off the wolf pack that's closing in on them.

It wasn’t what I had expected.  At all.  There’s a lot of waxing philosophical about death, religion, and family.  It was better than I thought it would be, but not amazing and fairly predictable.  Maybe give it a shot if you’re looking for an action movie filled with bearded men scrapping in the hinterlands and talking about atheism.

The Last Days of Disco:  1998 dark ensemble comedy directed by Whit Stillman and starring Kate Beckinsale, Chloe Sevigny, Chris Eigeman, Mackenzie Astin, Matt Keeslar, Jennifer Beals, and Robert Sean Leonard.  Alice and Charlotte are twenty-something’s in early 1980s New York, working at a publishing house together, living in an apartment together, going to awful clubs together, and secretly competing with each other while surrounded by Wall Street assholes and Studio 54 assholes and whatever.

I kind of hated it.  Charlotte (Beckinsale) is an insufferable human being, and Alice (Sevigny) has no personality and no spine.  Was I supposed to empathize with these people?  I only kept watching because I hoped something awful would happen to them.  But instead I had to sit through a series of endless speeches delivered flatly by shitty characters.  Eigeman as the lady-killing scoundrel Des is the only redeeming part of this movie, and only because he provided occasional comic relief.  It was depressing and pointless and you shouldn’t bother.

I can't even look at you in that dress.

 

Tonight You’re Mine (a.k.a. You Instead):  2011 romantic comedy directed by David MacKenzie and starring Luke Treadaway, Natalia Tena, Mathew Baynton, and Gavin Mitchell.  Adam and Morello are lead singers in two bands performing at T in the Park, a Scottish music festival. When their initial meeting immediately turns into a tiff, a passing preacher decides it would be cute to handcuff them to each other.  Now they have to get their bickering in check long enough to find someone who can remove the handcuffs, all while dealing with their significant others, performing, and handling band conflict and drunk managers.  Will they learn to cooperate?

            Despite my aversion to music festivals (too hot, too loud, too many people) and the fact that it’s REALLY predictable, I still liked it quite a bit.  Tena, who you may recognize from her role as Nymphadora Tonks in the Harry Potter movie series, is always a delight.  And the skinny indie electropop front man character suits Treadaway nicely.  Give it a try.

Mini Reviews: 5/31/14

The Lady Vanishes:  1938 thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, Paul Lukas, and May Whitty.  Young Iris is waiting with her fellow passengers to board a train through pre-war Europe when she receives a severe bump on the noggin.  She’s helped into her car by the sweet, elderly Miss Froy, who she shares a cup of tea and a nice conversation with before blacking out.  When she comes to she can’t find Miss Froy, and everyone else on the train claims they've never seen her.  She enlists the help of a charmingly caddish musician named Gilbert, who agrees to help her solve the mystery – and perhaps save all their lives.

                  It’s a great early Hitchcock movie, slightly lighter on its feet than others.  Lockwood and Redgrave have a nice adversarial chemistry, there are plenty of twists and turns, and it involves just enough humor and weirdness to keep it from getting too dark.  It’s also the first film appearance of the British cricket-obsessed comic duo Charters & Caldicott, who you may remember if you’ve also seen Night Train to Munich, an indirect sequel to The Lady Vanishes.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service:  1969 Bond action film directed by Peter R. Hunt and starring George Lazenby, Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas, Gabriele Ferzetti, and Ilse Steppat.  James Bond is on the trail of the nefarious Ernst Blofeld, the head of the international terrorist organization SPECTRE.  On a tip from his current paramour’s father, he gains entry to Blofeld’s clinical allergy research institute (okay . . .) by posing as a genealogist (sure . . .) who has come to secure Blofeld’s claim as a Count or Viscount or whatever.  Fine.  Bond quickly surmises that the lovely young female patients are being brainwashed at night in a plot to distribute biological weapons around the globe.  Also Diana Rigg is there.

It’s definitely the weirdest older-period Bond movie.  I’m a big fan of the Connery and Moore and Craig eras, and never had much use for the others.  I continue to stand firm in that feeling.  It’s too long, especially during the action sequences that have this strange frenetic desperation.  It was Lazenby’s only turn as Bond, which I completely understand because this movie is a hilarious mess.  The real bright spot for me was Telly Sevalas, who I totally buy as a smooth-talking mastermind but not an expert skier.

Sneakers:  1992 comedic/dramatic caper directed by Phil Alden Robinson and starring Robert Redford, Dan Aykroyd, Ben Kingsley, Mary McDonnell, River Phoenix, Sidney Poitier, and David Strathairn.  Martin Bishop is a former hacktivist (shut up, it’s a perfectly cromulent word) who leads an unlikely team of security specialists that assist companies in beefing up their surveillance.  Martin is approached by the NSA and they offer to expunge his hacking record if he recovers a package from a mathematician.  His team succeeds, but when the mathematician is killed things go haywire and suddenly they don’t know who to trust – were those guys even with the NSA?  And could Martin’s former partner-in-hack be involved with all of this somehow?

                  It’s just delightful.  Kingsley can really pull off crazy, Dan Aykroyd’s nickname is Mother and it tickles me, Phoenix is adorable, Strathairn can pretty much do no wrong in my eyes, Donal Logan wears a white turtleneck under a cream blazer – I could go on.  It’s the height of early ‘90s spy heist caper excellence and you should definitely see it.

The Road:  2009 post-apocalyptic drama directed by John Hillcoat and starring Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, and Robert Duvall.  In an unspecified time after an unspecified cataclysmic world event a man and his son are on a meandering quest towards the South, and have to contend with thieves, hunger, cannibals, and roaming violent gangs.

I couldn’t finish it; it was just way too upsetting.  I gave it a shot because of Viggo, but after feeling nauseously stressed to the point of tears for the second time in 20 minutes I turned it off.  The book by Cormac McCarthy manages to be both heartbreaking and heartwarming, both uplifting and soul-crushing, and is one of the best books I’ve ever read seriously period.  It’s something I imagine is much harder to capture on film.  Skip it, and read the book.

 
The Jeffrey Dahmer Files:  2013 documentary about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, directed by Chris James Thompson.  It follows the last months in Dahmer’s life before he was arrested, and features interviews with a former neighbor and some of the officials who worked on the case.  I thought the dramatic reenactments were well done and for the most part spared the more gruesome specifics.  It’s fascinating – but I wouldn’t bother unless you have an interest in criminal psychology and can stomach the gory details of serial murder.

 

Mini Reviews: 2/17/14

The Bourne Legacy:  2012 action thriller directed by Tony Gilroy and starring Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Joan Allen, and Edward Norton.  Aaron Cross (Renner) is a field operative in a top-secret like totally super secret shouldn’t even be happening Department of Defense black ops program.  While he’s completing a training exercise in Alaska, a higher-up at DoD (Norton) realizes that the program is at risk of exposure, so the best solution would be to just kill everyone involved.  A drone is sent to kill Cross, but because he’s taking these fancy performance- and intelligence-enhancing pills he manages to escape.  He tracks down the last remaining biochemist who worked on the program (Weisz) and manages to save her from CIA assassins, but now they need to get their hands on more of those fancy pills before he goes into withdrawal and turns into a bumbling idiot.  Which won’t be great for their chances of survival.

            I liked it, and I like Renner as a Bourne-esque offshoot.  It’s a fairly good action movie, all in all.  And while I’m glad this reboot happened for the aforementioned reasons, it certainly wasn’t necessary.  So I’m torn.  It captured the feeling of the The Bourne Identity, without getting bogged down like the two sequels that followed it.  In order to understand Legacy, it would help to see the first movie and then skip the other two and then see this one.  Which is essentially the same movie with different characters.

The Collection:  2012 horror movie directed by Marcus Dunstan and starring Emma Fitzpatrick, Christopher McDonald, Lee Tergesen, and Josh Stewart.  A serial killer dubbed The Collector has kidnapped a young girl and her father recruits the killer’s only known surviving victim to track him down.  It’s a preposterous sketch of a movie.  It’s boring and too outlandish - not in an inventive way.  It seems to start midstream, and now that I know it’s a sequel that makes sense.  Perhaps if it had been more interesting I would have gone back to The Collector and then started this again, but that seems more effort than it would be worth.

Tabloid:  2010 documentary by Errol Morris, about Joyce McKinney’s bizarre tale of love and misunderstanding.  Or kidnapping.  You decide.  In 1975 McKinney met Kirk Anderson in Provo, Utah.  She was a blonde, buxom former Miss Wyoming; he was an upstanding young Mormon.  According to her they began a torrid romance, and his church whisked him off to the UK to keep them apart.  She found him, rescued him, and tried to break through the Mormon brainwashing with a weekend of wild, consensual sex.  According to the British tabloids (and Anderson, and the courts) she developed an infatuation with him that he did not reciprocate.  When he was sent to do his missionary work, she and a hired thug followed him, kidnapped him, and then she sexually assaulted him.  It’s a bizarre he-said/she-said that deals with the tabloid media, journalistic ethics, and the trustworthiness of seemingly emotionally unstable interview subjects.

Sadly, the documentary is not nearly as interesting as that synopsis makes it seem.  Anderson declined to be interviewed for the movie, so most of his side of the story is taken from former friends of McKinney’s and the newspapers.  And McKinney seems totally whack-a-doo, but does that mean she’s lying?  I found myself unable to side with either party totally, which in the end didn’t matter because I wasn’t really invested in the movie.  It was fine, but Morris has done far, far better.

Bully:  2011 documentary directed by Lee Hirsch about bullying in American schools.  It focuses on a slightly odd but very endearing 14 year-old boy named Alex; a girl called Kelby who is dealing with the fall-out after coming out as gay in a small Oklahoma town; and 14 year-old Ja’Meya, who was so fed up with being bullied that she pulled out a gun on a crowded school bus and is now facing 45 felony charges.  Surrounding these kids are terrified and frustrated parents, school administrators both clueless and helpless, and the bullies themselves. 

The Bully Project has now become a bit of a phenomenon, which is great.  It’s moving the issue forward.  I’m not happy that the filmmakers chose to gloss over the preexisting mental health issues of a boy named Tyler Long – who the movie asserts committed suicide solely because he was bullied, because I think that’s absolutely part of the larger conversation.  That being said, it’s definitely worth seeing.

It’s a deeply upsetting film, a great conversation starter, and pretty much universally relatable.  Everyone goes through this to varying degrees – be prepared for it to hit a nerve.

Chapter 27:  2007 drama directed by Jarrett Schaefer and starring Jared Leto and Lindsay Lohan, about the murder of John Lennon.  I was annoyed within the first three minutes.  While I appreciate Leto’s commitment to embodying Mark David Chapman with the weight gain and that horrible voice and the mannerisms, that’s about all the positive feeling I can muster for this.  The music seems desperate to make the movie quirky.  The narration is fucking terrible.  And though Lindsay Lohan seems so normal in this movie as to be shocking, her character is rather pointless.  She is apparently there to provide a human connection for Chapman, a reaching out from the universe towards this lonely, unbalanced man.  What total shit. 

Mini Reviews: 2/3/14

The Birds:  1963 thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, and Suzanne Pleshette.  When the mischievous young socialite Melanie Daniels begins a flirtation with Mitch Brenner at a pet shop, she winds up following him to his seaside home in Bodega Bay to play a little prank.  Once there she has his kid sister, overbearing mother, and former lover to contend with.  Also?  Swarms of murderous birds.  Gulls and crows and sparrows et al descend upon the sleepy fishing town and for no apparent reason start attacking the residents, seemingly with malicious purpose.  Suddenly there’s no safe haven, with birds infiltrating homes, businesses, cars – how will they escape?

It’s like a tense romantic drama set in a horror movie – I looooooved it.  I want to be friends with the Melanie Daniels character and learn how she does her hair and also how she manages to not scream when birds are dive-bombing her glorious face.  Another Hitchcock film to add to your must-see list if you haven’t already.

That Guy . . . Who Was In That Thing:  2012 documentary by Ian Roumain and Michael Schwartz about the lives and careers of working character actors.  It features interviews with Zeljko Ivanek, Xander Berkeley, Craig Fairbrass, Bruce Davison, Timothy Omundson, and eleven other actors who make their living as supporting characters in television and film.  You may not recognize the names, but you would probably recognize their faces – which is the whole point.  The actors talk about the various career idiosyncrasies of the character actor:  loving getting typecast or hating it, the horrid process of auditioning, everyone does Star Trek, etc.  It’s okay.  Mildly interesting.

Black Rock:  2012 horror-thriller directed by Katie Aselton and starring Aselton, Lake Bell, Kate Bosworth, Jay Paulson, and Anslem Richardson.  Sarah (Bosworth) has invited her friends Abby (Aselton) and Lou (Bell) to a fun girls’ weekend on a remote island off the coast of Maine where they used to camp as kids, in hopes that it will repair their broken friendship.  But they’re not alone on the island, and when a horrible accident turns The Others against them they have to work together to survive.

            It’s fine?  Pretty good?  Yeah.  Fine, pretty good.  The presence of Bosworth had me concerned that it would be chick-flickish, but it totally wasn’t.  The conflict between the girls made it more interesting, but there was also a The Descent element that felt perhaps too familiar?  Maybe?  I liked the people involved, and it was certainly more interesting and intelligent than your average horror movie of today.  It’s a what-are-you-prepared-to-do kind of thriller.  Not super gory but NOT for the squeamish.  The Big Bad turned out to be utterly predictable but still interesting in the end.  Fine.

Black Sunday:  1960 Italian horror film directed by Mario Bava and starring Barbara Steele, John Richardson, Andrew Checchi, Ivo Garrani, and Arturo Dominici.  A Moldavian vampire witch is burned at the stake with her lover, but not before placing a terrible curse on the future generations of her family.  Skip ahead a few centuries and some nimrod bumbling around her grave accidentally breaks the cross that’s keeping her body from reanimating and she totally comes back to life and starts killing people.  Great job.  I watched this only because I felt like I should – it’s considered a classic of Italian horror and hugely influential to many filmmakers all over the world, and so forth.  I’m glad I watched it, I did find it sufficiently creepy, but I don’t know that I would seek it out again.  Italian horror is just not my genre.  But if you’re into that sort of thing, definitely give it a try.

Ghost Bird:  2009 documentary directed by Scott Crocker, about the mysterious and elusive Ivory-Billed Woodpecker.  Long thought extinct, the bird was supposedly spotted in a remote area of Arkansas in 2004, and the news attracted expert ornithologists and amateur bird-watchers the world over.  After years of searching, no physical evidence of any kind has surfaced.  But if the bird really is extinct it will hurt the local economy and could stop funding for restoring wildlife areas, so the hunt continues.

It was kind of cute, but couldn’t hold my interest.

Mini Reviews: 1/20/14

Beverly Hills Cop:  1984 action comedy directed by Martin Brest and starring Eddie Murphy, Judge Reinhold, John Ashton, Steven Berkoff, and Lisa Eilbacher.  Brash, young Detroit police detective Axel Foley traces the murder of his childhood friend to Beverly Hills, where he is forced to work in an unofficial capacity with two local cops to solve the crime.  Hijinks of all kinds unfold:  a robbery at a strip club, a smuggling operation, kidnapping, undercover work, and many procedural violations.

                  It’s good.  Early Murphy is the best Murphy, Ashton is a fantastic straight man as Sergeant Taggart, and Judge Reinhold spends the entire movie looking pleasantly dazed as per usual.  It’s funny, plenty of action and intrigue, and it moves quickly.  I realize I was probably one of very few who hadn’t seen this movie yet, but just in case you’ve also missed it: it’s worth seeing.

The Woman Who Wasn’t There:  2012 documentary directed by Angelo Guglielmo.  Tania Head’s 9/11 survival story was the stuff of legend:  she was working for Merrill Lynch on the 78^th floor of the South Tower when Flight 175 hit it, and one of only 19 survivors above the point of impact.  Her husband was killed in the North Tower.  She was rescued by Welles Crowther, a man credited for rescuing over a dozen people before perishing in the South Tower collapse.  She became a head lobbyist for the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network, an organization she helped strengthen and gain public recognition.  Except Tania Head’s entire moving story is a crock of shit.

I was pretty skeptical at first – I mean, Meredith Viera produced it, so . . . but it quickly grew on me.  I would have preferred to hear her supposed story in its entirety from the beginning, rather than learning new tidbits over time.  That’s really my only quibble with it.  It’s short but powerful.  And the end isn’t all sunshine and light for the people left in the wake of her bullshit, it doesn’t sugarcoat their feelings.  Not all of her former friends were able to muster platitudes about forgiveness.

The Naked City:  1948 film noir directed by Jules Dassin and starring Barry Fitzgerald, Don Taylor, Howard Duff, and Ted de Corsia.  Veteran NYPD Homicide Detective Dan Muldoon and his rookie associate Jimmy Halloran have just caught the case of an ex-model drowned in her bathtub.  And that’s all I’m saying.  It’s a noir with just a touch of dark humor; it shows the drudgery and legwork of the police without being boring, which I think is difficult to pull off.   We see New York City as it was in 1940s summer, and the everyday lives of the policemen.  The acting is all over the place – Taylor and de Corsia were mostly fine, Fitzgerald as the elder detective is delightful, and Duff really overdoes it.   All in all, a great classic film; definitely check it out if you like noir.

Incendiary:  2008 British drama directed by Sharon Maguire and starring Michelle Williams, Ewan McGregor, and Matthew Macfadyen.  Williams plays a woman known only as the Young Mother, married to a bomb-disposal officer in an anti-terrorist unit, a bored housewife wanting more sympathy than her emotionally distant husband can give her.  She starts a flirtation with a neighbor, a reporter named Jasper.  One day while the husband and her four year-old son are off at a local football match, she begins an affair in earnest, and while she’s having sex with Jasper they witness the stadium being blown up.  Seriously.  Her husband’s boss Terrence tries to comfort her, and Jasper senses some devious doings on his part and begins to investigate.  Soon they are both vying for her attention and trying to solve the case.

I worried that it was going to turn into a meditation on grief and guilt.  But I warmed to it pretty quickly, especially once it morphed into a semi-thriller – and then by the third act all of the air had gone out of it.  I’m sure the end was supposed to be uplifting and redeeming, but by then I’d stopped caring.

World War Z:  2013 action thriller directed by Marc Forster and starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, and Fana Mokoena.  The zombie apocalypse has arrived, and it’s up to Gerry Lane, former United Nations investigator (really?) to get us out of this terrible fix.  When crazed zombies attack Philadelphia he manages to get his family to safety by having them airlifted to a Navy vessel, where he’s reluctantly pulled into service again.  He leads a team to South Korea, and from there they go bopping all over the planet to find the source and cure for the outbreak.

                  It’s fine, I guess?  I haven’t read the book yet, and I’ve heard the movie doesn’t even come close.  If you’re looking for an easy, mindless, fast-paced action/horror movie then give it a try.  Just don’t expect brilliance.

Mini Reviews: 12/28/13

Captain America: The First Avenger:  2011 Marvel superhero film directed by Joe Johnston and starring Chris Evans, Tommy Lee Jones, Hugo Weaving, Stanley Tucci, Toby Jones, and Hayley Atwell.  Steve Rogers is a young, sickly New Yorker who desperately wants to join the fight in World War II, but his myriad health problems keep him from the front until he’s recruited by a scientist to undergo a radical “super soldier” experiment.  It makes him taller, more muscular, and perfect for . . . promoting the sale of war bonds in a ridiculous costume as Captain America.  Meanwhile, HYDRA, a terrorist organization affiliated with the Third Reich and bent on world domination, has been using an alien energy source called the Tesseract (like in Thor) to build crazy weaponry.  Rogers finally gets the chance to prove his mettle in a rescue mission, and is then used by the military to sabotage HYDRA operations and thwart their evil commander, Red Skull.

            I watched this to refresh my memory about the Avengers backstory, and ended up really liking it.  The effects are great; it’s a decent, well-paced action movie; and it’s a WWII flick with minimal schmaltz and all the flair of the Marvel movie universe.  If you liked The Avengers, give it a shot.

Night Train to Munich:  1940 British thriller directed by Carol Reed and starring Margaret Lockwood, Paul von Henreid, and Rex Harrison.  A Czech scientist and his daughter Anna are on the run from the Nazis and take refuge in England.  Dickie Randall, a British Intelligence agent, is working with them and when they’re kidnapped by a Gestapo agent he works up a daring rescue plan.

Not to be trivial, but eye candy galore.  Harrison, von Henreid (aka Victor Laszlo of Casablanca), and Lockwood are very nice to look at, as are the costumes.  But also the acting is excellent, if occasionally prone to hysterics – I mean, it was the 1940s.  Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne as the cricket-obsessed fellow train travelers provide both comic relief and an appropriate amount of tension with their meddling.  It’s somewhat related to The Lady Vanishes, which is also a great movie.  Definitely check it out if you’re a fan of Hitchcock, noir, spy thrillers, or cricket.

This Is the End:  2013 comedy written and directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, and starring Rogen, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, and Emma Watson as fictionalized versions of themselves.  Jay has come to Los Angeles to spend a quiet weekend playing videogames and smoking weed with his good pal Seth.  When Seth announces they’ll be attending a party at James Franco’s new house, Jay reluctantly agrees, and then spends the entire evening feeling out of place.  That quickly passes once the apocalypse hits.  The Rapture is upon them, and the survivors now have to deal with giant sinkholes that lead to hell, demons, looters, unwanted houseguests, possession, exorcism, and a serious lack of water and food.  And Danny McBride just generally being a dick.

            I saw this in the theaters with two friends and I swear, hand to God, we all almost peed our pants from laughing.  It’s really hilarious.  I was a little skeptical, but I was skeptical of the 21 Jump Street remake too, and that totally proved me wrong.  It’s witty and self-deprecating and the dialogue seemed very real, despite the absurdity of the plot.  It’s definitely worth seeing, especially for the last five minutes.  And Michael Cera’s highly disturbing cameo.

Date Night:  2010 romantic crime comedy directed by Shawn Levy and starring Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Mark Wahlberg, and Taraji P. Henson.  When Phil and Claire Foster learn that their good friends are getting a divorce they decide to reexamine their own domestic routine, and find it rather staid.  To spice things up they decide to have their next date night at an uber-trendy Manhattan restaurant.  When they realize they’ll never get a table, they decide to live dangerously and take the reservation of the Tripplehorn’s, another couple that didn’t show up.  What fun!  Turns out the Tripplehorn’s kind of stole a flash drive of blackmail material from a mobster and suddenly some dirty cops are on their trail.  Hilarity abounds.

It’s pretty solid.  It’s not Fey & Carell at their funniest, but they do make an adorable and believable couple.  I also enjoyed the cameos: Ray Liotta, Mark Ruffalo, Kristin Wiig, Nick Kroll, James Franco, Mila Kunis, etc.  Not over the moon about it, but I liked it.

Kick-Ass:  2010 superhero action comedy directed by Matthew Vaughn and starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Chloe Grace Moretz, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and Nicolas Cage.  Dave is a nice, normal teenager who just wants to do something exciting with his life.   So he becomes a superhero.  Kind of.  After getting stabbed and run over during his first foray into crime-fighting, he beefs up, soups up his costume, and gives himself a terrible name: Kick-Ass.  He does pretty well for a while, but is soon jammed up again by a gang of drug dealers.  Thankfully, 11 year-old vigilante Hit-Girl saves his ass.  Hit-Girl and her father, Big Daddy (seriously with these names), are seeking revenge against a local kingpin and recruit Kick-Ass to assist them in their quest.

           It was fairly decent.  The action sequences are great, there are some nods to Tarantino, Moretz is hysterical as the tiny little badass, and Nic Cage is tolerable.  I haven’t read the comic books this movie is based on, so I have no idea how it stacks up.