Sex and the Leatherheads, Fat Boy
This Week’s DVD Releases / The Pajiba Staff
DVD Releases | September 23, 2008 | Comments (39)
Deception: Ewan McGregor. Michelle Williams. Hugh Jackman. And nobody saw it. Hell, few remember it even came out. For good reason, as Prisco writes: “It’s no surprise this shit heap was manufactured by director Marcel Langenegger, whose resume consists mostly of car commercials for Nissan. And that’s how this movie plays out: like one big, poorly produced commercial for a clunky car. It slithered out of the ear hole of Mark Bomback, author of such gems as The Night Caller and Godsend. He has made his career out of getting really good actors to say really terrible lines in really terrible movies. In fact, his biggest claim to fame was repurposing a tech magazine article on Internet terrorism into the I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Actually-Watchable Live Free or Die Hard. Bomback didn’t so much write a script as he photocopied pages from every legal thriller ever made and then handed it in for a paycheck.”
Leatherheads: Dustin dug the Clooney, both as an actor and director, but thought the movie lacked, writing: “Leatherheads ultimately fails not for what it is, but for what it isn’t: A legitimate screwball comedy on the level with the works of Howard Hawks or George Cukor. It’s an amiable, likable, swell comedy. And Clooney, as director, does an exemplary job with the 20s aesthetic, respectfully capturing the myths of football past on camera, as well as the feel of those old-school comedies combined with the breezy casualness of an Ocean’s film. And while he also does a fairly good imitation of screwball, that’s really all it is: An imitation. A movie good enough to remind you of better ones, but not good enough to compete with them, which — in the end — leaves you mostly with an overwhelming ache of nostalgia.”
Mother of Tears: Dario Argento met his match in Ranylt Richildis, who writes of his latest, “The problem here isn’t difference but execution; what Argento has been delivering stylistically in recent years fails to improve his films, or to obscure those defects that have always been there to some degree. He’s not an actor’s director, or a storyteller, or a dialogue specialist, or a continuity technician, which are just some of the things a master filmmaker has to be. We’ve always watched Argento for what he’s able to do with a surface — we watch him for style and (if you’re in the mood to be taken) for tension. When he attempts nuance or minimalism or even restraint, his house of cards collapses into a mess of B-quality production values devoid of imagination. The center cannot hold, all is vanity, and I’m off to go bleed in a corner for having delivered such tart words about one of my favorite visual artists.”
Pathology: Of the little-seen Milo Ventimiglia horror flick, Priso writes, “Pathology is an unholy mess of a movie, nothing but sloppy buckets of blood splattered over a pastiche of ER remnants. What makes it so incredibly offensive is not that it’s merely a bad movie but that it had the potential to be so good. Instead, it went completely fucking flatline.”
Run Fat Boy Run: Bad. Real bad, as Dustin writes, “American critics are taking it easy on Fat Boy out of respect for Pegg’s body of work (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead, “Spaced”), but I’ll give it to you straight: Cameron Diaz has made better romantic comedies. Hell: Both Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell have made infinitely better use of the one-joke comedy. If I were Gene Shalit, I’d have a goddamn field day with it: Run Fat Boy Run gave me the runs/trots; run, don’t walk, as far away as possible; it’s a marathon of clichés; more winded than a whoopee cushion; it’s not jog in the park; a 100 yard dash of dull; Run Fat Boy Run has tendinitis of the brain; don’t watch this movie, it sucks!”
Sex and the City: Not that the people who were going to watch it anyway care or cared, but Dustin loathed the movie, for both its content and its message, writing: Sex and the City: The Movie is a film that — more or less — brings us full circle, right back to where we fucking started from before the series began: Get a man, marry him, and erect a white picket fence (or a giant clothes closet) to encircle your happiness — typical fairy-tale princess bullshit that’d damn near satisfy Phyllis Schafly, if only Samantha could keep on her goddamn clothes (for all of our sakes, really). “Labels and love,” Carrie Bradshaw intones in the opening minutes of SaTC, and that’s basically what the movie amounts to: lots of shoes, a lot of smushy relationships, and no casual sex to speak of, thus decimating most of what was once most appealing about the show: Sex-hungry, successful women looking to get laid. But hey! They’re in their 40s now, and not even in New York City can a forty-something woman be happy unless she’s settling down with an older, twice-married prince with a deep pocketbook. I read that in Vogue.”
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Comments
Posted by: jM at September 23, 2008 8:43 AM
Haha. Dustin reads Vogue. Naa naa na naa naa.