Movie Moment: Fired Up (2009)

Given the reviews for Fired Up, you’d think it’s a total trainwreck. Having now seen it, I must say that anyone who hated it has no sense of humor. I mean, of course it’s fluff – it’s about two high school football players who go to cheer camp to score with girls. But as my roommate and I decided, it’s kind of a borderline parody of all these cheerleading movies. There’s a scene where the entire cheer camp watches Bring it On and everyone at the camp enthusiastically talks along with the dialogue word-for-word. Funny stuff, while also totally acknowledging that this is basically every other cheerleading movie you’ve seen.

Basically, there are only about 5% of the jokes that aren’t funny, and everyone and every aspect of the film is at least twice as good as you’d expect. If you just roll with the fact that it’s fluff and that it’s got a predictable storyline, it’s a really good time. Totally funny one-liners, surprisingly strong chemistry from the cast, and just all-around a surprisingly decent film. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called it “a kind of dumb but also kind of smart-about-being-dumb comedy.” Spot-on. B

Movie Moment: Gray Matters (2007)

Ooh… this one’s gonna be rough, guys. This went straight-to-DVD (I think – if it didn’t, it got dumped in LA/NY theaters then yanked after a week or two) and it shows. Heather Graham and Tom Cavanagh play siblings who are like Will & Grace in their co-dependency but with the gay reversed – turns out Graham is a lesbian, which she slowly discovers over the course of the film after a drunken make-out with Cavanagh’s fiancée (played by Bridget Moynahan).

Potentially interesting premise, yes? Of course. However, writer-director Sue Kramer, in her first feature, can’t milk an ounce of verisimilitude out of this film. Every single moment in the screenplay rings of contrivance and plot necessity, from the quickee Vegas marriage that Cavanagh and Moynahan get after only knowing each other a week to Graham’s wacky therapist (Sissy Spacek, clearly in this film because she lost a bet) holding therapy sessions at random venues, let alone the therapist character itself, who doesn’t behave in any manner remotely close to an actual therapist. For example: I doubt therapists react to their mid-30s client’s coming out of the closet with an emphatic “YOU’RE NOT GAY.” Ugh. Even the stuff that does work just seems rehashed from stuff we’ve seen before. Graham’s character, for example, has a trait straight from Sally Albright in When Harry Met Sally…: the complicated and specific orders when eating out was cute and charming on Sally, here it feels rote, regardless of how well Graham tries to sell it.

It’s all just depressing, mainly because Graham and Cavanagh are kind of good in the movie. You can see them trying hard to sell the horrible screenplay, and they’re wholly believable as the co-dependent siblings. I spent a lot of my time watching this wishing that they had been in a better movie together.

This is just another in a long chain of disappointing gay-themed films. When the Precious trailer came out (which you should all totally watch, by the way), a blog I read mentioned how rare it is to find good films made about realistic black characters, and the same is totally true of homosexuality in film. Yes, there are progressive portrayals of gay characters and great films that deal with homosexuality, but there are so few films that are about homosexuality, like this film. What an interesting premise we have here, dealing with a woman who realizes at her sexual peak that she has been playing for the wrong team (to borrow a horribly overused analogy). Pair this with an interesting brother/sister dynamic and this should have been a great launching pad for an interesting film. Alas, we’re left with odd stereotypes, a handful of jokes that land, and two charismatic leads flailing around for something to do. A real disappointment. D+

Movie Moment: The Prestige (2006), knowing the twist

I had the twist for The Prestige ruined for me. Thus, the movie was ruined.

Part of me doesn’t want to fault the film for this, of course, but I’m reminded of a film like Matchstick Men where even though there’s a HUGE twist at the end, the film still offers something upon subsequent viewings. With The Prestige, knowing the twist took away anything to glean from the film. It’s 130 minutes and felt about twice as long, and the film is paced and structured so oddly that it was kind of needlessly confusing.

There’s some really lovely cinematography, though, and the acting is uniformly solid (less so from ScarJo, but she’s still alright), but honestly, when the only thing a film has to offer is a twist at the end, well… knowing that twist going in kind of sucks the fun out of the movie, yes? I have to ultimately grade this a C-, though I’ll never know what I might have thought going into this knowing nothing.

Movie Moment: Click (2006)

So this is like, the weirdest mishmash movie I’ve seen in a long time. The premise is that an overworked man gets a “universal remote control” that is literally universal and controls everything around him, allowing him to fast-forward through boring family dinners, traffic, showering, etc., etc., etc.

Then it goes into A Christmas Carol territory when the remote starts remembering this guy’s preferences and automatically fast-forwards through things he’s fast-forwarded through before, so he inadvertently fast-forwards years at a time, losing his wife and alienating his kids without his being aware. Of course, he ultimately learns the importance of family and all that good stuff by seeing what happens when he goes into Auto Pilot and pays attention to work instead of his wife and kids.

It all sounds like a really intriguing premise – high concept, for sure, but intriguing. In fact, it feels like something one of the more creative kids would’ve tried to run with in one of my college screenwriting classes. As we all know, though, Adam Sandler is the main actor here (producer, as well), and it seems that his style (and perhaps the director is at fault here, too) is at odds with what is ultimately a really downbeat story. I mean, this guy ends up losing everything dear to him because of this stupid remote, yet the film tries to have it both ways by putting in a lot of broad slapstick Sandler-esque humor (like him gaining a bunch of weight through one fast-forward, losing it through another, then excessively flapping his weight-loss skin flap). There’s also a running gag about their dog(s) dry-humping a giant stuffed duck, to which the most appropriate response is: “really, guys?”

Ultimately, it’s like they half-assed making it a family film when it really really isn’t a family film. What they ultimately came up with isn’t bad, just immensely uneven. There’s a great film buried in the premise, but they obscured it with Sandler being Sandler. And he’s been great in other films (Punch-Drunk Love, Spanglish to a lesser extent), and he’s pretty good here, but the studio or director or whatever ran wild with the derivative comedy that he’s done before and it works against the film. There’s some nice acting from Sandler and Kate Beckinsale as his wife, some really subtle work done to make the settings futuristic as Sandler fast-forwards (though it comes amidst some really obvious and too-futuristic set design and graphics work). It’s all just uneven, which is too bad, given that it seems there’s a better film in here somewhere. B-

Most depressing part of the movie, though? In the world of the film, “Linger” by The Cranberries is a song that will be remembered for decades. I hate that song.

Movie Moment: Blindness (2008)

Before the critics got a hold of this one last year, it looked super super promising. High profile director: Fernando Meirelles (The Constant Gardener). High profile cast: Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, and Gael Garcia Bernal. High profile source material: José Saramago. It all seemed primed to be Oscar bait.

And then critics kinda hated it (or at least strongly disliked it), and it flitted in and out of theaters super quick without much of a blip.

I finally caught up with the film last night, and ultimately, while flawed, the film is pretty good. The book was clearly a parable, using an epidemic of blindness as a catalyst for demonstrating humanity’s greatest and worst tendencies. I’ve read some of the book, but not all, and from what I can tell, the film is intrinsically faithful to its source material.

Which is a fault of the adaptation, I think. What probably worked really well in print becomes flat on screen sometimes. As the blind are quarantined, all hell breaks loose as one of the three wards stockpiles the food and only exchanges it with the other two wards for valuables, then sex (of course, our main characters aren’t the evildoers). There’s some bleak stuff in this film, kids. Bleak bleak bleak. But the characters are all fairly indifferent to the horrible scenarios they find themselves in. There’s also a drastic tone shift for the final fourth of the film that, again, may have worked on paper, but on film, it’s incredibly jarring. The film ends on an optimistic note – not something you’d expect from something that’s so bleak for so long.

What works so well in the film are the individual moments. Any five-minute stretch of this film is a mini-masterpiece on its own, the cinematography gorgeous throughout, the set design brilliantly realized (as a parable, we don’t know what city this takes place in, so they’ve formed a fictional city from an amalgam of sources, I would guess; it all looks vaguely European, but the street signs are American). Though the filmmakers strive a bit much to mimic the idea of blindness through their visual style (blurry stuff going on a lot of the time), it’s at least interesting, and at least they’re trying.

It’s far from perfect, but it’s also far from the maligned film that the majority of critics talked about. This was a nice surprise, and while I can’t see wanting to watch it again any time soon, I’d recommend giving it a look. B+