Movie Meme Day 07 - Least favorite movie by a favorite actor or actress

This was is the first hard post from the Movie Meme so far.  I have lots of favorite actors and actresses, but no one hits the top.  And second, for the first few that came to mind, they didn't have a lot of movies that I really don't like.  However, I just thought of one.  Paul Rudd was the topic of Reel Insight a few weeks ago (as I'm sure you already know, check it out here for a refresher or just download from itunes) and probably the most disappointing movie and movie I actively disliked in the last few years.  So my least favorite Paul Rudd movie is Over Her Dead Body.  Do not see this movie.

If you must see a movie about a ghost that is actually a romantic comedy see Just Like Heaven.  OVDB also stars Lake Bell as the alive love interest and Eva Longoria Parker as the dead girlfriend who is trying to break up the relationship of her still living fiancee, Paul Rudd.  I like all of those actors individually, Parker is terrific on Desperate Housewives so the fact that she's shrill, annoying and whiny here (the description of Gabby Solis) and you hate her is strange.  Also, she's orange.  Whoever decided she should super tan, and then lighten her hair, creating a single color or orange from her head to her fingers and toes was on crack.  She looks terrible.  Paul Rudd isn't his loveable best, and Lake Bell is just wishy washy.  Boring, unfunny and never worth watching.

Check out the rest of the movie meme

DVD Roundup: The Good, The Innocent, and the Ugly

It's time again for a really random group of DVDs I've watched recently. All the movies came out this past year, to mixed reviews, but since they all starred people I like, I rented them through Netflix. I'll review them in the order I saw them: Get Smart, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, and Over Her Dead Body.

Get Smart, based on the 1960s TV show, starred The Office star Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway. The supporting cast wasn't bad either, with Supporting Actor Oscar winner Alan Arkin, Dwanye Johnson, and Masi Oka. Carrell longs to be a field agent, his agency gets destroyed and only he and Anne Hathaway can inconspicuously infiltrate the bad guys group and save the world. That's about all I understood of the main storyline, but it didn't really matter. The action is only slightly better than a TV series would put together, kind of like a funny Alias. Mostly it's about silly jokes and Carrell hurting himself with weapons. Decent entertainment, but nothing ground-breaking. 3.5 LAMBS/stars

I rented Kit Kittredge because I like Abigail Breslin (see Nim's Island and Little Miss Sunshine) and I'm kind of a sucker for kids movies, and it got decent reviews in the theaters. Based on a doll (The American girl series, which I had when I was a kid) and the books written about her character, Kit lives in Cincinnati during the Great Depression. She wants to be a writer when she grows up and keeps submitting her stories to the newspaper (edited by Wallace Shawn!) and keeps trying to write stories they might publish. Her father (Chris O'Donnell) loses his job and moves to Chicago to find work and Kit and her mom (Julia Ormond) open their house to borders to help make the mortgage. A mix of people move in, helping create fun stories, quirky characters and a good mystery. It was a strangely pertinent story as our own economy struggles that our society's view of poverty might not have changed much since the Depression. They treat "hobos" as criminals, and since few weren't susceptible to unemployment, anyone could become a hobo. I'll admit while watching it I got kinda nervous as they were echoing things that have been appearing in the papers lately. But since it's a kid's movie, it all worked out in the end and Kit solves the mystery and saves the day. It's still fun entertainment. 4 LAMBS/stars.

And finally, the ugly. Over Her Dead Body is a bad redo of Just Like Heaven (with Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo) which wasn't a good enough movie to do again. Basically, a woman dies, can't accept it, haunts someone, and there's a love story. Lake Bell is the main character and isn't interesting enough to carry a movie. That's my first problem with it. The second was that someone convinced Eva Longoria Parker (who I love in Desperate Housewives) that she should both tan extensively and dye her hair blond so she's the same color all over. Plus, half the story is about how Paul Rudd can't get over the death of his fiancee and thus won't smile anymore. Most of Paul Rudd's appeal is his humor and his smile. So basically this movie stinks. The reviews weren't good, but they were kind. It's worse. 1 LAMB/Star. Don't watch this movie.

Drew Barrymore and her leading men...

I was having a conversation with a friend about our mutual love for Drew Barrymore, but that not all her leading men were created equally, nor is their on-screen chemistry. From best to worst of her romantic comedy/dramas (chemistry, not movie quality) are:

Adam Sandler (50 First Dates) - This movie is probably one of the most original romantic comedies, telling a story about love and relationships without everything working out perfectly but making a very satisfying ending. Sandler's best work as an adult shows lots of sides of falling in love and what it means to create a relationship. You want them to succeed and you're impressed that they overcome a lot of the problems.



Jimmy Fallon (Fever Pitch) - Drew plays a woman who falls in love with a Red Sox fan who hasn't figured out the difference between obsession and fandom. Their relationship transforms them both (isn't that what you want from romantic comedy?) and they figure out how to be together, but still pursue their individual goals.




Hugh Grant (Music and Lyrics) - Her character in this is more than a little kooky, and that gets in the way of their romance, but given that they sing together, and Grant's dry wit making fun of her all the way through, they seem like good friends who fell in love, rather than two weirdos stuck together.



Adam Sandler (The Wedding Singer) - She is super cute in this movie, and really believes in true love, which almost makes you believe she'd turn down what she thought was a happy, successful relationship for the Wedding Singer. She makes him believe in himself and then he realizes he loves her. It works pretty well, but their chemistry definitely improves in 50 First Dates.




Dougray Scott (Ever After) - As Cinderella, she has more chemistry fighting with her stepsisters than she does with the Prince, but since you know the Prince will finally sweep her away, it's easy to believe. Her intellectual fights with the Prince over his entitled attitude sometimes breed chemistry, but mostly you just think "how stupid is this guy to not get that he's a prince?"




Michael Vartan (Never Been Kissed) - The sketchy nature of the teacher crushing on his student never really goes away, even though you know Drew is old enough to date him. He's impossibly cute, and her nerdy-girl crush works, but it never makes sense that they would actually get together.





Eric Bana (Lucky You) - Their chemisty NEVER comes together. He's a gambler who can be turned into a good guy by the love of a good woman. But Drew doesn't seem all that interested in the role, and Bana can barely see past his cards to realize Drew is sitting right there trying to flirt with him. Dreadful and unbelievable chemistry throughout.

My own Top 50

I'm all for sharing our favorites and many of my fellow bloggers have put up their top 50 lists (without any particular order, except that the Top 10 are the best). These are my favorite films. I own most of them or have seen them dozens or hundreds of times. They're not for everyone, but they all have something I like to see. Check out the really different lists at Blog Cabins, Hoping for Something to Hope For, and The Center Seat.

Top 50 Films

1. Sense and Sensibility
2. Gone With The Wind
3. The Princess Bride
4. Out of Africa
5. The Shawshank Redemption
6. Star Wars Trilogy
7. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
8. When Harry Met Sally
9. Waitress
10. 50 First Dates
11. Finding Nemo
12. The American President
13. 10 Things I hate about you
14. Good Will Hunting
15. Walk the Line
16. Dogma
17. Little Miss Sunshine
18. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
19. Sliding Doors
20. Top Gun
21. V for Vendetta
22. My Fair Lady
23. O, Brother Where Art Thou?
24. The Philadelphia Story
25. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
26. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
27. Grosse Pointe Blank
28. Groundhog Day
29. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
30. Men in Black
31. 12 Angry Men
32. Forrest Gump
33. The Little Mermaid
34. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
35. The Sting
36. A Few Good Men
37. Gattaca
38. Notting Hill
39. The Lion King
40. Live Free or Die Hard
41. Say Anything
42. March of the Penguins
43. The African Queen
44. Minority Report
45. Fargo
46. Bridget Jones’ Diary
47. Almost Famous
48. The Incredibles
49. West Side Story
50. Cold Mountain

Leatherheads, another marketing failure

So George Clooney's Leatherheads is many things. It's a one-minute buddy comedy, a one-minute screwball comedy, a one-minute romantic comedy, with one-minute about the old rules of the NFL, two minutes about the new rules of the NFL, and two minutes about being a war hero. By my calculation that means the movie should be about eight minutes long. The other 90 minutes don't seem to do much. This movie was marketed, right in the title, as a story about football. The original profession football players and how they became legitimate. This is NOT a sports movie. And then it was supposed to be about the love triangle with Clooney, Renee Zellwegger and John Krasinski (totally inappropriate for this role, still channelling Jim rather than this character). That doesn't happen, except for the lipstick scene shown repeatedly in the commercials. The war-hero story line was interesting, but kept losing it's focus between other non-plot points. So basically, this is a terrific 8-minute movie, but I wouldn't bother with the rest. 2 LAMBS/stars

Tropic Thunder has no spark

I was really excited to see Tropic Thunder. I love Robert Downey, Jr. and thought watching him for a while would always be worth it. And if this movie had cut Jack Black and Ben Stiller from the cast, the movie almost would have been worth sitting in the theater. Mostly the movie just never gets going, and Matthew McConaughey and Tom Cruise are the best things about the movie, particularly Cruise's over-the-top office boss. The main story is that diva-like actors are filming a movie about a rescue attempt in Vietnam. The director can't get control, so he puts his main 5 actors (Black, Stiller, Downey, Jay Baruchel and Brandon T. Jackson) into the forest and plans to film them in real situations out of reach of their agents, managers, and assistants. Downey, a full method actor, thinks it's great, Black starts coming off his heroine high and acts crazy, and Stiller decides he needs to lead with no one to follow. Lots of crazy mishaps occur and finally they have to really rescue some of their group from a drug processing camp. Most of the lines are delivered as one-liners that could be put in a trailer and as such rarely make for actual conversation. If they were funny, this would be a great gimmick, but rarely are they even interesting and often unintelligible. There are a few points with real humor, but mostly it's forced over the top insanity. McConaughey as Stiller's agent is funny throughout with his obsession about getting Stiller a TiVo on location. Downey really commits to his insane character and when other people challenge his need to stay in character, even he doesn't understand why he's doing it, causing laughs. Overall, I really didn't like the movie and would give it 2 of 5 stars/lambs. Stiller and Black were wasted and just uninteresting. The supporting characters all around were a lot more interesting.

DVD Roundup

I've seen 3 movies lately on DVD - too much of a hassle to make it to the cineplex on time for movies right now. I was very disappointed by 2 of them, but found one I'd been avoiding surprisingly good. Coincidentally, Hillary Swank starred in two of them. P.S. I love you and The Nanny Diaries were both victims of the same problem - overly focused on a single main character that was too boring to want to watch for two hours. P.S. I love you had a clever gimmick - Gerard Butler, the love of Hillary Swank's young life, dies of a brain tumor. However, he's put in motion a series of letters to come to Swank after his death helping her deal. He plans a trip, some nights out, etc. and she still wallows in grief, despite her girlfriends' attempts to cheer her up and help her move on. There's even a totally unbelievable love interest in Harry Connick Jr. I rented the movie hoping to see more of Jeffrey Dean Morgan (from Grey's Anatomy) but he's only in it for a few minutes, and does a TERRIBLE Irish accent. So boring, uninteresting love story. 2 stars/LAMBS

The Nanny Diaries might have been more interesting if I hadn't read the book and hadn't lived in New York City. Scarlett Johansson plays "Annie" the Nanny of Laura Linney and Paul Giamatti's Upper East Side couple. Johansson wants to be an anthropologist so the movie is riddled with her voice-overs explaining the anthropological significance of the stupid parenting and anti-parenting maneuvers of the X's. It's basically Johansson acting shocked by the appalling behavior of rich people who should be parenting their kids and not cheating on their spouses, and Linney and Giamatti pretending their a good couple and great parents. They yell at each other and act shocked. The reason Johansson pretends to care is the well-being of their kid, Grayer, who the movie barely makes obvious as a good kid worthy of her fights. Another uninteresting, non-funny family drama. 2 stars/LAMBs

The movie I was surprised to find I actually liked was Freedom Writers, with Hillary Swank and Patrick Dempsey. Swank plays an idealistic new teacher in a school that seems to have only a single class for her to teach (I'm guessing she has others, but we only see one). She has to fight with Imelda Staunton (channeling her "Doloris Umbridge" character from Harry Potter) to get permission to teach the at-risk kids outside of the curriculum. She works with them to understand their lives of gang violence, racial threats and poverty. She realizes their overall education has suffered when she tries to relate a racist picture a student drew to the beginnings of the Holocaust. When they don't know what it is, she begins a curriculum to help them across their lives - from cultural education to history and writing. They read "The Diary of Anne Frank" and become inspired to meet one of them women who helped her - Miep Gies. It's a good movie that does more to follow and understand the lives of the students than most movies like this. Swank isn't particularly inspiring as she lets her own life fall completely apart to help her students, but the students and the actors portraying the students are all terrific. They find inspiration from school to help deal with their own lives and in non-cliched ways become better people. I liked it. Not terrific, but pretty great. 3.5 stars/LAMBs