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Reviews
Friends from College (2017)
Bailed on the second episode
Just stupid from start to finish. This episode has as the central characters a cheating couple trysting at the woman's sumptuous vacation house, when they accidental trip the burglar alarm and then panic when she can't remember the alarm code. (She doesn't want her husband to know she was there, even though as she points out when he wants to remove fingerprints that she lives there.)
They attempt to mask their presence in increasingly stupid and desperate ways. Meanwhile, my husband says to me "at a house like that, wouldn't there security cameras everywhere?"
In another really stupid subplot, the cheating husband's wife is at her first day at the dumbest and most unbelievable toxic bro law firm ever, where the partners constantly egg each other on to put callers on mute so they can yell profanities at them.
But the worst thing to me was one of the tiredest and most annoying tropes in comedy - someone who's supposed to be caring for a friend's pet but kills it by accident. That puts me off watching any further. We noped out and aren't going back.
The People We Hate at the Wedding (2022)
Very contrived and fairly predictable
All in all, this was a sufficiently amusing way to pass a couple of hours. But if you're looking for a plausible story line or relatable characters, you won't find them here.
The plots centers around a 60-ish mother and her two well-into-adulthood kids who go to England for the wedding of their impossibly rich and sort of estranged (by their choice) half sister, Mom's first kid with her first, philandering husband. The story is supposed to be about realizing what's important in life and the importance of family, but everything that happens to being about those conclusions is painfully contrived and actually, the main characters are really pretty unlikeable and much of the action ridiculous. The acting is mostly good. So watch it like a "beach read," not to actually get anything of substance from it.
Aarakshan (2011)
Truly random comments
As an American (now living in America, despite my profile), I occasionally go to Indian movies to sort of clear my head and watch a story told in a completely different way than most American movies. For this purpose, Aarakshan fit the bill just fine. In the controversy over the school entry quota, there was an obvious parallel to the controversy over affirmative action quotas in the U.S.
The story did drag on and on a bit. The bad guys, particularly the vice principal, were a bit too over-the-top evil, and the noble persecuted principal stuck to his guns so firmly that at some point (specifically at the point where he sent the boys away rather than invite them to help him tutor the poor children) he went from principled to sort of stubborn and stupid.
A few other random thoughts that distracted me during the movie: The "American" accent, if that's what it was supposed to be, of the Cornell professor was truly lamentable. I laughed, I grimaced. It was awful.
In the scene where Sushant orders two coffees, it appears that the waitress delivers two glasses of milk.
The actor who played Prabhakar Anand, the university president, seemed too young for the character he played; the one who played low-caste love interest and firebrand student Deepak Kumar looked decidedly too old, especially when compared with the character of Sushant, who I assume was supposed to be the same age and who looked age-appropriate. I also found that "Deepak Kumar" looked gym-toned in a way that was attractive, but detracted from the verisimilitude of his character ... and a further distraction was that to me he bears a strong resemblance to American comedian Robin Williams!
Well, I told you these would be random comments. I did more or less enjoy watching the movie as a way to pass the afternoon, but it was no profound experience.
Cars (2006)
Much better than I expected
I started watching "Cars" without very high expectations and I was pleasantly surprised by it. The animations and backgrounds in this film were spectacular, the movie was full of background humor and in-jokes that helped keep your attention, the script was cleverly written and the cast did a fantastic job. It was fun to watch the credits at the end and see how many famous names I'd failed to recognize, in addition to those I had figured out. So what if the storyline was standard and the ending predictable? There are only so many story lines you can get in a G-rated movie intended to be watched by kids and to leave everyone feeling good. "Cars" did an excellent job of telling one of those stories.