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Due Date (2010)
Waste of time. Seriously.
I adore RDJ. I'm a late-comer to his fandom – I only started to love him after he was in Iron Man – but I've started to expect a lot out of him in the acting department, what with Iron Man, Sherlock Holmes, and Tropic Thunder.
So while I was not disappointed by his acting ability in Due Date, I was incredibly, unbelievably, amazingly disappointed by the fact that he chose to take part in what is probably one of the stupidest movies that I've ever seen.
The whole point of the movie, in case you haven't already heard, is that RDJ's character, Peter, has to get to California from Atlanta by Friday because that's when his wife's C-section is scheduled and he wants to be there for the birth of his first child. So he plans to fly home a week early and everything is great
until he runs into Zak Galifianakis at the airport and, as in all stupid comedies, Bad Things Happen That Wouldn't Happen In Real Life.
Long story short, they scuffle and RDJ gets shot with a rubber bullet by an air marshal before the plane even begins to move, and both RDJ and Zak's character Ethan are put on the No Fly List. Did you see that coming? Because I certainly did. Of course, RDJ's wallet and therefore identification are stuck on the plane to LA, so he has no way of getting across the country until (dun da-na-na!) Ethan rolls up in a girly red rental car and offers to drive RDJ across the country.
What follows is an hour and a half of the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life. It was full of dull, tired, half-hearted jokes that were barely funny the first time around and not at ALL funny the second time around. Due Date tries really hard to bring in a real plot with the introduction of Jamie Foxx's character – who, in all honesty, I can't even remember the name of – but it's too little too late for this sad attempt at a movie that combines both comedy and seriousness.
I will probably never see this film again despite the fact that I love both Galifianakis and RDJ. The acting from both of them was actually really, really good, but the writing was just terrible, so the fact that they were the supernovas in a film of black holes shows just how good they are at acting. I hope the two of them get together some time again in the future, but this movie was just terrible. I only give it two out of ten stars, and I really do not recommend it at all.
Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (2008)
A French film about the bias of people living in another part of the country. Very, very cute.
I studied Spanish for five years and have a deep, unrelenting bias to all foreign films that are not Spanish. I did not go into this French comedy – translated to Welcome to the Sticks – with very much hope that it was going to be a good film.
I could not have been any more incorrect.
Welcome to the Sticks is one of the funniest movies I have ever seen, foreign or domestic. It's about a guy – Philippe – who tries to con his way into getting a better job in warm, sunny southern France by pretending he's handicapped, gets caught, and is punished by being sent to The North. Everyone knows that The North is full of lazy, uneducated people and freezing weather and just absolute awfulness all around. Philippe is not excited, and his wife, Julie, is furious. She refuses to move with him and instead stays at home with their son. Philippe has to travel back on the weekends to visit his family.
But when Philippe arrives in The North, he discovers that it's nothing like the rumors he's heard; everyone is super friendly and everything is beautiful. The only problem is, they speak in a dialect that is almost impossible to understand. Hilarity ensues and the story continues, and Philippe lies to his wife and tells her that everything is terrible in The North, which actually helps to strengthen their marriage.
This was an incredibly cute film. The person who wrote the commentary even made the dialect come through in written English words, which was a little frustrating at first but helped English-only speakers to better understand the story. I would highly recommend this movie, and I kind of wonder if there could ever be an English equivalent to it – I think it would be almost impossible to do, which makes this movie especially unique, in my opinion. I give this film nine out of ten stars, and you should definitely choose this as your next Friday night rental.
The Social Network (2010)
How did Facebook get started? This movie will tell you.
I have been a Jesse Eisenberg fan since I saw him in Zombieland two years ago and pretty much instantly fell in love.
He was half of the reason I ended up watching Adventure Land – the other half being that it was filmed at Kennywood Park, my personal little slice of heaven. The only reason I didn't want to see it was because of Kristen Stewart, and she was ultimately why I never saw the end of that film.
But that's not the focus here, is it?
I have to admit – I was not disappointed by his performance when I watched The Social Network; he played the part of a douche bag nerd spectacularly. He made me hate Zuckerberg and feel bad for him (but only slightly) at the same time, which is quite impressive in my opinion.
I definitely thought that the movie was confusing in the beginning. They didn't explain things – which I actually prefer most of the time – but the competing lawsuits thing was difficult to follow at first. I thought that all of the actors did an awesome job, and I really, really liked the character Eduardo; he was the one I felt the most sympathy for throughout the movie. I did, however, get a lot of the characters confused. I felt like they weren't introduced properly, and I had to keep asking my friends who certain people were. I thought Eduardo and the twins' friend were the same person for a really long time, and by the time I realized that they were not, in fact, the same person, too much of the movie had gone by for me to figure out what was happening.
I pretty much left the movie thinking, "Mark Zuckerberg is a total dickhead; I would never be friends with him because of what he did." I'm actually surprised that Zuckerberg okayed this movie because it casts him in a really, really bad light, in my opinion. I absolutely love nerds, and this is the first time ever that I have watched a movie about a nerd and not fallen in love with the character, which was really disappointing.
I didn't actually think that this movie was as great as everyone else made it out to be. I'm not impressed by movies that seemingly go nowhere, and I don't like endings that kind of leave the audience hanging. Yes, they put up some text to "clear everything up," but I kind of think that's like the cheater's way of ending a movie. I also think that putting pictures of the "real people" should be mandatory during the credits of a movie that's based on "real life," if that makes sense. I like to be able to connect actors to people, and I don't want to have to Google them to do it.
I give The Social Network a seven out of ten. It wasn't awesome, but the acting was really good and I liked the way that the film was structured. It was way, way too long, though, and I thought the ending was kind of dumb. I suppose I would recommend it, but only if you're looking for something so real-lifey that it's annoying. I felt like the whole thing was building up to something big that they just forgot to put into the film. I hope, though, that if Facebook ever crashes, someone somewhere writes a story about its downfall, because that would make a really cool sequel.
Mean Girls 2 (2011)
A new girl moves to North Shore and tries to break up the Plastics
I must say, I absolutely loved the original Mean Girls. That's my girlfriends' and my go-to movie when we have Chick Flick Nights and gossip about girls. Needless to say, we were not excited when we heard that there was going to be a second one – sequels are never as good, and this sequel doesn't have the awesomeness that is Tina Fey. We pegged this as a failure before there was even a cast.
We were right. I watched the premiere on ABC Family on January 23, and this movie was so predictable I could've screamed. The movies reminded me a bit of Camp Rock and High School Musical – the writing and themes were aimed at twelve-year-olds – but there was a bit of a twist: they knew the Mean Girls crowd was a bunch of high schoolers, so they tried to aim the script at the original fans and older girls by adding words like "ass" and having the entire school make fun of the protagonist for being a virgin. Unfortunately, the virgin thing carries through the whole movie, which is just annoying, and the believability in this movie is pretty low. The original Mean Girls, while excessive, was at least believable, but the Plastics in this one literally crippled people with fear as they walked by.
Now, maybe I'm being unfair by comparing Mean Girls 2 to Mean Girls, but it's almost a requirement to compare a sequel to its original. Even on a more objective note, though, this movie was terrible. It was filled with cliché after cliché, and I predicted the outcome within fifteen minutes of the movie. I could tell what was going to happen every step of the way, and that was annoying. ((SPOILER ALERT!! Please skip to the next paragraph if you do not wish to have a small part spoiled for you.)) For example: the protagonist, Jo, is paid by a very wealthy man to be a bodyguard/friend to his daughter, Abby – enough for her to get into her dream school, Carnegie Mellon University. Jo and Abby eventually become best friends, and Jo debates for a long time whether she should tell Abby why they even became friends in the first place, eventually chickening out and not telling her about the deal. Can you guess what happens next, because I certainly could. When Abby's father pays Jo, she turns it down, but the head of the Plastics – Mandi – overhears the whole thing and tells Abby, instantly destroying the "best" friendship between Jo and Abby. Shocker, really.
That's only one of many predictable, clichéd moments throughout the movie, a movie – I must add – that runs far, far too long, especially when it's stretched over two hours on TV. I was completely bored by the end, and the only reason I would ever watch it again would be to make fun of it with my girlfriends, and even then we could probably just watch Twilight or something.
I do not recommend this movie. The language isn't really suitable for anyone below seventh grade, and anyone above seventh grade is probably too old for it. I only give this movie three out of ten stars, and most of those are only because the acting was semi-decent, and the movie carries the same title as one of the greatest chick flicks of all time. Don't waste your time on this movie – just read the summary on Wikipedia if you're at all curious; I'm sure it's much more interesting there, anyway.