Day: April 7, 2010

There are basically two kinds of moviegoers. The first will go to Noah Baumbach‘s Greenberg, not like it, get up after 45 minutes in and say to the manager “I want my money back!” This same kind of person will go to Shawn Levy‘s Date Night, laugh and stomp and go “hee-hee-hee” and “yeahhh!”

Date Night director Shawn Levy, star Steve Carell.

The second kind will go to Date Night and experience a slightly different reaction. He/she will quickly realize he/she is stuck watching another mildly tolerable high-concept comedy with soul-numbing car chases and gun-wielding baddie-waddies, and try to cheer him/herself by cherry-picking the few bits and lines that are semi-funny by saying “hey, that wasn’t bad…that was a decent improv…if only Tina Fey and Steve Carell could costar in a film with decent material.” And then walk out of the screening room relieved but vaguely depressed.

The first kind represents, I’d say, between 85% and 90% of moviegoers. The second kind obviously represents persons like myself.

I don’t know which group Variety‘s Lael Lowenstein belongs to, but her having recently called Date Night “an uncommonly engaging date movie with action, edge and genuine chemistry between its leads…a home run” calls her judgment and taste buds into question. In a perfect world there would be a special District Attorney with the power to indict certain critics for writing outrageously incorrect (i.e., overly fawning or overly dismissive) reviews. If I was Mr. D.A. you can bet Lowenstein would be hauled before a grand jury.

Date Night, yes, has its moments. Left to their own improvisational devices, Fey and Farrell are obviously bright and inventive and even “funny” here and there. It’s not a “terrible” film, but I just sat there like a lump of mashed potatoes this morning — patient, immobile, looking at my watch every so often, half-frowning, waiting for it to be over. It carries the Shawn Levy virus, you see, and if you’ve seen the Night at the Museum flicks, Just Married, Cheaper by the Dozen and The Pink Panther you know what that means, and more particularly how it feels to submit to it.

Don’t let Levy’s smiling face in the above photo fool you. He’s obviously doing very well in life, but serious movie hounds despise him. He must realize by now that he’s trapped in a wonderfully affluent studio-funded hell of his own making. He’ll never make anything as good as Little Miss Sunshine or Flirting With Disaster. If Levy was to get hold of the “cheaters” and put them on in front of his bathroom mirror, look out.

And yet Levy deserves credit for at least keeping Date Night down to 88 minutes.

The goal here could/should have been to make another After Hours, the dryly subversive Martin Scorsese comedy with a similar premise, but that wouldn’t have been as Eloi-friendly as Date Night, which will do pretty well commercially, I expect.

I loathe movies with pistol-packing, slickly-dressed, slightly fungusy-looking bad guys who do three things and three things only — threaten-and-glare, shoot at the good guys, and chase them in cars. The Date Night offenders in this regard are Jimmi Simpson (who played one of the vicitms in Zodiac) and Common, a rapper-shmapper.

“The Cheaters” was the title of a 1960 episode from Thriller, the hour-long, Boris Karloff-hosted series that tried to feed off the success of The Twilight Zone. It was about a pair of glasses that allows the wearer to see the ugly truth about others, and what he/she really looks like a la Dorian Gray. The story was by Robert Bloch, the original author of Psycho. The director was John Brahm. The actor in the clip is the late Harry Townes.

I have to catch a 10 am Date Night screening. No more filings until early afternoon, and only briefly at that with another screening at 6 pm.

I’ve finally seen Maren Ade‘s Everyone Else (Cinema Guild, 4.9), and can confirm reports about it being a very well acted, intelligently focused, moderately uncomfortable relationship film. It’s about a somewhat youngish couple (Birgit Minichmayr, Lars Eidinger) going through contractions during a vacation in Sardinia. The seriously talented Ade has said she “wanted to make a film about all the details of a relationship, all the things you can’t really explain to someone…a film about the secret world you have together with someone in a relationship [by] being as specific as possible.”

After seeing Everyone Else at the New York Film Festival, critic Philippe Garnier wrote that Ade’s effort does “for the 21st-century couple what Roman Polanski‘s Knife in the Water or Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’Avventura were doing in the ’60s.” That’s arguably or at least half-true, which is why I’m favorably disposed for the most part. It’s a movie that dog-paddles, but in thoroughly adult and curiously subtle ways.

The wrinkle is that Knife in the Water‘s Jolanta Umecka and L’Avventura‘s Monica Vitti or Lea Massari were glamorously, broodingly attractive while Minichmayr (sorry but you have to be straight about such matters) is not.

You could call Minichmayr “striking” if you want to be gracious, but two minutes with her and you’re thinking “later on the rock ‘n’ roll.” On top of which her character is almost constantly anxious and/or agitated. So right away I was asking myself why Eidinger, a tall and handsome fellow with soft eyes and a smallish bald spot, would even be with someone like Minichmayr in the first place. It doesn’t feel right — we all decide within minutes whether or not a couple we’ve just met fits together or not — so the whole film feels off in this respect.

Entertainment Weekly Nicole Sperling is reporting that Winona Ryder‘s having landed the part of Kevin James‘ cheating spouse in Ron Howard’s Cheaters (a.k.a., Your Cheating Heart/Untitled Cheating Project) indicates a career rebound.

My three reactions: (1) Ryder’s part is arguably the least fleshed-out of the four leads, or at least it was in the October ’09 draft of Alan Leob‘s script that I reviewed on 2.23; (2) the movie is essentially about the inability of James’ longtime friend and business partner (played by Vince Vaughn) to man up and tell James that his wife might be up to something on the side — he actually hems and haws about whether to share this vitally important suspicion with a guy he cares about; and (3) there are no cheaters plural in Cheaters but a single infidel (Ryder’s Geneva character), unless you want to say that Vaughn is figuratively “cheating” on James.

The implication of Cheaters, however, suggests a nifty premise — a movie about two guys and their significant others who are all cheating on each other at the same time. Now that’s a funny set-up. That I would pay to see.

Cheaters will begin shooting in Chicago in May, Sperling reports.