Imagine you just signed up for Netflix to catch the latest blockbuster movies and series. You can't wait to watch the latest releases ranging from Bird Box to Apostle and Triple Frontier. You start streaming the Vietnam War drama Full Metal Jacket while your sister in the other room is streaming a romantic comedy Crazy Stupid Love on her iPhone. Suddenly you receive a notification that you are running out of data.
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Watching "I Give It a Year," a new romantic comedy directed by Dan Mazer (he also wrote the screenplay), is a bizarre experience. It's not romantic in the slightest, and it is quite comedic on occasion, but the parts don't fit together at all. It jerks along on its own jagged trajectory, with a silly soul dying to burst through and take over but never quite succeeding, and the end result is truly strange. "I Give It a Year" is clearly not interested in the common clichés of the genre, although said clichés are present and acknowledged. The title alone clues us in to the film's attitude about the marriage in question. The cast is terrific (from the leads down to those who have one or two lines), and there are a couple of sequences that made me laugh out loud, but the movie as a whole is baffling.
The violins-and-doves scene, indeed the entire film, might have had potential, if the moviemakers had felt free to be truly silly. Silliness is not a bad thing. I wish more movies felt free to be silly. "I Give It a Year" wants to be silly, and the performances are often extremely silly, but it also wants to be touching, and that is its fatal flaw. The story is really akin to a French farce, with adulterous couples running in and out of rooms, slamming doors, mistaking identities left and right, and behaving horribly. Sentiment has no business intruding in such a brutal comedy of manners.
Calvin is a brain from Cal Tech who has been waiting for years for the big one to drop. His prudence is admirable but his luck is bad: There's no nuclear war, but a plane crashes on his house and sends a fireball down the elevator shaft, convincing him there is one. So he closes the heavy steel doors and informs Helen that the time locks won't open for 35 years--"to keep us from trying to leave.'' That's the setup for Hugh Wilson's "Blast From the Past,'' a quirky comedy that turns the tables on "Pleasantville.'' That was a movie about modern characters visiting the 1950s; this is about people emerging into the present from a 35-year time warp. In the sealed atmosphere far below Los Angeles, nothing changes. Calvin and Helen watch kinescopes of old Jackie Gleason programs ("People will never get tired of watching these,'' Calvin smiles, while Helen's eyes roll up into her head). Tuna casserole is still on the menu. And unto them a son is born, named, of course, Adam, and played as an adult by Brendan Fraser.
Adam is trained by Calvin to speak several languages, and he masters science, math and history, while his mother teaches him good manners and gives him a dance lesson every day. His dad even tries to explain the principles of baseball to him. Try it sometime. Calvin is pleased as punch with how well his shelter is functioning, but Helen grows quietly stir-crazy and starts to hit the cooking sherry. Her wish for her son: "I want you to marry a nice girl from Pasadena.'' His birthday wish for himself: "A girl. One who doesn't glow in the dark.'' Eventually the locks open, and Adam is sent to the surface, where his family's pleasant neighborhood has been replaced by a ruined strip mall made of boarded-up store fronts and porno shops, and populated by drunks and transvestite hookers. "Subspecies mutants,'' he decides. Then he meets a real girl who doesn't glow in the dark, the inevitably named Eve (Alicia Silverstone). She can't believe his perfect manners, his strange clothes, his lapses of current knowledge or his taste in music. But eventually, as is the custom in such movies, they fall in love.
That's the central premise of 'P.S. I Love You,' a movie the marketing touted as a light romantic comedy but which is in fact far more somber than your usual entry in the chick-flick genre. Hilary Swank stars as Holly Kennedy, married to the hunky Gerry (Gerard Butler of '300,' sans CGI-enhanced chest). They're struggling, but their passion is as strong as their adverse circumstances. Then Gerry dies unexpectedly of a brain tumor at the age of 35, leaving Swank to pick up the pieces with the help of Gerry's widowed mother (Kathy Bates) and their circle of friends (including Gina Gershon, James Marsters, and Lisa Kudrow).
Overlong at 127 minutes, 'P.S. I Love You' rambles a bit in its middle section. At the heart of the film is Holly's tug-of-war between holding on to her memories of Gerry, and choosing to love again with either Connick or Morgan. Unfortunately, what should have been a fairly compact story is unnecessarily stuffed with cutesy scenes of Holly falling off a stage during karaoke, fishing in Ireland etc. (all of which seem designed as money shots for the trailer). Thankfully, the third act quickly regains its footing, and is surprisingly effective -- again largely thanks to Swank's keen understanding of Holly's heartbreak. That I had a couple of tears by the end credits speaks to the story's basic power despite the film's flaws.
Surrounds are meager, with even upbeat club and party scenes lacking zip. The film does make good use of a few melancholy pop songs, but even here there is little bleed to the rears. Thankfully, dynamic range has great pep, with some deep bass during a karaoke scene and a polished, clean sound. Dialogue is strong, too, and well placed front-and-center. It's just too bad that even for a romantic comedy, 'P.S. I Love You' is too restrained.
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The film jumps around tonally, from melodrama to indie naturalism to moments of slapstick. This approach might be a concession to the Taiwanese market for which the film was originally created, but it makes investing wholly in the film a little difficult. Unexpectedly, however, some of the broad comedy is the best stuff in the film. Late in the story, a dejected Mr. Chu takes a dishwashing job in New York's Chinatown. His annoying boss fires him, but Mr. Chu refuses to budge from the spot where he is. After Mr. Chu deflects the attempts of all his coworkers, the boss brings in leather-clad thugs and eventually the police to get Mr. Chu out of his kitchen. Sihung Lung plays Mr. Chu in these moments like he's the hero of his own personal kung fu movie, full of weary, grim-faced determination.
Thanks to the camera work of Dante Spinotti and production design of Nathan Crowley, many moments in the film have a beautiful dreamlike quality, despite the rawness of the violence and ribaldry. Andrew Dominik pulled off this technique with much better success in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford but the set pieces here still deserve special mention. Many of the film's key scenes were shot in the locations where they actually occurred, including the climactic showdown outside Chicago's Biograph Theater. Every scene is immaculately tended to and there's never a fear that when we turn a corner, the flavor of 1930's America will be lost.The film does have several rough spots though, including some deficiencies with the sound design. I realize it sounds rather snooty to complain about something as seemingly innocuous as sounds design, but often - especially at the beginning of the film - key bits of dialogue are drowned out by background or ambient noise, sometimes leaving us wondering what the previous scene was about. I suppose it could have been my particular theater, but I've since discussed with others who experienced the same. Grievous error.The supporting parts are led by Christian Bale as special agent Melvin Purvis, specifically appointed by J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) to bring down these infamous gangsters, and a wonderful Marion Cotillard as Dillinger's love interest, Billie Frichette. Bale's Purvis is thin and mostly forgettable, primarily because Mann never forgets this is a Depp vehicle through and through. Dillinger meets Frichette as a coat-check girl and is immediately smitten with her besotted vulnerability. It's a bit jolting to see the two hit it off so suddenly, but as they spend more and more time together, we understand how Dillinger finds solace in her devotion and assuredness as his world begins to crumble around him.Nothing new about John Dillinger is explored in Mann's script as he sticks like glue to the text of Bryan Burrough's novel, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34. We know the story, and we're familiar with the timeline and scenario of Dillinger's doom, but particularly entertaining is the way Mann weaves into Dillinger's tale a couple of other interesting threads. Running concurrent to Dillinger's reign of terror in the upper-Midwest, is the birth of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And particularly fascinating is the revelation of how precariously born was the F.B.I. We're given a stark illustration that had the organization been headed up by anyone even a tad less driven than Hoover, the Federally unified crime-fighting wing may never have pecked out of its tender shell.Public Enemies has a unique verve and an abundant sense of period style, but we're never really quite sure why the film was made. With nothing particularly new to say and no previously untapped angles explored, we're left with a slightly empty feeling. Some of Mann's parts are truly genius filmmaking, but they're just not put together properly. It's as if all the pretty jigsaw pieces have been laid out of the table, but we're not allowed to put the puzzle together. 2ff7e9595c
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