IT'S ABOUT 'MARLEY AND US' OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT

DIRECTED BY DAVID FRANKEL

STARRING: OWEN WILSON, JENNIFER ANISTON, ERIC DANE, KATHLEEN TURNER, HALEY BENNETT and ALAN ARKIN

I think the best thing about ‘Marley & Me’ is the fact that it cannot churn out a sequel. I say this not in comparison to ‘Beethoven’ and related dog-movie-franchises, but as a film in itself – you cannot extrapolate it beyond the ends, you cannot see the Grogan couple buy a Chihuahua or a Collie, if the Labrador’s going to give them nostalgia issues. It’s a depiction of a man’s phase of life with the dog and it simply has to end where it ends – as a heart-warming tale not on ‘understanding life’ as imparted by the dog, but on going through it and growing up with it, in a sort of mutual maturation period. It’s like living with your Grandfather except that the Doctor fees come in a lot later.

The film is armed by good acting talent and their well-suited dog(s) – this is where it makes a crucial difference, or so I think. The idea is to have a couple that loves their dog in the sense that they see it as an integral part of their family rather than as a piece of decorative furniture that they polish every day. Owen Wilson as the autobiographical John Grogan and Jennifer Aniston as Jenny Grogan, his wife, are organic in their roles and most importantly – they work well together. The atmosphere is harmonious, the suburban outfit is well-knit and the film is one fine cruise without much of hiccups although it could slightly have bored me being the dog-lover that I’m not. And the end was refreshing, even if not surprising in the least.

What I think is important about the film is that it finds itself fairly essential. It’s not been long since I saw a dog-human bond attempted, even if not in a live-action film but an animated venture by the name of ‘Bolt’ from the Disney label. And the fact that our Penny here is a full-grown man and that it’s a confessional storyline than a sequence of thought-out pranks boosts the levels of connection. And what did the film do to me? It made me realize that a dog could mean different things at different phases of life, ranging from a childhood fascination to a long-lost friend. True, I’m not saying anything particularly individualistic in this regard, but I think that’s enough of an impact for a film to make. And in the end, I wanted to have a dog. I felt that if there’s a time I wanted to marry and if I had a warm, suburban home to house myself in, then I’d take one in, mature with him and probably replicate Mr Grogan’s life and would be glad to do so. And I’d probably even call my dog Marley as well, or maybe Mayer and he shall be my first child and a fair companion from then on.

Now, I might be writing this review from the inside of a little apartment house, but hey – at least the film (and Marley) made me imagine that much!

Love, as I believe, is all about the absence of emphasis. And the fact that the film didn’t try to drive its point through is what I think makes it as likeable. In that way, ‘Marley & Me’ succeeds not only as a good Christmas-release, but as a warm film to spend time on for a loveless heart, for it could sniff some out from unseen corners, with a fairly Canine ease.

CONFESS IT, YOU FREAKS!

DIRECTED BY GRIFFIN DUNNE

STARRING: UMA THURMAN, JEFFREY DEAN MORGAN, COLIN FIRTH, SAM SHEPARD, SARITA CHOUDHURY, AJAY NAIDU, KEIR DULLEA and ISABELLA ROSSELLINI

‘The Accidental Husband’ is yet another affirmative on my standpoint of the romantic comedy, an exhibit of incredible conception that’s done incorrigibly wrong. Not overdone, not underdone – just wrong. We’ve had only so much as anti-clichés in this regard, from the much-deliberated Vince Vaughn-Jennifer Aniston starrer ‘the Break-up’ to the more from-the-heart Marc Webb motion picture ‘(500) Days of Summer’. Cinema intellects have long usurped on the anti-thesis, but that’s not what I’m asking – I’m just utterly flummoxed at how no romantic comedy sketch has had its fair share of justice done to it.

Look at it this way – even something titled ‘the Ugly Truth’ was not as ugly as the truth is supposed to be. And we’re actually talking about a truth that’s uglier than just ‘ugly’.

Where was this film going? The beginning was obvious, so the characters had to be drawn to suit the needs of an end that the makers think the audience requires. Which in turn means that we’re watching/listening to a ‘Real Love’ that the film so inevitably condemns with a dilemma that’s so diabolic that it’s not a dilemma at all. It’s incisive, it’s a tool that’s meant to claw the viewer and coerce them to believe in something that even the film doesn’t stand for – in other words, it’s a box-office superlative.

I’m really sick of watching the American re-imagination, which in turn is a self-imagination of an unchangeable self, forgive me for being redundant. What disappointed me more than anything, more than its wavering foundation in the relationship-advice show, more than the juvenile attempt to cater to the American-Indian audience, more than the relentless ‘other man’ than the softening hero was the fact that the film was actually made. ‘The Runaway Bride’ was actually a film in itself, and I wonder how many more times we’re to watch a re-run, especially where the woman isn’t half as exciting as the well-represented Julia Roberts. And it’s not Bill that we want to kill this time.

I watch my version of the film, I see a disappointment, a lesson learnt at one’s own expense. I see Emma Lloyd (Uma Thurman) and her accidental husband Patrick Sullivan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) in wedlock, where my Patrick would still resort to giving her hell because that’s what he’s supposed to do, because there’d be a Sophia in his picture that would keep driving him berserk irrespective of how ‘sweet’ or ‘coaxing’ Dr. Lloyd turns out to be. I’d imagine a wedding cancelled citing an already existent marriage, and I’d imagine an annulment, a point proven and the slam of a door. Sophia’s not going to come back and neither is Dr. Lloyd. And in the meantime, I’d imagine Richard Braxton (Colin Firth) as having spunk enough to enterprise himself with another woman, or maybe get himself married to profession as they call it. In the end, it’d just be Dr. Lloyd exercising her ‘ten years of scientific research’ as she’s doomed to her show and nothing more.

But then, that’s ‘the Girlfriend Experience’ for you. So you might as well go ahead and watch that film instead, than search in vain for the silver lining in this corroded plate.

DID I MISS SOMETHING, OR WAS IT ALL?

DIRECTED BY NELSON McCORMICK

STARRING: BRITTANY SNOW, SCOTT PORTER, JESSICA STROUP, DANA DAVIS, COLLINS PENNIE, KELLY BLATZ, JAMES RANSOME, BRIANNE DAVIS, JOHNATHON SCHAECH and IDRIS ELBA

Perhaps I’m not well-suited to analyse ‘Prom Night’, the slasher film it’s supposed to be. Or perhaps I shouldn’t be writing this review at all citing insufficiency if not an alien premise, for I didn’t happen to quite find one. I was always under the impression that horror flicks are straight-ended vehicles for tomfoolery where the intention was to tie some third-tier acting talent into a predictable plot with limited locations and decent camerawork topped by a fair editing job. The weekend box-office could gobble it all and maybe throw-up when it’s too late and the film had romped home with a positive margin on a trashcan budget.

‘Prom Night’, I thought, tried to be sensible at the expense of major detail. If you thought the prison-break is preposterous, it was just the beginning. Reminds one of the age-old tales of a murderer at large and the paranoia induced – well, that’s not quite the case either over here. The writer mixes unseemly schoolroom rivalries, as is the cliché, into a plot that’s been jumpstarted from the beginning with the man on the move. The very idea of the promenade becomes questionable and the film could have ended even before it began, with the entire school sitting in the lobby surrounded by a S.W.A.T. team while the psycho goes to work on the maid he just killed. You’d only have to title it differently, for it’d be a hunger strike in one’s quest for life.

If you think my lines don’t make sense, it’s because I think the same of the making of the film in the first place. Other than the box-office excuse, of course.

Please don’t consider this to be my assault on horror films on the whole as much as I would like you to. I’ve never appreciated a good scare, perhaps because there can never be one. But then again I guess that’s the only reason why I was able to watch through the lengths of this film – because there were none. Come on, mirror tricks? The dream-reality drift? Consider that I even forgive the writer for ‘engineering’ the stupidest sort of prison-break ever. What’s left is at least a plot that’s intact, with a psycho in its midst who could be made into a Hannibal Lecter, if only he had the direction. A little more empowerment could have made sense as opposed to the dunderhead we’re dealing with, even though he succeeds to rip the girl’s life to pieces in a one-night spree.

Donna Keppel (Brittany Snow) stands without parents and sibling and a recent Boyfriend. To break-up is one, but to find him dead in bed next to her? The psyche is barely explored, can one even fathom to put forth the mind-set, let alone neglect it altogether just to make her look pretty? What of the previous experience? Does she sink into it, or does she retaliate? No, she grows out of it! If that’s not enough outrageousness, there can be nothing else. Except maybe how the aunt and uncle let the girl take her Boyfriend to spend the night with her when the ideal case would be to keep her within sight – after all, it’s just the night’s experience (as agrees the film’s title).

The film confirms my belief that horror flicks are an idiot’s effort to come out intelligent. And needless to say, only he can champion his cause, if there’s ever been any.

DEAD-WEIGHT

DIRECTED BY KURT WIMMER

STARRING: JAMIE FOXX, GERARD BUTLER, BRUCE McGILL, LESLIE BIBB, COLM MEANEY, REGINA HALL and VIOLA DAVIS

I have to admit that when I watched through the lengths of ‘Law-Abiding Citizen’, I couldn’t place Kurt Wimmer, its director, to a previous film. Now I know he was associated with the illustrious ‘the Recruit’, and the Christian Bale magnum opus ‘Equilibrium’, his history helping my dissection process even better. It is pretty obvious that Mr. Wimmer believes in the triumph of the man-God, perhaps even more than Dostoevsky did, and it comes with the excruciating price that he would go to any lengths to prove his worth. With his Herculean construct of Christian Bale’s character in ‘Equilibrium’, he was tolerable; maybe even flamboyant. But Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) simply falls flat.

I was drawn to compare this film to another dark, misguided thriller – David Fincher’s ‘Seven’. Something kept telling me that the murkiness of the plot and the incredible details of the plan in action, coupled with the helplessness of the hunting party I understood that I was to witness yet another debacle. Yet another case where the film proves to be too detailed, too labyrinthine for the writer/director to make ends meet in any sane way possible. With ‘Seven’, he had an option in the climax. In this film, we have an option – to tolerate it and go ahead to watch it, or to humbly make our exits to leave it rot by itself, witness a cruel disintegration of intense action to childish nothingness. I guess that’s what happens to your John Doe when you decide to up his game a little.

By all means, the film is exciting. It’s about 100 minutes of dilemma, of going along with the storyline, of the viewer being as clueless as the characters – you’re made to guess as the cards fall down hoping that somewhere down the line is the deuce or that maybe you’ve found the deuce and you’re waiting for an assertion. Well, that’s before the 20 minutes of torture to follow.

In a loose way, ‘Law-Abiding Citizen’ is a man’s struggle against the system, something that sparks off excitably in sequences as Clyde’s bail hearing, and in a criminally-underdone-overemphasized conversation between Nick (Jamie Foxx) and Sarah (Leslie Bibb) that doesn’t happen. To ask the ethical questions that the film asks is unfortunately detrimental to itself. Not to mention the fact that the revelation is childish fantasy, except that it would be a lot less bloodier if it actually were. And we’re thrown in the odd thrill or two, a couple of fears as to who’s going to be next and some worry lines regarding Nick’s family. Then of course, there’s the mysterious Chester as well.

This film, in short, has all contents for an on-the-dot action thriller, but definitely not enough direction for further specifics. The quintessential ‘howdunnit’ than the ‘whodunnit’, it has neither the political-charge, nor any amount of weight in the revelation to champion its cause. It’s a rather distorted depiction of Clyde himself – angry, misguided, delusional, half-crazy, and yet a tad too arrogant, thus reducing itself to mainstream nonsense than anything substantial.

AND SHE CAN GO TO HELL WITH IT

DIRECTED BY DAVID FRANKEL

STARRING: MERYL STREEP, ANNE HATHAWAY, EMILY BLUNT, STANLEY TUCCI, ADRIAN GRENIER, TRACIE THOMS, RICH SOMMER, DANIEL SUNJATA, STEPHANIE SZOSTAK and SIMON BAKER

The reason why romantic comedies are still (and would ever be) a sub-genre of ‘filmmaking’ is because they’re bullshit – they’re replications of a non-existent life and exaggerations of those replications that it makes one tear his head trying to trace back. If he wants to, that is. I didn’t have to watch through the lengths of ‘the Devil wears Prada’ to size it as one – in fact, I didn’t have to watch it at all. But I did, and I don’t regret it. Mainly because now I can scoff with more empowerment when someone tries to sell it to me; because I can now assert for a fact that I don’t pay for a shit.

We begin dissecting films at how they’re sometimes a waste of talented cast. But this film is an example of abuse of the same – cold, brutal abuse that the film-viewer is brainwashed enough to be fascinated at every fart that Meryl Streep lets out, call it symphonic or cacophonous. What of every other chick-flick we’ve gone through? Did they require her? Maybe, well – maybe for a 75% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, they did. Maybe for diversity of audience, of reeling in men in their late forties or older, maybe to exclude the exclusivity of such films. And wow, isn’t that a feat? I mean, I should be thanking the director for this, shouldn’t I? For putting men to unendurable torture just because they’d like this ‘Queen of Accents’ do one for them – why not call the phone sex hotline, then? Or wait, maybe they’re doing that already!

Let me not be ashamed of what I say, but I actually like watching romantic comedies for the escape they are. ‘the Confessions of a Shopaholic’? Can you refuse that that film was actually funny? I shall not say the same about the abuse of journalism called ‘How to lose a guy in Ten Days’. ‘the Devil wears Prada’ does not even qualify as ‘watchable’ in my book and that’s a book, mind you. Not a fashion magazine. And what’s its selling point? That the film is actually fighting what it’s standing up for? Whoever said the accessibility of celebrity is enough to stir some sympathy needs to think twice. What happened to “it’s not who you are underneath, but what you do that defines you”? This way, we shall flood the libraries with copies of ‘Playboy’ magazine, classify striptease as art and deem child molestation as recreational sport. Let the world go to whores, I say!

I’d follow the newspaper if I wanted to see traitorous cross of leagues – the world’s made of naught but that. So why would I want to watch the same in a movie? So I could pity them? The shards of empathy shall pierce only when they’re actually existent, I’m not foolish enough to imagine. Neither did I get any help – not from the music, not from the clothes, not from all the pomp galore. “I think I can see a lot of myself in you” is possibly the worst movie-quote in this scenario, you don’t throw a phone into a fountain to disconnect a call and arms are not always open for you to snuggle into them whenever you want to. Neither are job recommendations, where completely predictable.

A word to the makers – the next time you want to cast Meryl Streep in a role, don’t. Or well, just go ahead by all means, you know? I mean, I’m the only one who’s protesting.

PACKS A HEFTY PUNCH!

DIRECTED BY PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON

STARRING: ADAM SANDLER, EMILY WATSON, LUIS GUZMAN, MARY LYNN RAJSKUB, LISA SPECTOR, JULIE HERMELIN, KAREN HERMELIN, HAZEL MAILLOUX, NICOLE GELBARD, MIA WEINBERG, DAVID STEVENS, JIMMY STEVENS, NATHAN STEVENS, MIKE D. STEVENS, ASHLEY CLARK and PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN

The very idea of a romance comes with strangeness. It is the out-of-the-world feeling that your favourite characters inspire that which makes you like them so much. Perhaps Woody Allen deconstructed a little on that when he wrote his everyday ‘Annie Hall’ to counter the ‘Casablanca’s there were, but Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Punch-Drunk Love’, to me, seemed to be a memorable regression to the fantasy land of romance, a good nostalgic trip down lanes of ‘Before Sunrise’ except it’s Hawaii and not Vienna.

Adam Sandler’s Barry brings about a reminiscence of ‘A Serious Man’, except that it should be the opposite. A grown man who’s yet to come to peace with his surroundings, one who’s dissatisfied but doesn’t know what he wants. I draw resemblances not only with character but its progression as well, not to mention the scenario that grows in synchrony with him. It’s dull when he’s dull, it’s rattled when he is – a clear visual projection. Forty five minutes into the film and you barely know what’s going on, and as you reach the hour, so much had happened. It’s always a delight when you find the film to be organic than just a dead camera depending entirely on its performers. What’s best about ‘Punch-Drunk Love’ is that it doesn’t depend on Barry, it nurtures him and gets nurtured in return.

There is a sequence where the pair of them (Barry and Lena, played by a fairly-fitting Emily Watson) are in bed and exchanging sweet nothings, which progresses ahead into viciously sexual remarks and then we hear Barry remark in his own fashionable way that “this is funny” – yes it is! Adam Sandler actually being funny, can you believe that? That’s kind of why this film took its own sweet time to grow on me. But thankfully, it could catch up, what with the tension it built and the music score that undergoes a parallel and parasitic change. I was struck by the energy, that which is captured in two phases of our hero – one in the turmoil and the other in his retaliation. And that made me wonder whether this ‘love’ is just his excuse or vice-versa. Well, I just had to wait a while to have that answered.

This is an ‘in Repair’ film – something about a man who waits for things to fall in place before he evaluates himself. Barry doesn’t speak before he’s got a woman interested in him, before he gets her hurt that he simply has to strike back; before he gets his pudding secure. There is such freshness in this film, such innocence and yet such power that I can’t help but give it to Paul Thomas Anderson and his craft. I would go ahead and call him wizard, but I don’t know for sure if this is just his experiment or his best yet. A subtle mix of dark comedy and drama, with a toast of sheer physical energy – magic.

Well, at least it makes the blot of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s exciting but unwarranted cameo disappear.