What Kristin Thought of The Baxter

Hi Kristin,

You asked me to watch The Baxter, so that you could shamelessly adopt my opinion of it as your own. Okay.

Here is what you thought of The Baxter. You liked a lot of things about it, especially the classic zany comedic performances of both leading actresses. And don't get me started on how much you loved the little 1940's dresses Michelle Williams kept wearing. You sort of hated Michael Showalter, but then you've always sort of hated him, ever since The State. Remember when you used to watch The State on MTV when you were in high school, after all those years with no TV? Michael Ian Black is so cute and funny. He reminds you of Maisie when she's like "Let's be serious." You should be following him on twitter, if you're not already. He's so hilarious. Also, Rob Cordry.

Even though the writing was weirdly uneven (the scene with Peter Dinklage as the wedding planner, for instance, caused you to alternate wildly between rage and mystification), you could appreciate what the film was trying to do. The romantic comedy from the perspective of the guy-not-taken, a sort of Rashomon for the whole romcom genre. But it never really decided whether Showalter was the Perfectly Nice Guy who doesn't get the girl (Ralph Bellamy in, oh let's say, His Girl Friday would be a good classic example) or The Wrong Guy who deserves to lose because he's so mean/stupid/sexist/dorky/etc. In the first scene, voiceover explains that a Baxter is a perfectly nice guy, who never gets the girl. But by the end of the movie it seemed that a Baxter was simply a person who is being rejected at the moment, and this annoyed you slightly.

As always, you thought Paul Rudd was adorable (although of course he'll never top his finest performance).

Now please tell me why I like Joe vs. the Volcano.

Thanks,
Lydia

Star Trek

(Wrote this a long time ago, forgot to post it...)

There is something a little cheap about returning to the beginning of a franchise - remember in Episode One, when R2-D2 showed up, and you knew that there was just so little substance to the movie that they decided to pack it instead with misguided nostalgia? That's a danger of prequels.

Well, Star Trek is all nostalgia. Every fifteen minutes, you meet another character you already know. Lots of lines got big laughs from the opening-night audience I saw it with, and I assumed that the ones I didn't recognize were were also in-jokes for the Trek fans who made up a large portion of the audience.

I'm not saying I didn't enjoy watching the movie. I did. Every actor impressed me. Because I think they are better actors than the original cast (well, the one obvious exception is Leonard Nimoy, who is about the same. No, maybe a little better, although he seems to have a bit of a denture problem? Am I making this up? It seems like he's always afraid his teeth are going to fall out) and they managed to play these characters we all already know, and be true to the original, but take themselves seriously, but not too seriously. Also, Chris Pine is very pretty. And he's in a zombie movie that's coming out this fall.



Note: Nokia = Bazoomercom

Drag Me To Hell

Drag Me To Hell looks back on an era when horror movies worked through creepy moods and shakes, rather than (just) fake blood and prosthetics, and it's largely successful at doing so. Better, it vacillates between scenes that are genuinely suspenseful, if not really ever unsettling, and the kind of slap(st)ick Raimi is so known for, over the years, resulting in the same kind of confused mishmash that made Evil Dead II so wonderfully deranged.

Although Drag successfully captures the innocence-gone-wrong feel of the Seventies horror films (partly because they appear to have actually told the set designer that the movie was set in 1978--the protagonist even has a sunburst clock on her wall!), it fails to match the depth of the best of them. Rosemary's Baby is about the terrible experience of being unexpectedly pregnant the devil's baby, sure, but more than that it is about the terrible experience of being unexpectedly pregnant. Nothing in Drag Me To Hell ever has any resonance with the rest of life.

Unfortunately, although Drag successfully captures the strange mixture of approaches that made EDII insanely great, it fails to update the formula in any meaningful way.

Had it been made in 1978, this would have been a great movie. Drag looks back on a high point of the horror genre...but it says nothing more than "weren't these great?". And they were, but they're already there. It's not clear to me what the need was for a new one. Unfortunately, Drag provides little more. This movie was well worth seeing. It's probably one of the best movies I've seen this year. But in the future, if I want to watch an intelligent, creepy horror, I'll watch The Stepford Wives, or Alien. If I want the perfect mix of goofy and gorey, well, I'll watch The Evil Dead II.

Parents

I really thought Parents was going to be about cannibalism, but mostly it was just about how a kid feels when his parents have sex. There's probably a lot I could say about the weird relationship between pre-adolescents and their parents, but I feel Liz Lemon said it best:

"I don't have a lot of personal life experience, but if I have learned anything from my Sims family, when a child doesn't see his father enough, he starts to jump up and down and then his mood level will drop till he pees himself."

The exciting news is that as I pack I'm watching everything that looks even barely decent on Hulu. I may just start updating this blog again.

Terminator Salvation

For whatever reason, I enjoyed the newest Terminator movie. I went on a very hot day, and I paid $5 to get in, and I guess all I really wanted was some big explosions and some cool/scary machines (and some ice cold movie theater air conditioning).

But it's a pretty terrible movie. It doesn't make any sense. Here's one example. Spoiler alert. You know that scene in every movie, in which we think the hero is dead, and then someone administers CPR and even though he's been dead for twenty minutes, he perks right up? In T4, the hero in this scene is a human-cyborg hybrid* and a CG Arnold Schwarzenegger has some trouble killing him, until he realizes that his weakness is (you'd never guess...) his human heart, at which point the terminator reaches into his chest and crushes his heart with his bare hands. John Connor subsequently administers CPR to his completely crushed heart and he comes back. Cut to scene in desert, where we learn that Connor's heart is bad. He's going to die, we find out from his wife (who between T3 and T4 has changed from Claire Danes's sassy veterinarian, to Bryce Dallas Howard's, apparently, Greatest Heart Surgeon in the History of the World). He can be saved, but only by a heart transplant. Dramatically, the human-cyborg hybrid (who's heart was just crushed by a terminator, remember?) offers his heart. Everyone is very moved.

One more thing: How and why is it that Terminator ladies have gone from ordinary to amazing to senseless and spunky to quite literally barefoot and pregnant in the course of these four movies? Sure, B Howard's Mrs. Connor is a magically skilled physician, but she's also a simpering whiner throughout most of the movie. I might have forgotten, but I don't think she even holds a gun. (I mean, not that holding a gun is the only measure of toughness. Um.)

* Note: But aren't they all human-cyborg hybrids? With the human skin that gets them through the time travel and so forth?

dave, on Star Trek

"What have we gotten out of Star Trek for the last decade? Ever since TNG, it's just a bunch of pretty successful reboots. It's like they're running Windows 2000."

-Dave

mostly I just like the zombies