Ms. Amused

It might have been released in 1990 but the script was definitely written in the 80s. Felt like the leads were all thoroughly bored and distracted. They’d ‘wake up’ and realize it was their line and deliver it and then zone off again.

I’m fond of Daryl Hannah but now I have to wonder if I’ve inflated her acting skills in my mind. She came off as petulant instead of neurotic.

I’ve never been a huge Dudley Moore fan but I’ve liked things he’s done. This felt like a phone in job for him.

It was mildly amusing to see Paul Reiser playing a similar character to the corp hack in Aliens.

At the end, I was doing a serious double take because I could swear that the one helicopter pilot was George Eads (CSI), but it wasn’t. And I knew it would be because George doesn’t look 45-50 as he would be now.

The only thing I would recommend this movie for would be the funny “honest advertising” campaigns that the movie’s plot centers around. Otherwise unless you just REALLY love 80s movies, Dudley Moore, Paul Reiser and/or Daryl Hannah….. don’t watch.

Daryl Hannah: 1.5 star
Daryl acting badly: -.5 star
Funny ads: 1 star
It’s an 80s movie and I love the 80s: 2 stars
It’s a bad 80s movie with little to no charm: -1.5 star.
Summary: 2.5 stars

I’ve not read any of the books so didn’t really know what the movie was going to be about.

Which enabled me to see part of why the movie underperformed. It’s not a bad movie at all but I think they relied too much on the presumption that the audience already knew the story because I felt like a ping pong ball getting batted around when it came to understanding the story and what was happening and why it mattered.

However, that didn’t stop me from enjoying the movie because the questions were eventually answered and it was a beautifully done movie. CGI wasn’t perfect but good enough to not detract.

I really hope that they do greenlight the followup movies because this one was very much filmed & told to be a part of a series, not a stand alone. It’s like Pirates of the Caribbean 2, Dead Man’s Chest… it told a story in its own right but left a lot of loose ends to be taken care of in POTC 3.

Perhaps if they’d tried to do it more like POTC 1 that was done at first as a stand alone and then built upon for a trilogy, it would have been more successful.

I’m left wondering what the heck was Mrs Coulter (Nicole Kidman) all about? What’s with the weird relationship between her and daemon? What is the Dust and why is it so taboo? I don’t think they really ever made that clear in the movie. The Magistrate (or whatever they called them) wanted to suppress & control awareness of it but the motivation was never really clear. “It’s tradition” isn’t enough because traditions have to start SOMEWHERE!!

I’d watch it again. And I really hope the rest of the story gets made.

This movie is made of so much fail.

I really REALLY do not get how we’re supposed to sympathize or like a the lead who is highly judgmental about his new wife (makes a big deal out of things that aren’t big deals) in order to justify cheating on her. Watching this movie makes me feel bad for Christine Taylor because it doesn’t seem to be made by people who like women very much. I’m looking at Ben, the Farrelly brothers and whoever wrote this shite. Looking at IMDB, Scot Armstrong & Leslie Dixon are the writers. Scot I can see based on his other credits but I’m surprised at Leslie since I like her other movies. I did get a feeling that someone had attempted to reign in the misogyny a bit, maybe that was her? Scot clearly belongs to the Judd Apatow crowd… I despise the bulk of Judd’s work and this crap rates even lower than a lot of his.

It was rather surreal because normally when you have the people who hate the lead and are very critical and etc, you’re rooting for him to show them that they’re wrong. This time… THEY’RE NOT WRONG!! The guy (Stiller) is an absolute shmuck of an ass and rarely does anything redeeming. I just don’t have patience with people (or characters) who operate with complete disregard for how they affect other people and their lives. He barely shows any remorse for the emotional hell that he puts his new wife through. She may be slightly nuts but like he’s not? Not grounds for dismissal and I resented that they made it seem that she deserved what she got or that she was a harpy for acting like a woman who’d just been dealt some low dirty blows from her new husband.  She was the sympathetic character in this… not Stiller. Or the other girl perhaps who I just can’t buy her dumping her husband in the end for Stiller cause hello? He’s shit.

Heartbreak Kid my ass… HE deserved all the crap that happened to him and didn’t deserve the good stuff like the women who married him and “the girl” he fell for.

I agree with other people’s comments that Stiller’s been doing the same thing over and over again. It’s been a long time since Ben’s done anything worth watching. Meet the Parents is the only thing I can think of that was ok at all and I credit DeNiro & Hoffman & Blythe Danner & Babs for that.

So why did I watch it the whole way through? Because I was too lazy to get up and turn it off, plus the horridness made it easier to concentrate more on my knitting which got done much faster!

Why did I watch this at all? Well I keep holding out hope that he’ll pull out something decent again like Meet The Parents & Meet The Fockers. Adam Sandler’s a far better bet. Even if I haven’t loved all of his recent movies, I  didn’t hate any of them… not even Click. And some were really damn good… Spanglish & Reign Over Me were jaw droppingly good as he departed from the comedy standard and showed some drama chops. But I digress…

I’ve not been to Disneyland in a long time but now I wish I had….

Someone talks about playing Jack Sparrow at the park and the DisneyNazis who fired him.

It’s a very entertaining read and is only two pages so go read it! If the accompanying photo is him, damn is he a ringer for the real deal!

So when is there gonna be a Pirates 4 already?

I honestly can’t remember why I added this to my online rental queue but it came today and I decided to pop it in. The roommate had already seen it and her verdict was… “ok”.

So I sit down to watch while messing around on my laptop and right away I’m put off cause the story isn’t flowing naturally. If you’ve read the synopsis of the movie, you already know that Susan Sarandon’s character, Sophie, is going to be very paranoid in the movie and the movie really starts just after the point in the story where she starts to notice that not everything is right.

Sometimes I’m just not in a proper mindset to watch movies like these and I found myself reacting badly to the super paranoia and hopeless feelings that Sophie was going through as she was starting to wonder if she was just going crazy.

And if you’ve seen Sleeping With the Enemy and/or Single White Female… this movie was falling somewhere in between there.

And then BAM!!

It got good as the story took a hard left and finally entered the realm of originality. I just wish the first hour wasn’t so boring and trite.

What is Irresistable about? It’s about a woman dealing with the recent lost of her mother. She’s an illustrator of children’s books yet the death called forth old demons from her past. Just dealing with that on top of her job commitments and being a mother and wife is barely all she can handle when she starts to notice things. Odd events that lead her to believe that she’s being stalked by Mara, her husband’s pretty, young co-worker. Sophie starts to think that Mara is actually trying to replace her. But of course, no one believes her and it all goes downhill from there.

Susan was very good at the role but haven’t we seen her in similiar kinds of roles before? I’m a fan of her work which is the only thing that kept me from turning off the movie. I’ve not known her to do a movie that was completely worthless to me yet. And she has not failed me yet!

And Sam Neill was just non essential. He played the absent husband who doesn’t really get what’s going on with his wife nor is he really interested in knowing.

Emily Blunt was an interesting new face to me. She did very well as Mara, the woman who Sophie is getting paranoid about. I’ll definitely keep an eye out for her in the future. I see from the IMDB that she’s in The Devil Wears Prada which I still haven’t seen.

I can definitely agree with the roommate’s assessment of just “ok” because while some interesting things were done in this movie, it shouldn’t have been such a chore to get to those parts.

Official verdict: mildly amused. If you’re a fan of Susan like me, go for it. If you like movies like Single White Female, go for it. Otherwise, don’t strain yourself reaching for the dvd on the shelf.

Rewatching this movie for the first time in a long time. Trying to remember the first time I ever watched it. I think I picked it up as a browsing choice back in college and was just floored at how funny the movie was.

I haven’t seen any of the funny yet 25 minutes into the movie. This isn’t looking good but they are just about to hit the road.

So here’s the premise. Paul Rudd is Wyatt Trips, a college freshmen who’s been deeply in love with his beautiful high school girlfriend, played by Christine Taylor, since forever. At her insistence, they have remained celibate and will stay that way til after they graduate. Trips is a sappy guy and goes along with it.

Til one day when he calls her at her college to be subjected to a rant by a roommate about how Kim and the “Ricker” couldn’t keep it quiet last night.

Whoops…

Drunken tirade at the local strip joint nets a meeting with a stripper, the devil-minded Ivy, played by Reese Witherspoon. She convinces him to write a Dear Jane letter as the only way to salvage his pride and FedEx it (or Global Express it since we can’t have free advertising placement).

The next morning, he wakes up to Kim’s voice on his machine talking about having missed his call the previous night because she was out walking “the Ricker”.

Whoops….

Now we’re set up for a really entertaining movie as Ivy & Trips try to get the letter back.

Going back to the movie in play… Ivy & Trips have started on their quest to get the package back and now I remember why I liked this movie so much. It has the weird kind of madcap zany mishaps like you’d find in a Kevin Smith movie.

Oh wait… Kevin did re-write this movie! He wrote about it once in an article explaining why he hates Reese Witherspoon so much.

I really have to wonder how much of his influence has been left in the script cause some of it is really good. Yet K doesn’t think much of it at all. Oh well.

In looking up that reference, I came across a very funny “abridged Overnight Delivery” script which does nothing but play off on the Kevin Smith connection. Go read it.

Things I love about this movie… the Purple Thing they drive in, Ivy’s wacky hairdos, Trips’s weird outfits.

This movie is bringing back fond memories of last year’s road trip through the Midwest especially since they’re driving through some of the same states (just saw a scene of “entering Iowa”). And getting me excited for the next one we’re planning for end of May!

Brings me to the next OD trivia bit out there… The other night I was browsing the IMDB message board for the movie and found arguments about whether or not this movie ripped off Road Trip. Well the answer’s clear considering that this movie was made 2 years before Road Trip. And for that matter, I do not fondly remember that movie like I do this one. It had its moments but not the charm of Overnight Delivery.

The Casting Choices

Wyatt Trips: Paul Rudd proved to be an excellent choice. I remember him from Clueless which did not give him much of a chance to show off as this movie does. I had no idea he could be so funny with both his delivery and his physical presence. OD escalated him in my internal rankings and made him “one to watch for”.

Ivy: Reese… well I have to admit, I’ve never been a Reese fan. I always thought she was the kind of stuckup person that I never really get along with. Kevin’s explanation of “Greasy Reese” only cemented that feeling. That said, she can be a good actress and I really adored her in Freeway. The character Ivy has a similiar devil may care kind of attitude towards life except she’s not pessmistic like her Freeway counterpart.

Kim: Christine Taylor. Now there’s an actress that took me by surprise. She’s often played the snob cheerleader type as she does in this movie and The Craft but what’s refreshing about her is that she’s a gorgeous woman who has no problems laughing at herself or putting herself into a foolish way. I remember her guest stint on Friends where her character shaved her head. That’s always a ballsy move for an little known actress cause something like that can sink your career if Hollywood morons get you stuck in their minds as a freak. I think the fact that she’s married to Ben Stiller says the most about her cause as she’s said in various interviews, the big attraction for her is a good sense of humor.

Sadly, this role is just another 2 minute stereotyped gig for her. She does stellar as always.

Hapless Global Express deliveryman: Larry Drake. I know he’s played retarded characters before but this one is falls more in the category of just “a bit slow”. He’s very dedicated to his job and makes it his mission to make sure the letter gets delivered when he catches on to what Ivy & Trips are up to.

I won’t ruin any of the fun for you but please do not be one of those people who are incapable of suspending a little disbelief. Trust me, you’ll have more fun if you can.

Parting thought… where can I get one of those giant inflatable Elvises?