The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)
We're doing a quickie Yes No Maybe So for the Superbowl movie spots.
Aaron Eckhart fights aliens in Battle: Los Angeles
In Part One I covered the movies I'd already done some thinking about (usually due to stars or superhero familiarity). Here in Part Two, movies I had not paid even a whiff of attention to up until this very moment. New eyeballs who have casually dropped in from a google search might be shocked that a movie website exists that does not spend almost all its posting time serving up rumors about blockbuster movies and had never before EVER said a word about these four movies exists. But it's true! The Film Experience exists!!! There are about 21,000,000 sites that do that other thing well but this is not one of them.
As I was confessing on Twitter yesterday, I have literally never watched the Superbowl. Not once. The only football bits I've ever seen were in high school (I hung with the band geeks but was a choirboy), comic strips (Lucy is so mean!), in movies, and in Friday Night Lights. L-O-V-E that show. It returns in April for its final season. *sniffle*
Since movie studios bleed gazillion$ worth of their future profit$ to air 30 seconds of their potential blockbusters I $hould $hare them. It's like a hydra-headed episode of Yes, No, Maybe So. I'm listing them in the order I was curious about them BEFORE I saw the spots. Things may have changed.
Serious Film's Michael C. here for this episode of Yes, No, Maybe So wherein we make a snap judgment on BRIDESMAIDS, Hollywood’s attempt to give female audiences a Hangover of their very own.
Women certainly have some balance coming to them. In road trip comedies they’re usually lucky to get the role of the humorless, castrating wife/girlfriend. If they’re not lucky they play the stripper, who in Vegas films stands a decent chance of ending up in a shallow grave in the desert.
Bridesmaids also represents star/co-writer Kristen Wiig’s stab at big screen stardom because she can’t go on forever being SNL’s last line of defense against total un-watchability, and God knows MacGruber didn’t do it for her. Simply put Wiig is appointed Maid of Honor by Maya Rudolph making her responsible for sending her friend off in style, which in this case entails rounding up her colorful band of bridesmaids to go to Vegas for a bachelorette party. ROAD TRIP!!!
The main draw here is clearly the cast, which is one big bag of “Yes!” I can’t spot a weak link. In addition to Wiig there is Rose Byrne, Maya Rudolph, Melissa McCarthy, and The Office’s Ellie Kemper, who couldn’t be more adorable if she was manufactured by Hello Kitty. I’m especially pleased to see Reno 911’s stellar Wendi Mclendon Covey get such a high profile gig. Her reactions to Kemper’s “princess theme” and McCarthy’s “female fight club” ideas are the funniest part of the trailer. Another reason to be psyched: it is directed by Midas Touch TV director Paul Feig. His credits read like a roll call of the greatest shows of the last decade, Arrested Development, Freaks and Geeks, Mad Men, Parks and Rec, 30 Rock. I feel obligated to buy a ticket out of gratitude alone.
I have long-standing rule of avoiding movies that have trailers in which curse words are replaced by sound effects so that’s strike one there. On a more substantive note, the movie looks like it leans pretty heavily on broadly drawn types – the jaded one, the ditz, the butch one. Also, is it too much too ask that women get one movie that doesn’t center on a wedding? Seriously, if you went by Hollywood comedies you would think single women do nothing with their evenings but tip back glasses of white wine in order to stave off thoughts of suicide because all their friends are getting married to orthodontists and cranking out horrible children. I’m offended on your behalf, ladies.
Of course, there is a good chance Wiig is as annoyed as I am with the culture's wedding obsession and is dragging the material out in order to give it the send up it richly deserves. It’s so hard to tell with trailers. That fact that this one is a few notches shy of uproarious could be a sign that it showed only the most trailer-friendly, punched-by-Mike-Tyson type jokes instead of funnier character beats. It could also be a sign that the better jokes simply aren’t there. I’m pretty on the fence about this one.
Oh, wait…Is that Jon Hamm there at the end? Okay, I’m in. What can I say? I think he is a comic genius trapped in a Rock Hudson body. Poor guy. What say you? You would think this collection of talent would have to do something worth checking out, but then that's what I said before I sat through Date Night.
We've been so caught up in Oscar nominations, we've been letting other things slide. So herewith the return of "Yes, No, Maybe So" in which we pre-judge movies we haven't even seen by their trailers. Today's topic is the new drama (dramedy?) Beginners about a man whose elderly father comes out to him. It opens in June, marking two consecutive cutesy gay-themed films for (We Love Him) 'Phillip Morris' (Ewan McGregor).
Yes. Beginners has a fine cast: enduring screen star Christopher Plummer is the gay dad; Melanie Laurent, hot off of Inglourious Basterds, is Ewan's girl; And then there's Ewan himself who, as I've shared before, has the face that makes me happiest at the movies. It's a personal thing that I can't define but to look at him is to experience joy. This is not to say "he's hot" or anything sullied by baser instincts. It's just joy. It's not unlike how I respond to Gene Kelly or Greer Garson in old movies. Wasn't Ewan just sweetness personified in ILYPM? This trailer also gives off a bit of a mid 80s Woody Allen vibe. You know, back when Woody made bittersweet and even warm films that weren't plagued with overt misanthropy. Plus it opens with a long conversation between Ewan and his dog and people who talk lovingly to animals are the kind of people that make us happy even when they don't have magic serotonin faces like Ewan's.
No. Eeek, this reaction is super personal too. (Damn you Hannah! for asking for this particular episode of Yes No Maybe So). Depictions of older gay men in film and television make me t-o-t-a-l-l-y nervous because I hate ageism (always have, even when I was much younger) and most depictions of elderly gay characters take on some form of tragedy or patheticness. Like, I had to stop watching Brothers & Sisters when the uncle came out because the stories just got so immediately I'm Pathetic With a Capital P and don't even get me started on Queer as Folk's completely vile ageism. Truth: Everyone gets older every minute including people who think they never will so let's all stop pretending like aging is a sin. It's not good. It's not evil. It's not triumphant (survival) or tragic (yikes, you're approaching death!). It just is. So anyway. I get nervous. I hope the situations and the relationships are handled sensitively in the movie and I hope they don't reinforce all those boring ol' stereotypes that nobody needs since one day we will all be Christopher Plummer's age (if we're lucky to live that long). Yes, even Hailee Steinfeld. ;)
Maybe So. Here is where we discuss the many ways in which this movie could go right or wrong. First you've got that a-dor-a-ble dog whose thoughts are subtitled. But the laugh line music is missing and the scene is lit and cut so pleasantly that it's not screaming BIG LAUGH. NYUCK NYUCK WINK WINK which is... comforting. Then you've got the hand drawings and the 'rollerskating where you're not supposed to bits' which is... is the latter a lift from Steve Martin's LA Story? There are worse films to steal from. So is Beginners filled with gaggy cuteness or is it just beautifully humanistic and completely adorable?
Monday, February 7, 2011 at 2:05PM 
Aaron Eckhart fights aliens in Battle: Los Angeles
