Hardly An Epic, Sadly Unincredible, Why Interstellar Is Not All It Should Have Been. . .

The Good: Decent plot, Adequate acting, Moments of character, Metaphysics
The Bad: Not stellar on the character or performance fronts, Huge detail problem that is never addressed
The Basics: (Mostly) Well-constructed, Interstellar is still deeply unsatisfying.


Coming into Oscar Pandering Season, indeed for most of the year, it is easy to say that the film I was most anticipating was Interstellar. I have largely enjoyed the works of Christopher Nolan and I am a fan of Anne Hathaway. Eager for her biggest film since Les Miserables (reviewed here!), I spent the day on a splurge: I went downstate to see Anne Hathaway in IMAX. I was excited to spend the day out and splurge seeing Interstellar in IMAX [Rant #1 – Hey, you, jackasses at the Warner Brothers advertising department! If you’re going to make the claim that “This film will be released two days early in IMAX” live up to your promise! There were no IMAX showings of Interstellar in Michigan on November 5, but your commercials sure made it here! Grumble!]. I otherwise went into Interstellar virtually blind; I managed to avoid spoilers, reviews and previews.  So, having made a day of it . . .

. . . it is hard to discuss my level of disappointment now. I know the moment the film was done that I enjoyed it more than I did Gravity (reviewed here!). But, when I went to assign a number rating on Interstellar, I had to go back to my literal, strict, formula for rating and Gravity, it turns out has a half point on Interstellar by the numbers! My wife asked me before if it was the worst Christopher Nolan film and I said, “No,” thinking that I liked Interstellar more than The Prestige (reviewed here!). While this might be an implicit argument that sometimes films get rated higher based on a first viewing (The Dark Knight Rises, I am most certainly looking at you!), my gut tells me that Interstellar is suffering in the opposite direction . . . and yet . . . and yet. There is much to recommend Interstellar, but there are some gaping holes in the science and science fiction of the film. As a result, I have decided that the best way for me to approach reviewing Interstellar is with a fractured review; the top half will have the spoiler-free critique (Jessica Chastain had a much bigger role than Anne Hathaway, the visual effects were not actually all that spectacular, etc.) and then a more thorough analysis of the problems with Interstellar (which is impossible to do without some spoilers). There will be a clear delineation.

Set in a nebulous future where blight has killed off many major crops and made farmers more important to Earth than engineers and astronauts (not to mention military powers), Cooper is a farmer who was once, briefly, a pilot. Living in the new dust bowl, Cooper farms corn and raises his son – Tom - and daughter, Murph, because humanity has turned so against science and medicine that MRIs no longer exist to find things like cancerous tumors in time to save the life of Cooper’s wife. Murph is a bit of a troublemaker at school and refuses to believe things like the Apollo missions were just government productions devised to bleed the Soviet Union financially dry and she is convinced she has a ghost in her room because books keep falling down. After a particularly violent dust storm floods Murph’s room with dust and dirt, Cooper becomes convinced that there is something going on in Murph’s room; the dust lands along specific lines of gravity and from those lines, Cooper discerns a simple binary message. Something is giving Cooper and Murph coordinates and Cooper (unwittingly taking Murph with him) makes a journey to find what is at those coordinates.

What they find is an old NORAD facility, which has been secretly used by NASA, which has existed in secret long after the public thought it was gone. Cooper meets Amelia Brand, who shows him the truth: in the years to come, the Blight will adapt to corn and the Earth will be unable to feeds its people and NASA is working on an ambitious project to evacuate the population or repopulate a distant planet with humans using embryonic genetic material. Cooper is reunited with Dr. Brand, whom he knew from his past days in NASA, and he meets Doyle and Romilly, along with the robots TARS and CASE, who are intended to go on a mission through a wormhole that appeared 48 years prior out near Saturn. Cooper learness that their mission would be the second endeavor through the wormhole; a decade ago, the Lazarus Project under Dr. Edmund went through the wormhole and sent twelve pods out to nearby planets to try to find a habitable one. Despite Murph being furious at Cooper for going, Cooper joins the mission as the pilot, leaving behind a watch for Murph and hoping to return by the time she is his age.

The crew of the Endurance goes to sleep for two years and wakes up when the ship reaches Saturn and the wormhole there. Cooper pilots the Endurance through the wormhole – in which Brand has a close encounter of sorts – and arriving near the black hole (Gargantua) in a far away galaxy, the crew discovers that three of the twelve probes give them reason to hope. The crew heads right away to Miller’s planet, where the orbit of the planet has such a relativistic distortion that an hour on the planet is equivalent to seven years outside the distortion field! Trying to track down Miller turns disastrous, though; her planet is all-water and while the lander finds her wreckage, they lose Doyle and are delayed while the engines drain of water. Returning to space, Brand and Cooper learn from Romilly that twenty-two years have passed. While he has managed to learn all he can about gravity from the nearby black hole, the years have drained most of the Endurance’s power and now the Endurance has only enough fuel to investigate one of the two remaining close planets. When Cooper exposes Brand’s determination to go to Edmund’s planet as a result of her love for him, he makes the choice to take the ship to Mann’s planet. During that time, Cooper finally starts getting messages from Murph, who has begun working with Dr. Brand on the project to get a worldship off the ground. As the years go by, Murph struggles to keep hope up for saving humanity. Hope is in short supply, though, when Dr. Mann’s optimistic appraisal of the planet he has been marooned on for decades turns out to be way too good to be true and Dr. Brand delivers a deathbed confession to Murph that causes her to question the whole nature of the mission her father is on.

Throughout Interstellar, the lingering question is who They are. They are the people who sent Murph and Cooper a message in the dust by manipulating gravity, They are the ones who created the artificial wormhole and other gravity anomalies, They seem to want humanity to survive, but They do not communicate directly with humanity. Unfortunately, the narrative technique of Interstellar makes this answer troublingly obvious – more about that in the spoilerific section below the rating! For no particular reason that makes much sense, Interstellar opens with elderly people discussing their childhood in the time period that the film begins in. While this is wonderful for creating a sense of time and place – they put plates on the table flipped over because of all the dust – it telegraphs the largest possible arc of the movie in a disappointing way. From almost the first frames of Interstellar, writers Jonathan and Christopher Nolan seem to be obsessed with saying, “Don’t worry, humanity will survive!”

Ultimately, though, that is at the root of the problems with Interstellar; the film tries to make mysteries and then completely lets down the audience with the payoffs to them. The film is riddled with inconsistencies much larger than Murph’s disappearing necklace between a p.o.v. shot change; the audience is meant to feel a sense of peril, but there is no larger sense of jeopardy because we already know humanity lives on. Similarly, Cooper opens the film as a scientist of such strength and conviction that it gave me hope that should Matthew McConaughey win any awards for his portrayal of Cooper in Interstellar, he could not reasonably waste time thanking the Divine in his acceptance speech. But for all of the rigid science of Cooper’s views, much of Interstellar is about faith. Anne Hathaway’s Amelia has her most impassioned speech of the film about the power of love; Murph is an educated scientist whose devotion to the cause borders on the fanatical in the absence of any reasonable reinforcement for decades!

This is not a complaint about the final act’s metaphysical nature. In fact, I enjoyed that. After a very literal film about the perils of space travel, Interstellar evolves and goes into cerebral territory much akin to 2001: A Space Odyssey. I have no problem with cerebral science fiction; indeed, I enjoyed Love (reviewed here!) more than most and more than I did Interstellar. But for a film that is supposed to be about human resilience and hope in the face of potential extinction, Interstellar really cheaps out with a faith angle that is not at all scientific.

On the performance front, Interstellar is adequate. Some of the casting is a little weird; Mackenzie Foy looks like a pre-teen version of Anne Hathaway, yet her character Murph grows up to be played by Jessica Chastain and then Ellen Burstyn, so there’s really no clear evolution in how her body changes throughout her life cycle! That said, all three actresses make incredible use of their time on screen – Foy especially is a scene stealer. Jessica Chastain has a powerfully substantive role in Interstellar and what is perhaps most impressive about her performance is how she sells some of the most ridiculous leaps a scientist could make as plausible. For plot purposes, Murph realizes something impossibly obscure and Chastain acts around the improbability remarkably well.

Interstellar has an impressive supporting cast, led by Anne Hathaway. Hathaway is given remarkably little to do; her character of Amelia seems cold initially and Hathaway has to play the part with a bad-enough poker face for Cooper to realize that Amelia has an attachment to Edmund and she does that. But Hathaway has only one big scene in Interstellar where she is otherwise given enough space to act and give her character any dimension. Ironically, Matt Damon’s character of Dr. Mann is in Interstellar for far less time, but he is given more to do with greater range. Damon is able to evolve Mann from good-natured and grateful to unsettling and unhinged, with careful gradations in his behaviors! Wes Bentley, Michael Caine, Topher Grace, Casey Affleck, John Lithgow and David Gyasi (wow, Interstellar sure is a sausage fest – are all the women in this bleak future out farming, too?!) all have moments that make their characters watchable and/or interesting. But no one in the film really shines and makes the viewer think “wow, that’s an amazing performance!”

That includes Matthey McConaughey as Cooper. McConaughy plays Cooper as a reluctant leader who is determined to juggle two potentially opposite things; save the Earth and get back to Earth before his daughter dies! McConaughey is good for the film’s physical moments and he does most of the jargon just fine, but his performance is nothing superlative.

Sadly, the same can be said about the special effects in Interstellar. I was psyched to go see Interstellar in IMAX and once the film finally got off Earth, I became excited again. Just as Prometheus (reviewed here!) made great use of the massive IMAX canvas for illustrating a tiny ship next to a massive planet (it’s a very different effect on Blu-Ray on a small screen!), Interstellar features a tiny space ship next to Jupiter. And the spherical wormhole is pretty cool. And the trip through the wormhole is appropriately trippy. And the film’s climactic, metaphysical, event is awesome. But in between . . . meh. Director Christopher Nolan tells a few cool things using effects – the lander hitting a frozen cloud in the atmosphere of Mann’s planet is neat – but the effects are more mundane and obvious than they are incredible or truly special.

In fact, in the quest to make some good special effects frequently works to the detriment of the story in Interstellar. The Coopers are farmers in a society that values farmers; why is their house falling apart?! Seriously, we have better windows and doors today than the Coopers do and there is no real rational reason for that to be so (see the spoilerific section for more on this!).

The result is a surprisingly middle-of-the-road science fiction piece that does what it promises in the film’s first few moments - it tells the story of how humanity was saved – it just does not do it very well. In fact, Doctor Who pounded the same theme on the importance of exploration in the recent episode “Kill The Moon” (reviewed here!); that might have had an equally preposterous underlying supposition, but at least it was shorter!

6/10

So, beyond this point is the crux of my issues with Interstellar - SPOILERS ABOUND! READ BEYOND HERE AT YOUR OWN RISK TO ENJOYING THE MOVIEGOING EXPERIENCE!!!

Interstellar is plagued with some serious problems that the film is unable to reconcile and it is unfortunate for how a film that tries to be smart ends up being so very, very stupid. First, the narrative technique; old people discussing life in the future, where they were children. The Nolans seem to think viewers who they want to be smart enough to understand physics and philosophy will be unable to grasp that the narrative technique they use to establish the precepts of their near-future also deny the viewer of any question as to whether the mission of the Endeavor and Lazarus Project will be successful! This film is not like “The Inner Light” (reviewed here!) where all that is going to survive are the planet’s stories.

The second big problem is They. “They” are referred to as being interested in saving humanity and giving Cooper the coordinates to the NORAD facility. They set off a story that is inherently cyclical. Unlike Inception (reviewed here!) where the movie may be viewed as a loop that the audience is working back to, Interstellar depends upon the loop. In fact, the film is all about the loop. Unfortunately, the nature of the loop is obvious from almost the very first moments of the film. When a time/space anomaly is detected that is clearly artificial and has such specific effects as coding a message to a single person in a specific place and time, the nature of that loop is pretty obvious. Anyone who likes science fiction will know that Cooper is sending himself on the mission.

But, wow, does Cooper go the long way around! “They” are influencing gravity to make messages in dust. That ability could be used, any time after Cooper has left on his mission, to write messages in the dust without causing a paradox. In fact, if the Cooper house had just had modern windows, “They” could have written pretty decent, concrete, messages in the dust on the windows. Cooper could have written something in the dust that would have made Murph’s ridiculous leap make sense, something like “Second hand!” But alas, Interstellar does not do anything quite that smart, even as it is appearing to be smart.

That is because the entire conceit of the movie defies any sense of logic and reason. I understand paradoxes and I love narrative loops. I have absolutely no problem with effect preceding cause . . . but it has to make sense. Sadly, Interstellar doesn’t. Even non-linear narratives need to have a sense of reason; if time is a loop, events must conspire such that the first time through time, people or planets get to a point where the loop may occur (i.e. if the Earth is destroyed by all-out nuclear war before the time machine is invented, a human from the future cannot come back to influence the past). The reason it fails to make sense comes during the metaphysical climax to the movie. Cooper does not do enough to influence his own timeline to make events happen after he and TARS enter the black hole. Cooper should have created the gravity anomaly that crashed his first mission, but the Nolans forgot to address that.

The wormhole is a problem that is a macguffin that is not satisfactorily addressed. The Lazarus Project and the Endeavor are only able to go out to a distant galaxy thanks to the wormhole. The wormhole was supposedly created by Them, which would be Cooper and TARS, but they forgot to make it before reality on the other side the event horizon collapsed. Therefore, someone else had to make the wormhole and the only implication in the film is that it is hyper-evolved humans who exist in five dimensions in the distant future. But, here’s the problem; without Cooper getting saved by them, they can never exist. Cooper’s own story which puts him in the distant galaxy on the other side of the wormhole hinges on him getting messages back to Murph in both the past and present. Cooper’s message cannot be transmitted unless he and TARS solve the equation from within the event horizon. The choices then are that he is saved by aliens who have mastered the fifth dimension or that he and TARS create the wormhole to save themselves. Otherwise, cause and effect be damned; humans would not have come through the wormhole to evolve into fifth dimensional beings to save Cooper! They couldn’t have left the planet to get there. So, that puts Interstellar once again in remarkably unsatisfying territory; Cooper and TARS forgot to engineer the wormhole so they were saved by unseen aliens who manufactured a wormhole . . . why?!

Seriously, if we’re to buy that aliens save humans what. the. hell.?! Many, many galaxies away, aliens bend time and space to discover humans and they commit themselves to saving them . . . by putting a hole in space not really near enough to them to be particularly useful. Ugh!

For other works with Jessica Chastain, please check out my reviews of:
The Martian
The Help

6/10

For other movie reviews, please check out my Film Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Bernie Is A Good Almost-Documentary That Prioritizes Substance Over Sparkle.

The Good: Interesting story, Good characters, Jack Black’s performance
The Bad: Tone/pacing
The Basics: Bernie is, ultimately, a glorified newsmagazine special of a murder case that takes far, far, too long to become anything.


Lately, when my wife and I finish watching a film, she turns to me and asks, “What are you going to give it?” because she knows I will review anything and everything that comes before me. When Bernie was done, we had a rare discussion about the film. Her family had left a copy for us to watch on their last visit and we finally watched it, pretty late at night. Bernie was engaging enough that I stayed awake an hour and a half after my usual bedtime to watch it and it was presented in a way that continued to develop such that I could not fall asleep during it (not that that was my first instinct).

But the more and more my wife and I talked about Bernie - and I did like it – the more I was forced to admit that, more than anything, I simply did not care how the film turned out. My wife analogized Bernie to a 48 Hours television special, without the ominous tone (I used the phrase “sensationalism”) and she was right. Bernie is very much like a profile on a television newsmagazine, usually the type where the trajectory of a killer is traced with voiceovers that make the person seem terrible and their crimes almost inevitable (or, conversely, utterly shocking). Bernie is very much like that, but without the tone or sensationalism and, for a significant part of the movie, a crime. In fact, it is remarkably late in the movie that the film evolves from somewhat boring character profile to an abrupt murder, cover up and inevitable trial. The erratic nature of Bernie left me feeling the film was far more average than exceptional, though I did enjoy it.

Bernie Tiede is a Texan in his late thirties, who is a mortician’s assistant in Carthage, Texas. Beloved by all the locals for the way he has a kind word for everyone and goes out of his way for the bereaved, Bernie finds success and happiness in the small community. Marjorie Nugent, on the other hand, is reviled my most of the town for the way she is mean to everyone and delights in rejecting loans in her position at the local bank after her husband dies. But, when her husband dies, she and Bernie strike up an unlikely friendship. Against all odds, Marjorie allows Bernie to console her and soon they are seen everywhere traveling together and spending time in one another’s company.

That relationship, however, takes a turn for the unhealthy when Marjorie starts controlling Bernie’s time and keeps him under the thumb. Frustrated one day at her berating him, Bernie picks up the armadillo shooting rifle and shoots her in the back four times. After that, Bernie continually comes up with excuses for why people cannot visit Marjorie, while at the same time using her considerable assets to benefit everyone in the community. But Marjorie’s stockbroker and the local district attorney slowly come to believe something is amiss and when they find her body, Bernie is taken into custody.

Bernie is based upon a true story, so all my comments – it should be noted – pertain only to the film Bernie. Bernie takes its time to adequately illustrate just what a nice guy Bernie Tiede is, and it does that exceptionally effectively. But the film plods along without any purpose for quite some time as Bernie just keeps doing nice things in Texas and by the time something actually happens (i.e. he shoots Marjorie), I had almost completely lost interest. In fact, it almost seems like writer and director Richard Linklater got bored as well because he forgot almost all of the rising action leading up to the murder. Bernie’s defense at his trial has to do with how controlling Marjorie was, but that is not exceptionally well-illustrated in Bernie; the scene before, Bernie is off flying the plane Marjorie seems to have bought for him. In other words, Bernie fails to show the man oppressed in a serious or crippling way.

This is to the detriment of the film because as soon as the accountant goes snooping and Marjorie’s body is found, Bernie focuses quite a bit on D.A. Danny Buck, a thoroughly unlikable character. So, despite loathing Buck and his methods, Linklater’s Bernie is only so persuasive because the first half of the film convinces the viewer that Bernie and his perspective can be trusted.

Shirley MacLaine plays Marjorie and she has vastly fewer lines than most of the townspeople (who are played by themselves, actual peers of the real Bernie Tiede) and her role is basically a supporting one that is comparatively minor. Similarly, Matthew McConaughey’s Daniel Buck only comes into his own in the last third of the film and he quietly develops the character in reaction shots more than he defines him through anger or bluster. Buck’s fate is not mentioned in the closing credits and that is unfortunate, so McConaughey effectively generated enough interest to make the viewer care whether the D.A. got re-elected or not.

Most of the movie rests on the performance of Jack Black, as Bernie Tiede. Black gives a performance that instantly reminded me of Zach Galifianakis in The Campaign (reviewed here!), but to be fair, Black beat him to the mannerisms. Regardless, this is a role unlike any I’ve seen Jack Black in and he carries it effectively, showcasing his musical range along the way.

Ultimately, Bernie is a simple movie, well worth watching once, but unless it is leading up to a retrial or pardon (one supposes the Governor of Texas could watch Bernie and be moved or Obama could use a Presidential pardon on the guy) it is hard to muster up the enthusiasm to rewatch the film.

For other works with Shirley MacLaine, be sure to visit my reviews of:
Around The World In 80 Days
The Apartment
Terms Of Endearment
In Her Shoes
Rumor Has It . . .
Valentine’s Day

5.5/10

Check out how this film stacks up against others I have reviewed by visiting my Movie Review Index Page where the film reviews are organized from best film to worst!

© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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The Rare Distracted Movie Review: Failure To Launch Fails To Impress

The Good: Decent acting, Interesting story, Moments of humor
The Bad: Frenetic moments, Predictability, Final moments, Main characters
The Basics: When Tripp meets Paula, it might be love, save that she is working for his parents to get this thirty year-old out of their house.


It's rare that I wait more than four days to review a movie (a trip out of town saw to that in this case) and it's even more uncommon that I review a movie that I saw under such strange circumstances as Failure To Launch. My mother was watching Failure To Launch one afternoon when I stopped by to pick her up to take her to lunch. She insisted on finishing it before leaving, so I watched the last twenty minutes of the movie. She then insisted I take it with me to watch and - finding my queue otherwise empty - so I did. I cannot think of a movie I've basically ruined the end of only to sit down and watch it days later.

Failure To Launch follows a laid-back boat dealer named Tripp who is in his thirties and living at home with his parents. Tripp soon meets Paula, an attractive woman who is seemingly not repulsed by Tripp's life without land and property and the two begin to date. The problem, as the viewers are instantly brought into, is that Paula is actually a specialist working for Tripp's parents to get him out of their house. As Paula develops real feelings for Tripp, her life - and his - become complicated.

Ultimately, I am recommending Failure To Launch because, though it is an average movie, it smartly deals with some aspects in a complicated manner. Sue, Tripp's mother, is largely motivated by fear which she expresses to Tripp late in the movie. Tripp is motivated by a strong sense of loss and on a grander scale, Failure To Launch is the first movie in my experience to deal with the growing phenomenon of adult children in the U.S. living with their parents, usually as a result of economics.

It's rare that one watches a movie that is clever enough to make things complicated. Tripp is not a loser and one of his friends who initially appears to be one is even less of one, having bought his parents' house to avoid the estate tax. Tripp's father, Al, even develops in the course of the movie, so it feels less like a monolithic romantic comedy.

The problem is when the movie stops being clever and defying the conventions of romantic comedies by focusing entire scenes on characters who are not the leads and instead descends into the inane and ridiculous. In Failure To Launch, this takes the form of slapstick comedy with Tripp being attacked by a dolphin, a chipmunk and something else. I say "something else" because I know there were at least three frenetic, spasmodic scenes with animals flying around, but the movie left such a lack of an impression on such scenes that it was largely forgettable. At only 97 minutes, I want to think that the ridiculous slapstick intervals are simply a way to kill time to get the film up to conventional standards. Though I suspect director Tom Dey and writers Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember could have extended the movie more organically, I'll try not to blame their choice.

Sarah Jessica Parker plays Paula and it's hard to judge her acting in Failure To Launch, as the role is fairly indistinct; she is generic professional and female romantic lead. She had more of a screen presence in The Family Stone (reviewed here!) and this did not seem much different from any of the episodes of Sex And The City I've seen in terms of acting. This is not the role to define Parker.

Similarly, Matthew McConaughey as Tripp is a bland, generic, Hollywood-good-looking, "Aww shucks"-charming, well-off thirtysomething lead. He's indistinct and bland and his screen presence - or lack thereof, makes one wonder how he was voted "sexy" at anything; he's far too generic for that, with all of the important information about his place and character being relayed by others.

And that's why Failure To Launch comes close to failing. The lead actors are not distinctive in their roles. All of the bit actors steal the show. Kathy Bates has a supporting role as Sue and Terry Bradshaw, as Al, steals ever scene they share from her. Who would have guessed that Terry Bradshaw could hold his own in a supporting movie role and legitimately earn praise for it? Bradley Cooper, who I always enjoyed on Alias, (reviewed here!) gives a strong supporting performance as Demo, a character too infrequently used in Failure To Launch.

It is actress Zooey Deschanel who throws the movie over the top. Deschanel plays Kit, a bitter, borderline alcoholic who is Paula's best friend and is plagued by a mockingbird. She plays the role with enthusiasm and sarcastic stoicism that make her the easiest character and actor in the movie to watch. She's able to turn her moods on a dime, almost violently in a way that few actors can.

In short, Failure To Launch is a pretty straightforward romantic comedy save that it is diluted with slapstick and strong supporting characters that have little in competition for airtime with the a-story. It's not going to light the world on fire, but it's also not the worst movie one could watch when the queue is otherwise empty.

For other works with Zooey Deschanel, be sure to visit my reviews of:
New Girl - Season 1
Yes Man
Weeds - Season 2
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
Elf
Almost Famous

5.5/10

Check out how this film stacks up against others I have reviewed by visiting my Movie Review Index Page where the films are organized best to worst.

© 2012, 2007 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Worse Than We Had Predicted, Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past Is Unredeemably Bad!

The Good: Soundtrack
The Bad: Acting, Plot predictability, Direction, Character development, Continuity contradictions.
The Basics: Utterly unredeemable, Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past is a terrible film that reinforces negative stereotypes about women and treats men badly, too. No entertainment value.


My wife and I have different tastes in movies, but it seems like lately I have been picking more winners. Indeed, she was concerned she would fall asleep during X-Men Origins: Wolverine, yet squeezed my hand at all of the shocking moments and after begrudging me (quietly) the two hour drive and hour wait in line to a screening of Star Trek eagerly talked about it with me and anyone who would listen. But from the previews, she was eager to see Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past. As she observed afterward, "even people who went in with low expectations will be disappointed."

She is right; I went in figuring that the best moments were in the trailer and the irony of that is that some of the best moments stay in the trailer. The trailers had moments cut from the final film and the result is even less funny than the concept. But if you want to save yourself time and money, here is the simplest possible explanation of Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past: women are idiots and sluts, men are dogs who refuse to take responsibility for their actions. That's not me saying that, it is the message that comes through loud and clear in the film and those who like good chick flicks will cringe at how bad this is both as a "chick flick" and as a film in general.

Connor Mead is a photographer who shoots women in their underwear and who is not tied to any one woman. In fact, as he works to seduce a new singer, he breaks up with his three latest prior conquests, then abandons his latest chick for his brother's wedding where he has bedded all but one of the bridesmaids in the past. As Connor tries to convince his brother, Paul, to flee marrying Sandra, he is reunited with the arguable love of his life, Jenny. Jenny continues to reject Connor and Connor looks to hook up with the last bridesmaid at the wedding.

This is when Connor and Paul's dead uncle Wayne appears to Connor and tells him he will be visited by three ghosts, who will teach him a lesson on love. Connor is soon visited by the Ghost of Girlfriends Past, who illustrates to him how poorly he has treated women, then reminds him of the relationship he had with Jenny and how he left after the first time they made love. As Connor wrestles with the understanding he might have left the love of his life walk out in the past, Paul and Sandra get cold feet and Connor must apply his newfound heart to saving the imperiled couple.

Sometimes, simplest is best: Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past is stupid and insulting. My apparent generalization before is, unfortunately, not a generalization. Women in the film are treated atrociously and the men are little better, but certainly no worse. There is an undertone of misogyny in the way Connor treats women like objects, but they not only let him, they encourage him. Then they act like surprised idiots when he abandons them the way he abandoned everyone else. The height of this sickness is arguably reached at the beginning when the new up-and-coming superstar witnesses Connor treat three women poorly, encourages him to bed her and allows herself to be seduced with the line "come to papa" (which is much grosser in context than it sounds out of). This, however, is "arguably" the low point for women being treated badly by themselves (because, again, women in this film are sluts and/or idiots) because later a woman responds to Uncle Wayne by approaching him with the line, "She might not be into that kind of thing, but I am!"

But the most important idiot, er, woman, is Jenny. Jenny appears as a strong female character from the outset, rejecting Connor and keeping him at arm's length. We soon see why; despite a childhood together, when she rejected Connor at a middle school dance, Connor became a misogynistic dog. Ten years later, he woos her only to leave her. The stupidity here in Jenny takes the form that she let him in to begin with, despite correctly analyzing his tendencies, and that she still pines for him now. Jenny's whole catchphrase throughout the movie in relation to Connor is "not as dumb as he looks, folks." The problem is, Jenny IS! Seeing him again turns Jenny into mush, which helps reinforce the old concept that women want the bad boy and the project.

This is, unfortunately, not the only message being reinforced throughout the movie. The positive message is a remarkably conservative "fidelity pays off and everyone ends up with who they are 'supposed' to" message, all within a heterosexual and ethnically conservative sensibility. As a result, as the movie ends with people pairing off, the film's two most recognizable ethnic characters make a love connection and the viewer is afforded one final cringe in a movie filled with them. Sandra is a neurotic caricature of a bride and this reinforces, like many of the movie's other messages, that women live entirely for the bridal day and that this is the socially appropriate way for them to be . . . neurotic.

As well, men are dogs, but that is okay as long as someday they settle down. This is reinforced pretty obviously by Connor and Uncle Wayne, but the more troubling message is that men refuse to take responsibility for their actions. Connor only bucks this trend in the final moments of the movie, but his character is such a ridiculous trainwreck anyway (I'd mention the specific moment in the last minutes that was so ridiculous that it did not fit, but I'd ruin it for the one person reading who did not see the movie trailer, because the trailer DID show virtually the entire movie) that it is hard to care.

The most problematic aspect of Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past is that the Dickensian message being spread in it is unfortunately inapplicable in the specific circumstances. Connor is learning a Very Valuable Lesson about the strength of love. He learns the lesson in time to try to save the romance between Sandra and Paul and pursue Jenny at arguably the last moment he will have to get her. The thing is, Sandra and Paul's romance is beleaguered on the eve of their wedding not because they suddenly learn a new fact about each other, but because their fundamentals are not solid and that fact upsets Sandra to a ridiculous extent. In other words, Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past annoyingly supports a romance that is not firm enough to survive on its own because it is not a decent romance. Only in the movies do people lie to one another up to the wedding day, have a real conflict about that and salvage the wedding day. In the real world, people come clean early, delay the wedding or don't get married, more often than films show any of those consequences.

As for the acting, this is not the Jennifer Garner of Catch And Release and my wife is convinced that Matthew McConaughey is trying to be Adam Sandler in his role as Connor Mead. Either way, they have utterly no chemistry on screen. The only other noteworthy acting comment would be that Lacey Chabert appears to be contractually obligated to give her teeth screen time in every moment of the film. No performer in this film ought to be proud of the final result.

There are a few good lines in Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past, but for every good line, there is a cringer and one that reinforces a negative stereotype. And for those who want to write it off as "just a movie," I'd argue this is how prejudice, sexism, misogyny and outdated gender roles persist. Of course, keeping women dumb and skanky works for those dogly men, so . . .

For other films with Emma Stone, please check out my reviews of:
The Help
Crazy Stupid Love.
Friends With Benefits
Easy A
Marmaduke
Zombieland

1.5/10

For other movie reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2011, 2010, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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The Wedding Planner: Something Hollywood This Way Comes . . .

The Good: Background scenery
The Bad: Utterly predictable, Lack of character and development, Pretty much all of the acting
The Basics: A disgustingly homogenized film in which everything we expect to happen does and everyone looks like they stepped out of a magazine. Bland.


My title ought to have the subtitle "As Bad As I Suspected It Could Be." Have you ever seen a film that didn't disappoint your lowest possible expectations for it? A film that was so predictable you could call the lines two scenes in advance and you sat through watching the clock begging for it to be over? Well, The Wedding Planner was exactly like that for me. I was expecting it to be bland, utterly Hollywood fare. Well, it was. In fact, it was the epitome of everything that is Hollywood.

Mary Fiore is, surprise, a woman who plans and directs weddings. She's landed the ultimate wedding to direct which has put her in a position to advance in the wedding planning business. In the process, she meets a guy and falls in love at first sight. As it turns out, again predictably, the man she's fallen for is the groom in this important wedding. You ought to be able to see where this is going; Mary tries to do her job, arranging the wedding for Steve and Fran while Steve and Mary fend off their feelings for each other.

The sole strength I could come up with for this film was the scenery. They picked a beautiful place (San Francisco) to shoot The Wedding Planner. The gardens are nothing short of amazing. And there are enough background shots that make the film easy enough to watch.

There is no character development. There are no plot surprises. There is not acting talent at work here. Matthew McConaughey plays Steve and he's not acting; he appears as the charming enough man who does the talk show circuit whenever he has a new film coming out. Jennifer Lopez was herself as well, meaning that her instant assumption was that the man she was with was gay (I almost wrote this as a "Is Jennifer Lopez a closeted lesbian?" piece because having watched Angel Eyes (reviewed here!) and The Wedding Planner today I'm somewhat surprised that the only thing the characters Lopez plays seem to have in common is a line where they both accuse their male costar of being gay. It's not subtle and it's bordering on homophobic accusation.). Anyway, Lopez isn't playing a character any different from herself when she does the talk show circuit. I mean, she's playing herself here as a business woman, kind of like how she acts when she talks about her music career; she's trying to sell herself as something and in this case, it seems like no leap of the imagination.

This film is not funny. This film is not charming. The two high points for me were when Charles Kimbrough (he plays Fran's father in the film; he played Jim on Murphy Brown) and Kevin Pollack showed up. Sigh even they couldn't save this film from being impossible to recommend.

You've seen this film, a hundred times before. All of the men are chiseled, all of the women skinny, bleached hair, over make-uped. In a word, Hollywood. None of these characters are real and none of them feel that way. This film is not worth your time. Well, unless you love Hollywood . . .

For other works with Judy Greer, be sure to visit my reviews of:
Love And Other Drugs
Marmaduke
The Big Bang Theory - Season 3
Love Happens
Arrested Development
What Women Want
Three Kings
Jawbreaker

1/10

For other film reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2011, 2002 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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