Old Friends Fail To Entertain With Sex And The City 2!

The Good: Moments of cinematography, Moments of humor
The Bad: Characters are stalled, Not terribly funny, No great acting, Overly familiar
The Basics: A droll sequel that feels like one, Sex And The City 2 is a series of recycled plots and character moments that only the die-hard fans are likely to endure.


The very best cinematic follow-ups to television shows ought to either continue the adventures and character development from the small screen or tell a completely new story that utilizes the characters in a way that the small screen never could. Some of the best series’­ avoid the temptation to tell more story (Lost’s recent series finale, for example, left plenty of story opportunities open that one may only hope never get ruined by a sub-standard cinematic sequel) and let the series rest where it ended. Sex And The City is not like that. Sadly, almost as soon as it was off the air, the film was announced and shortly thereafter, Sex And The City 2 was announced. This, alas, could have been a fan-loved film that brought new fans to the series, but instead it has the feel of being an entirely cheap sequel.

Truth be told, I did not see the first cinematic Sex And The City, but the film catches viewers up very quickly before launching into the “new” story. I write new in quotes because the story has been done to death on the television show, it is just done in a different setting in Sex And The City 2. I gave up on Sex And The City after Season 3 and not only did I not feel at all lost with where Sex And The City 2 went, but I didn’t feel like I was watching anything I had not already seen before. Indeed, all but one of the major characters in Sex And The City 2 were present in the television series by season three (the holdout being Charlotte’s husband Harry).

Sex And The City 2 opens with what one has to assume is a favorite bit of fanfic, which finds Carrie Bradshaw meeting Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda in the early 1980s. After they befriend one another, the film shifts gears to the present day (two years after the first movie). Carrie is in a rut with Mr. Big, who wants to stay in when she wants to go out at night and Charlotte’s life is overrun by her children. An old beau of Samantha, a movie producing sheik, asks for Samantha’s help on a movie shoot and offers to fly her and her friends over to Abu Dhabi to consult on his film. This getaway for the four friends seems perfect.

But while in Abu Dhabi, temptation rears its ugly head. Carrie meets up with her former lover, Aiden and sees his being there as a sign. When they kiss, Carrie has a crisis of conscience and debates on whether or not to tell her husband. Charlotte’s eye wanders while away from Harry and Miranda enjoys the sun and tries to advise Carrie on how to handle her situation. But soon, Samantha’s sexual antics have the quartet on the run from the more conservative elements in the Middle East.

Basically, it’s Sex And The City before it degenerates into “ethnic mismatch comedy” of the most generic sort. Most of the movie is spend in Abu Dhabi and while this initially seems like it might shake up the Sex And The City formula, it fails to. Running into Aiden in Abu Dhabi is much the same as it was when Carrie randomly ran into him in New York City in season three of the television show. In fact, the whole movie ultimately has the feel of the Los Angeles arc that the television show did, just in a different sunny city.

The problem, of course, is in a formulaic plot that keeps the characters ultimately stagnant. This is not Married Life (reviewed here!), it’s Sex And The City and as such, there has to be sex, melodrama and moralizing in an over-the-top way about decisions most people are actually smart enough to avoid by not putting themselves into the initial, problematic situations that force the decisions. Miranda is a virtual nonentity in this film, which makes one wonder why Cynthia Nixon bothered to come back. Sure, Nixon and Miranda have a sage-like quality and is fun to watch, but there are no great character leaps for Miranda in this outing. Similarly, Samantha is still a hornball and Charlotte is still trying to be the faithful “good girl” long past when she last actually was one (in the series her character loses her initial path ridiculously quickly).

But then there is Carrie. In Sex And The City 2, Carrie is a homogeneously uninteresting character. She spent years hunting Mr. Big and now that she has him, she doesn’t know whether or not she wants (or how) to keep him. Their sexual magnetism - which some would have argued was more assumed than shown on-screen anyway - is largely drained and whether or not Carrie feels it, it is hard for the viewer not to feel like she has made the wrong decision. That is, until Aiden appears. The appearance of Aiden could have been a huge thing for the fans, but the truth is, when he appears, the result is more of a groan than an excited gasp. Aiden’s appearance feels contrived and Carrie’s debating on how improbable his appearance is makes it feel more contrived, not less.

Ultimately, Sex And The City 2 does not add to the acting range of Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristen Davis or Cynthia Nixon, it simply allows them to once again step into the familiar shoes (metaphorically) of the characters that they embodied for years. There is nothing truly new here and too many of the moments in the film have the principles looking bored with the material, like they know they have said similar lines before. I know I’ve heard the lines from them before, so that reaction is absolutely no surprise.

For other Sex And The City reviews, please visit:
Sex And The City - Season 3
Sex And The City - Season 2
Sex And The City - Season 1

3/10

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

© 2013, 2010 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Not Quite Smart Enough, Smart People Is A Lame Vision Of Miserable People

The Good: Good cast utilized fairly well, Moments of risk taking
The Bad: Woefully misrepresents people of intellect, Nothing exciting in bonus features, Moments of poor editing.
The Basics: When Lawrence Wetherhold begins dating and trying to take over the English department at the college he works at, the viewer discovers even the "smartest" people may be idiots.


Let's talk about stereotypes. Stereotypes are based upon prejudice and misinformation, judging entire groups based upon a limited idea of a very limited number of people from that group. Almost all the time, stereotypes are prejudicial and derogatory and are fairly transparent for what they are. So, for example, if someone were to characterize a black man as virile, watermelon-eating, fast-running illiterate, virtually everyone reading such a statement would recognize it as a series of stereotypes and it would likely reflect worse upon the person making such generalizations than upon the character in question.

Why, then, does our society consistently devalue people of intelligence and articulation and stereotype them? There seems to be a pretty fair open season on intellectuals where they are characterized as asocial, pompous jerks who are utterly incapable of getting along with another human being. They are characterized as intelligent in a test-taking way, but completely idiotic when it comes to interacting with people. Nowhere in my recent experiences has this been more true than in the film Smart People. Smart People stands as a monument to the viewpoint lauded and celebrated by people who are afraid of and prejudiced against people of intelligence.

Lawrence Wetherhold is a quiet English professor who is struggling to get a book published, raise his daughter and find some measure of peace in a world that seems content to surround him with obstacles he does not quite understand. Thwarted by a disgruntled student working the campus impound lot, Lawrence is wounded when he falls over the impound lot fence and finds himself in the care of another former student, Dr. Janet Hartigan. Unable to drive for six months, Lawrence turns to his slacker brother, Chuck, for help.

While Vanessa - Lawrence's daughter - makes moves on her adopted uncle, Lawrence begins dating Janet, who used to have a crush on him when she was a student. Unfortunately, Janet discovers Lawrence is a painful bore who has little going for him and as she works to extricate herself from a relationship with him, Lawrence resolves to become more accessible. In addition to allowing an editor to hatchet his book, he begins to pursue the position of chair of the English department, along the way discovering he is a truly miserable human being.

It is a rare thing for me to sit and enjoy a movie where the characters are almost universally miserable and in that regard, Smart People is most like Friends With Money (reviewed here!) in terms of its tone. It is fairly consistent in its oppressive mood where Lawrence mopes through his day. Like Friends With Money, there is little catharsis and it is hard to muster up a lot of empathy for most of the characters.

This might be even more true because the title of Smart People is woefully misleading. Outside Janet, none of the characters seem exceptionally intelligent. Instead, Lawrence seems to be bluffing his way through academia, Vanessa is snotty with few actual displays of intelligence (though she does get a 1600 on her SATs and manages to get into Stanford), and even Janet is so ridiculously out of touch with her emotional self that she altered her entire life over a paper that Wetherhold gave her a C on. The two black sheep of the family, neglected son James and the incompetent businessman Chuck, are given the trappings of greater intelligence in this skewed stereotype. So, for example, James - who is characterized by the other members of the family as the dim one - gets a poem published in The New Yorker. And Chuck, who drinks, gets Vanessa drunk and is so slovenly he never manages to show up for an appointment on time, is the family liberal. Only in the mind of one so grossly prejudiced against intelligencia would these traits be construed as the trappings of being smart. It does not require much in the way of deconstructing Smart People to realize that this film has an absolute disdain for the appearance of intellect.

Unfortunately, any sense of satire that might come from the presentation of Janet and the Wetherholds is undermined by the fact that anyone who has ever been around anyone of genuine intelligence will see this as a weak collection of obvious stereotypes. In other words, just like our parody of stereotypes at the beginning, the asocial, mumbling lecturer who doesn't notice how unsatisfied his date is and is raising a young Republican, reads as a collection of the most inane misconceptions about intellectuals.

As a result, it is hard to judge the characters in Smart People. Lawrence is so miserable, but he never strikes the viewer as particularly intelligent, either. Instead, whenever Janet states something and poses the question, "You knew that, right?" he simple nods and says "Of course." As a result, Lawrence is - at best - a poseur and one only wonders what negative experiences director Noam Murro and writer Mike Poirier had in academia that makes them think such a poseur could survive in a university setting so long.

Similarly, Vanessa - played by Ellen Page and the whole reason I picked up Smart People to watch - is more bratty than most young intellectuals and she does not so much learn anything in the course of the movie. Instead, she simply begins to emulate and hit on Uncle Chuck, then stupidly wonders why he would be avoiding her.

Murro goes for the cheapest of laughs with Chuck, featuring multiple shots of him sleeping with his bare buttocks exposed. It's amazing what passes for humor these days and if the first instance of this is juvenile, the second occurrence is just brain-numbingly insipid. Just as the supposedly smart people are treated as idiots, the audience is supposed to understand Chuck is somehow intellectually inferior because his butt ends up exposed while he sleeps. There is only so much insulting of the audience one might be expected to endure.

I've been on an Ellen Page kick of late and Smart People gives her a role different from the others I have seen her in. Unfortunately, it puts her in a role that is disturbingly lowbrow for her. Some of her roles have put her playing people who act young because they are young, but as Vanessa, she is forced to play somewhat mindlessly bratty without any real finesse that illustrates there is anything truly empathetic about her character.

Similarly, Thomas Haden Church is unfortunately utilized in a role that seems awfully familiar for those who have seen the actor in other things. And I'm not a fan of Sarah Jessica Parker's acting in general and Smart People does not give her a role that is meaty or interesting enough in any way that makes the viewer rethink their position on her.

In fact, of the main cast, the only one who does a decent job is Dennis Quaid. The last work of Quaid's I enjoyed was his role in American Dreamz (reviewed here!) and his characterization of Lawrence is a strikingly different performance. Not just the beard, but his whole body language is transformed into a sullen, slouching lecturer who is able to drone without any real affect. Quaid - who is often charismatic - plays this astonishingly well and makes Lawrence largely unlikable.

On DVD, Smart People looks and sounds fine - though there are some moments where the editing was noticeably choppy. There is a commentary track, blooper reel and deleted scenes, none of which made the movie any better. The featurettes repeat a bit of the information from the commentary track and add little in the way of real insight.

I went into Smart People ready to be stimulated and to laugh and when it was over, I just felt cheated. There are much better movies out there.

For other works with Ellen Page, please visit my reviews of:
Super
Inception
Whip It
Juno
An American Crime
X-Men III: The Last Stand
Hard Candy

5/10

For other film review, be sure to check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012, 2009 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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Kissing The Stone Of Mediocrity: The Family Stone

The Good: Decent acting, Fair plot
The Bad: Unlikable or inconsistent characters, Builds too much on unpleasantness before getting good
The Basics: When the Stone Family reunites, it is an annoying girlfriend to one of the sons that dominates the story and ruins the experience for family and viewer alike.


I cannot remember the last time a movie had an emotional resonance with me, where it succeeded in bringing a tear to my eye at moments, that I did not then recommend. Ultimately, and I suppose to skip to the end, The Family Stone is not a movie I'm willing to recommend because by the time it gets to the deeply emotional stuff, it has mortgaged its enjoyability. That is to say, by the time the story tells us to care about the characters, we already do not. And what is most likely to bring a tear to one's eyes is obvious. Writer/director Thomas Bezucha goes for the obvious tear-jerker moments, so the viewer is more likely to feel manipulated at the conclusion to the movie than satisfied.

The Stone family is getting together for Christmas. This year, Everett is bringing his new girlfriend, Meredith Morton, home with him. She is uptight, somewhat obnoxious and pretty glued to her cellphone. She has trouble unwinding, insists on sleeping apart from Everett and feels pressure to fit in with his family.

The family, diverse to the point of cliche, is setup to not like her, though patriarch Kelly insists they give her a fair chance. Sybil, the matriarch, is feeling anxiety over her suspicion that Everett is going to ask her for a promised ring to propose to Meredith. Everett is, in fact, prepared to propose to Meredith and finds himself in conflict with his family over his choice of spouse. Younger sister Amy is feeling persecuted and put out by Meredith, Ben is giving everyone a chance, deaf son Thad and his Black gay partner Patrick are planning to adopt and see this as a chance to be with their family to float the idea and Susannah - with her daughter - is waiting for her absent husband to show up for the holiday.

The problem here is twofold. The first problem is Meredith. While actress Sarah Jessica Parker does not get top billing for The Family Stone, Meredith is the central character during the first half of the movie. And she's unlikable. We're not supposed to like her. Bezucha sees to that. From the first moment she appears on screen talking incessantly into her cell phone, Meredith is portrayed as an uptight pain in the butt. In her first scene with Everett, his action is to simply take away her cell phone and close it, undermining any insinuation of chemistry between the pair. Meredith is unlikable and she is supposed to be. But she is so unlikable and so much time at the beginning of the movie is spent on her that the Stone family - and their assorted stories - simply act as an accessory to her story. And, frankly, we just spend the first part of the movie hoping something unlikely will happen like an alien will abduct her or a car will just crash into the house and take her out. No such luck.

The other problem is the Stone family. This is a collection of direct, progressive people who are generally likable. They are immediately accepting of their family members. All of the members of the family sign for Thad, no one has a problem with his homosexuality or his partner's presence in their family. Thus, after such an establishment, it reads as significantly off that only Ben would give Meredith a chance. Meredith enters the house and is immediately stiff. The family, which seems to be caring and flexible, goes out of their way to make her uncomfortable, flaunting her problems as opposed to helping her through them.

So, the viewer stops caring about Meredith, we side with Sybil and her view that Meredith is not right for Everett. Sybil's issues become a side note and used to jerk the audience around. But more than that, the same lack of attention to detail or caring that marks the Stone family's problem above comes into the writing. There is a line of dialogue that Meredith delivers to Everett early on after arriving at the house. She basically says she doesn't want Everett to feel like he jumped into something and committed too soon and then got stuck. Because he hasn't proposed or anything remotely like that, there's a subtext that perhaps she is pregnant. That subtext - and more importantly, the emotional insecurities which created it - are almost instantly disappeared.

And the problem here is not in the acting or even in the characters. This is not a case of quality actors being placed in roles that don't work. This is an instance of quality actors playing interesting, defined enough, characters who simply don't act like how they are defined after a while. So, for example, Amy gives up her room to accommodate Meredith. She is the rebellious youngest member of the family and it seems odd that she is so thrown by being asked to make so small a sacrifice.

Amy is played by Rachel McAdams and her performance is delightful and Diane Keaton gives another performance worthy of her caliber. Luke Wilson, somewhat disappointingly, plays the same essential character we've seen him as before, which he plays well. Wilson is Ben, an educated and extremely casual guy who more or less surfs through the movie simply dealing with what comes up. In a similar way, Dermot Mulroney fails to wow us as Everett. The actor who surprised me most in The Family Stone was Craig T. Nelson. Nelson plays Kelley and it's a mature, quiet role that requires strength, subtlety and intelligence and Nelson nails the role. He might not have a lot of lines in the movie, but he owns the ones he has and in the final scenes of the film he connotes a great deal with his eyes and expressions.

But it is Sarah Jessica Parker who dominates much of the beginning of the movie as Meredith and her performance creates a character that is so unrelentingly unlikable as to be difficult to watch. Parker walks around the screen and one can see she is visibly clenched, creating a tone that is unsettling, uncomfortable and unenjoyable.

Those are three words that are the death knell to any romantic, family comedy or most dramadies. A hard drama, like Magnolia manages to be unsettling and at times uncomfortable, without being unenjoyable. The Family Stone fails on that front. Ultimately, as I said before, by the time The Family Stone becomes noteworthy, the viewer already has stopped caring about the family and their predicaments and foibles.

For other works with Elizabeth Reaser, be sure to visit my reviews of:
Breaking Dawn, Part I
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
New Moon
Twilight
Twilight trading cards P-8 Elizabeth Reaser costume card

4.5/10

For other film reviews, please visit my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing of all my movie reviews!

© 2012, 2007 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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The More I Keep Watching Sex And The City, The Less I Like It: "Season Three."

The Good: A few moments of humor, DVD bonus features
The Bad: All of the characters become unlikable, Repetitive plots
The Basics: An entirely disappointing season of Sex & The City, "The Complete Third Season" has little to offer that the syndicated episodes don't already have.


Sometimes, I wonder why I put myself through such things for reviewing. When my mother got into Sex & The City in syndication, I began getting her in the boxed set DVDs and as she finished them, I would try to get through them. But with the third season of Sex & The City, I think I am finally done trying; life is too short. With Sex & The City The Complete Third Season, the show mortgages all of its likability as all the characters devolve by losing whatever essential traits made them interesting to begin with. Instead, this season is repetitive with character elements that are entirely disappointing. While the season had a few moments I became excited by, the show soon undid the aspects I enjoyed and restored the show to all of the mediocre elements I did not like. In fact, it says something pretty bad when the most pleased I was in an eighteen episode season was when I recognized Kat Dennings in episode fifteen ("Hot Child In The City").

After watching the first and second seasons of Sex & The City (reviewed here and here, respectively), I actually sat down to the DVD set of Sex & The City "The Complete Third Season" with a sense of excitement. I figured it would not be possible for the show to grow in popularity if it simply followed the same bland formula that it beat to death in the prior seasons. And for a few episodes, the show actually had me; it was engaging and I liked where the characters were headed. But by the middle of the season, the show has mostly restored the characters to exactly where they began.

Shaking up the somewhat blase formula from prior seasons, Carrie mourns her latest loss of Mr. Big by dating a politician and then an artist named Aidan. Similarly, Miranda and Steve move in with one another and begin truly working on their relationship. While Samantha continues to promiscuously go through men, Charlotte begins a methodical search for a husband. That search takes Charlotte to a man who degrades her when he has an orgasm and then to a near-car accident with Trey. Trey takes to Charlotte almost instantly and soon the two are headed to the altar to be married.

But the good things quickly dissipate for the quartet. Miranda discovers she has clymidia and she and Steve need to be tested. And when she notices skidmarks in Steve's underwear, she calls it quits with him. And while Samantha continues to sleep around - even getting an AIDS test - Carrie gives in to her lust for Mr. Big and starts an affair with him, behind Aidan's back. And Charlotte discovers her dream husband is impotent . . . after they are married!

Sex & The City actually has remarkably unlikable characters by this point. Carrie is reprehensible, carrying on with the married Mr. Big behind Aidan's back. And the reason is never believably fleshed out. Instead, the viewer gets the impression that there is a sense of inevitability between Carrie and Mr. Big. But because the show has already done this so many times, the viewer feels betrayed by Aidan's appearance and departure. When Carrie appears to be growing, by finally settling on one man and quitting smoking for him, the show becomes a lame soap opera with Mr. Big returning to break them up in the most contrived ways.

In fact, my usual favorite, Miranda, has moments when she, too, grows before collapsing back into a familiar character type. Miranda and Steve have great chemistry and their reunion late in the prior season sets up well their relationship in this season. So why Miranda, who had goals like having a husband and family, gives that up when she and Steve have difficulty keeping a puppy together, is less believable. After all, Miranda is a career-oriented woman who tends to know what she wants and pursues her goals with strength and persistence. To see her give up so easily is disappointing. It is especially distressing because the actors playing Miranda and Steve have great on-screen chemistry.

Oddly, especially for my morals, Samantha actually seems to have one of the best character arcs, despite not having much character growth. Because Samantha is a promiscuous woman who never truly grows or changes (at least in the three seasons I've watched) there is no way for her to regress. So, there are minor victories of character in this season for her when she does smart things like getting tested for AIDS and talking to one of her lovers about how his ejaculate tastes. While her pursuit almost entirely revolves around sex still, this is less disappointing than seeing characters who get what they want only to give it up for the stupidest reasons.

And, unfortunately, this is what Sex & The City "The Complete Third Season" is preoccupied with. After trying to convince viewers that we are watching professional, intelligent women who want relationships, this season illustrates that the characters are anything but. They are cliches; women who never are truly happy or who define their whole existence by their relationships. There is no spark and no originality to the series by this point. Instead, by this point, everything that could be done with the characters appears to have been and now it is just repetition. So, when Miranda and Steve break up, it is entirely unsurprising how fast she gets back on the . . . well, next man to come her way.

Every great show revolves around characters who the viewer may empathize with. Unfortunately, these characters have become tired by this point. In the third season of Sex & The City, the characters are:

Carrie - Heartbroken over Mr. Big's engagement to Natasha, she dates a local politician who wants her to pee on him. She then tries to develop a relationship with a bisexual and finds that too confusing for her. She then takes up with Aidan, who treats her right, forces her to take things slow and for whom she quits smoking. But when she runs into a drunken Mr. Big, she begins to fall for him again. They begin an affair and Carrie seems surprised when he learns the truth and does not want to continue the relationship. This leaves her free to date younger men and smoke pot and escape to Los Angeles to deal with people making a movie based upon her columns,

Samantha - Still going through men like crazy, she moves to an area of New York with a great view, but noisy drag queens in the alley below. She gets an AIDS test, dates her male counterpart, tries her luck with a short man who is not lacking confidence and breaks up with her poor-performing boyfriend because he's nowhere near close to satisfying her in bed. She develops professionally, even taking the party of a New York City socialite who is completely spoiled,

Miranda - Hitting things off with Steve again, she tries her best to make things work. Even as they fall deeper in love, Miranda finds faults she cannot live with. She discovers she has an STD and is embarrassed to have to deal with that and has a phone sex relationship with a guy . . . until she discovers he has a similar arrangement with someone else! As the season winds down, she enjoys the getaway to California. She gets both laser eye surgery and braces this season,

and Charlotte - Her professional life gets even better as her gallery becomes more and more successful. She spends half the season attacking getting married the way she has succeeded professionally and half unsatisfied with the results. She discovers her husband Trey is impotent and she works to rectify the problem, but finds herself inconsolable.

As for the acting this season, Sex & The City has become so formulaic that the performers seem to be sleepwalking through their performances. None of the characters have anything truly different to emote, so their performances blandly continue to portray the same weak-willed, whiny characters who become entirely boring to watch. In fact, the best moments of the season feature the guest stars. Aidan is played by the always-articulate and mellow John Corbett, who plays the role remarkably similarly to how he played Chris on Northern Exposure (reviewed here!). He adds a little flavor to the show that trumps the repetitive nature of the primary cast. But, because he is not a principle cast member and his character is not in the show terribly long, he cannot shake up or save this season much.

On DVD, Sex & The City has commentary tracks on several episodes and a few featurettes on the characters and the entire season. The bonus features do nothing extraordinary as to make the primary programming worth buying.

This season of Sex & The City starts and ends with the same whining viewers are accustomed to, with a few episodes in the middle that are actually engaging. Unfortunately, the show mortgages those moments for a return to the familiar and banal.

For other works that have Kat Dennings in them, please check out my reviews of:
Thor
Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist
Charlie Bartlett

3/10

For other television reviews, please visit my Television Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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I Can't Believe I Sat Through Another Season! Sex & The City - The Complete Second Season Repeats.

The Good: Miranda and Cynthia Nixon's acting.
The Bad: Repetitive plots, No real character development, Melodramatic, Requisite HBO drug use, Lack of DVD bonuses.
The Basics: The second season of Sex & The City asks mildly different questions than the first season did, but otherwise is repetitive and dull.


When one begins as a reviewer, it is often possible they are bowled over by other reviewers, swept along on the current trends. I'll admit that ever since I watched the first season of Sex & The City (reviewed here!), I've had no desire to return to the series. So, when my mother asked me to start getting the seasons of the show out from the library, I did so grudgingly. However, as I have a lot of sorting to do in preparation for my annual trip to Las Vegas, I figured I might as well watch the second season when it came in. Whatever concerns I had as a novice reviewer about not fitting in with popular opinions have long since passed and now I have absolutely no problem panning Sex & The City The Complete Second Season.

This three-disc DVD set featuring all eighteen half-hour episodes of the second season of Sex & The City (there are no bonus features save episode previews for each episode and a review of the prior season before the season premiere) is overpriced and bears low repeatability. Watching the episodes once is boring and painful enough; watching them twice is a waste of time beyond reckoning, especially for those who have seen the first season of Sex & The City. The reason for the low repeatability of the season both on its own and in the context of the series is that the episodic show - it has a few serialized elements - repeats much of the same formula and events as the first season of the series! Beyond that, the episodes soon take on a highly formulaic quality and the failure for the quartet to evolve becomes irksome to watch.

Manhattan sex and relationship columnist Carrie Bradshaw is still pining for Mr. Big when she gets involved with a New York Yankee. Irked by the way all Carrie, Samantha and Charlotte do is sit around complaining about men, Miranda abandons her friends, until she is struck by seeing an ex. Samantha wrestles with a dry spell, whatwith not enjoying how small her otherwise wonderful boyfriend is. Samantha, Charlotte, Carrie and Miranda soon find themselves adrift and manless, relying on one another for companionship and conversation. But when Miranda buys an apartment, she finds herself in a longer relationship with a bartender who earns vastly less money than she does.

As Miranda works on her relationship with Steve, Carrie hooks back up with Mr. Big, whom she still finds emotionally unavailable. Samantha and Charlotte continue to date with them swearing off men, getting involved with older, wealthy men, and acting like a twentysomething in succession. But as things with Steve rock Miranda's relationship, Carrie finds the lack of firm commitment from Mr. Big spells trouble for their relationship as well when he abruptly leaves for France.

Sex & The City, for those who have not heard of or seen it, is an HBO production and while that means occasional softcore nudity in this season, what separates it from network television most is the frank dialogue about sex, anatomy and swearing. Unfortunately, it adds up to little; it is not funny, the show does not ask compelling questions that an emotionally-mature sixteen year-old girl hasn't already asked and answered for herself and the characters are so vacuous and dull that they are almost impossible to care about. Moreover, just as Disney has its own conceits - Disney princess look, teamwork resolving all conflicts, etc. - HBO has its own conceits and Sex & The City falls into all of them. The show is packed with promiscuous sex and drug use, though in this season it is limited to potsmoking and an alcoholic, outside the usual use of nicotine cigarettes. Samantha laying in bed smoking pot as she listens to her neighbors have sex is utterly pointless outside trying to keep the idea that either HBO is edgy or everyone in their thirties smokes pot. Either concept is ridiculous in my book.

The fundamental problem with the second season of Sex & The City is the same as the first season; almost every episode asks a question and all four of the women wrestle with the same question in one form or another for the episode. So, when Carrie declares all men in Manhattan to be sexual freaks, all four women find themselves dating men who are into deviant sex in one form or another. By the next episode, they are all single and suddenly, they are dating people who all have relationships with death. The "theme episode" feel of the series wears thin and the problem - outside not caring for over half the "problems" Carrie explores - is that Carrie's supposedly brilliant column poses questions which her witless voice-overs never develop.

More than that, one of my serious beefs with Sex & The City is the way it insults the intelligence of women everywhere. I'm not talking about the promiscuous sex (I'm fine with that), but with the idiotic voice-overs that tell what the medium already shows. The average voice-over on Sex & The City is something like "Meanwhile, uptown, Samantha was romancing . . ." Do the producers of Sex & The City truly believe that we viewers are so stupid that we need the transition? Do they think without the voice-over, if we simply saw Samantha beginning to get frisky with a guy we wouldn't figure out what was happening? The net result of the voice-overs is to either insult the viewer's intelligence or insult the intelligence or interest of Carrie's column readers (if one interprets the voice-overs as Carrie's column being written).

The dialogue in Sex & The City is about what one might expect from a program that is billed as television's ongoing "chick flick." The women giggle and laugh and rely upon each other with witty rejoinders, but little real depth. They are not Alpha Women, they are a parody of women in their thirties and the agonizing aspect of watching this season of Sex & The City is that the women act like they do not know they are parodies of the female ideal, instead, they act like they embody it. As a result, they strut around like they own Manhattan and act like their relationships are the only real problems in the world. Bafflingly, Miranda is a lawyer who can afford her own apartment (buying, not renting) who also never seems to be involved in any cases she needs to devote time to. She's just as accessible as Carrie (the writer), Samantha (the public relations specialist) and Charlotte (the art gallery owner).

Great television is based upon the idea that the characters are interesting in one way or another, but by the second season of Sex & The City, the characters are almost indistinguishable from one another - Charlotte's character is almost completely gutted this season - and it is hard to care about any of them. Still, for those considering this season, here are the principle characters of season two:

Carrie - The columnist who whines incessantly about losing Mr. Big. After going through a few sexual relationships (seldom do the women actually relate in their relationships in this season outside sexually), she hooks back up with Mr. Big. Once with him, she agonizes over whether or not they are right for one another, how much truth is important and what it means to be exclusive, before she leaves him again because he leaves for France without telling her in advance. After that, she continues dating men who are bad for her without growing in the process from the experiences,

Miranda - The lawyer struggles to find happiness while learning to do such things as talk dirty in bed to a man (in the process discovering the one thing that can't be said to a guy while talking dirty to him) and feeling rejected by seeing her ex, Skipper, who wants nothing to do with her. She soon hooks up with a sardonic bartender who insists she treat him with respect and she finds she likes Steve. She and Steve, though, have radically different incomes and this becomes an issue between them, which puts Miranda back in the single lane having more random relationships,

Charlotte - No longer the "good girl," she bends all of her principles and instead begins to view men as projects. Whenever she feels like escaping that trend - in between dating a guy who is reputed to give the most amazing oral sex and an attempt to play the field by asking out multiple men at a time - she finds herself getting a dog, embracing lesbian culture (less the sex) and learning how to ride a horse again,

and Samantha - The oldest of the group (perpetually thirty-five), she breaks up with a man who has a small penis and then begins dating rich men in society. This gets her in trouble as one of them is married and ruins her social standing. Going through usually one man an episode, Samantha is the archetype of the free sex movement, but even she runs into trouble when she meets a man who has an incredibly large penis.

The second season of Sex & The City asks some of the least sophisticated questions that illustrate how wrapped up the show is in itself or the characters are in themselves. Questions that pit twentysomething and thirtysomething women against one another and "Is it possible to be friends with someone you've seen naked?" are of limited interest to most people able to ask the question and watch the series and for those who take the answers seriously, Sex & The City offers poor answers to those questions.

The second season of Sex & The City is devoid of great performances, though Cynthia Nixon is excellent as Miranda. She is able to carry the serious moments with real depth and has a fun side that she shows in episodes like "Games People Play." But much of the show focuses on Sarah Jessica Parker and her acting is terrible. She pouts through most of the season and whines for most of her deliveries. Her idea of carrying a difficult emotional moment is to have Carrie look down like she's lost a penny and this season she does nothing to make us care more about the character than reading the scripts might have.

In fact, this is little more than a soap opera that focuses on four women hanging out, having sex and talking about relationships with one another instead of working on them with their love interests. It got lucky and for those who have not been subjected to this season, you can get luckier than I did by avoiding this season.

For other works featuring Kim Cattrall, please check out my reviews of:
15 Minutes
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

4/10

For other television reviews, please visit my Television Review Index Page for an organized listing of all the shows and seasons I have reviewed!

© 2012, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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The Razor Decision On The First Season Of Sex And The City.

The Good: Honest, Interesting, Fairly good acting, Good plots
The Bad: Flat characters, Low connectivity, Derivative
The Basics: If you've never seen Ally McBeal, watch this. Otherwise, poor characterization, episodic nature and low resolution don't outweigh the excellent casting and interesting questions posed.


Perhaps the thing to remember when reading this review is that: 1. I'm a huge fan of Ally McBeal and 2. I liked Sex And The City. That said, after a very close call, I've decided not to recommend Sex And The City: The Complete First Season to other viewers.

Sex And The City: The Complete First Season follows the sexual exploits of four women in Manhattan. The cast is more than competent, the four women chosen are all interesting and beautiful, at least by Hollywood standards. In truth, Kim Catrall's character is somewhat refreshing for the occasional horrific camera angles that make her look less than Hollywood beautiful. Otherwise, we've all seen these twiggy women in other things and my instant impulse is to offer them a snack.

Also successful is the whole plot angle. Each episode asks a question and seeks to answer it in the course of the episode. It's miraculous how each theme fits into the character's lives perfectly. For instance, in the episode asking the question about threesomes, just happens to be the only time all of the women encounter it. It's more than just nitpicky; just a little annoying. Why? On something like Ally McBeal the writing is worked in such a way that often serious issues are returned to and different characters wrestle with different questions at, well naturally, different times.

The plot succeeds in that it asks interesting questions. And from there we go into the problems. The first, huge!, problem is in the characters. Any show where I sit down and watch twelve episodes in the course of two days and I'm stuck on the actor/actress' names as opposed to the characters, that's a sign of poor characterization. Why? I ought to be able to separate the actors from their roles if their characters are good. Miranda. Miranda is the only character whose name stuck with me.

Kirstin Davis plays a completely gorgeous, if naive woman, Kim Catrall plays a woman who isn't terribly different from her role as Valeris (the Vulcan in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country), and Sarah Jessica Parker plays the lead protagonist whose name starts with a C, as I recall. Parker's character, Carrie Bradshaw, spends the first season chasing after Mr. Big, but having sex with other guys she has less emotional attachment to.

Now, I'm not much of a prude, so I have little problem with the promiscuity on the show. That's fine, each of the women make the choice for that. In fact, the whole liberal sexual angle is pretty wonderful. The problematic aspect is that in addition to having little emotional context to the characters (hence being Sex And The City as opposed to Love Making And The City), there's not much to them. Bradshaw is a woman who writes about relationships - and mostly sex - in the city, but the character never seems like a terribly interesting person who would actually have much going for her outside that. That is to say, in order to be a writer and dispense advice, it helps to have a personality. Outside having a spending problem and a taste for expensive shoes and an apparently high tolerance for alcohol, there's not much to her character. Moreover, the character Miranda seems to have more of a social life and more time on her hands than any lawyer I've ever met.

The whole New York City club scene and the extravagancies of New York (some of which are universal to all big U.S. cities, but many which are VERY New York) are played up and is distracting to those who either are ignorant to such things or find them unappealing.

I've often confessed to enjoying serial television (Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Ally McBeal, Once And Again). Sex And The City is not terribly serialized, though the first season follows - mostly - two plot arcs: Carrie and Mr. Big and Miranda and Skipper. The show is largely episodic, but it seems inappropriate as each episode seeks to answer a crucial question. When the question is answered, the characters ought to grow. Yet, by the next episode, the characters are largely unchanged and still largely uninteresting.

The final nail in the split decision for me came down to the fact that Sex And The City is derivative and unbalanced. It borrows a lot of the frank, earnestness of Ally McBeal, but lacks the strength of that show which is that it is balanced, along gender issues. The problem with Sex And The City is NOT that it provides a women's point of view. Instead, the problem is it ONLY provides a woman's point of view. It doesn't male bash, but it strikes a blow to feminism in that it doesn't offer the equal dialog feminism seeks.

That is, instead of liberating all, it simply puts men in the roles women have cast off; as voiceless and one-dimensional.

Ally McBeal offers much more vibrant characters realistically asking many of the same interesting questions Sex And The City tries to, but fails with its glossy cast, intriguing questions and pathetic characterization.

I'm recommending against season one of Sex And The City, though I enjoyed it enough that if I ever have the opportunity to watch the second season, I'll take the opportunity. There's potential in this series, but the first season doesn't realize it and it doesn't manage to be something great or unique either. At most, it's interesting at best, humorous at times and the very least it does it pose interesting questions that individuals and couples ought to ask themselves.

For other works with Sarah Jessica Parker, please visit my reviews of:
Did You Hear About The Morgans?
Strangers With Candy
State And Main

5/10

For other television reviews, please check out my Television Review Index Page for an organized listing of all the shows I have reviewed!

© 2012, 2002 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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The Fun State And Main Holds Up Better Over Time!

The Good: Funny, Decent characters, Good acting
The Bad: Hits some of the jokes a few too many times.
The Basics: Funny throughout, State And Main tells the story of a beleaguered movie company trying to make a film, with a movie-in-a-movie comedy.


Every now and then, I find myself watching a movie I am convinced I saw, but never got around to reviewing. Before I recently watched State And Main with my fiance and family, for example, I was sure I had seen it. I knew what it was about, after all. However, less than five minutes into the movie, I knew I never had seen it; I would have remembered it. Written and directed by David Mamet, whose Glengarry Glen Ross (reviewed here!) I recall enjoying, State And Main is an understated comedy that I found myself laughing at far too many times to be seeing it the second (or third) time.

That said, I do believe that as people discover State And Main now on DVD or digital download, they will find a gem that was overlooked at the time of its release. Filled with witty dialogue, deadpan deliveries and quick double-takes, State And Main utilizes its extensive cast perfectly and offers those who like smart comedy something worth laughing out loud at. Indeed, despite the repetition of some jokes, this film about an independent film crew descending upon a small town is fairly consistent in the laughs and it utilizes a number of well-known performers in ways they are not frequently used.

Walt Price is the executive producer and director of a film called "The Old Mill" which has had to move abruptly due to one of the star's indiscretions. A location scout has brought Walt to Waterford, Vermont, where all seems perfect to shoot the movie. Unfortunately, as the cast moves into the small town, Walt's production is beset with problems, not the least of which include that the old mill in Waterford burned down decades prior and his leading lady will not fulfill her contract and bare her breasts for the film. So, Walt calls upon the writer, a legendary playwright named Joseph Turner White to rewrite his screenplay without the presence of the old mill.

As White bonds with the local intellectual, a woman who is trying to organize the town for an upcoming dramatic production, Ann's fiancee, Doug feels slighted and turns upon the film crew looking for some way to make money off them and draw attention to his greatness as a D.A. to launch his political career. Doug gets his wish sooner than he thought when the star of Walt's movie, international movie star Bob Barrenger's predilections for girls (not young women, mind you) gets him in an accident with local high school student Carla. Walt works desperately to keep the production afloat amid all of the chaos while White works on a rewrite that finds him wrestling with what the movie is truly about.

State And Main often has a dryly delivered, often absurd sense of humor. Almost immediately, the tone of the film is established by Walt, talking on the phone, delivering the line "Waterford, Vermont. Where is it? THAT'S where it is." The movie tends to fall along that line of humor throughout, with various people asking the question, "Do we have to have The Old Mill?" at various points as well. Despite the dry deliveries of almost every line of jokes, State And Main is often hilarious, with a sense of wit that will make most audiences do more than just smile.

Unlike many comedies, State And Main actually takes the time to develop themes and it manages to make jokes recur, though a few of them do get tired by the end. Joseph Turner White's character, though, is intriguing in that he works on creating a film that has meaning and explores the vain quest to reclaim purity while his part in this film satisfies the same need and theme. Of course, this is all by clever design, but Mamet is a careful enough writer and director to entertain and make the viewer feel like everything is occurring organically, as opposed to a script.

Part of the way he does this is by developing very vivid characters. Walt is much more than just a dry-line delivering director who is witty for laughs from the audience. He is single-mindedly devoted to creating a movie and while people like his producer, Marty, seem to be motivated solely by money, Walt actually seems devoted to the project because he believes it is legitimately great. Of course, virtually everything he says is a lie meant to get people to do his bidding, but all of his lying seems to be for the purpose of making a great movie.

Similarly, White - with his obviously symbolic name - is both a symbol of purity and a man who one can actually see is a writer daunted by the greatness of his first production. His relationship with Ann occurs organically and when he ends up in a compromised position with the film's star, Claire, Mamet does something wonderfully unexpected; he treats the situation as an adult situation. White explains to Ann what happened, as absurd as it might appear and Ann believes him because she has no reason not to. In other words, Mamet and State And Main do not play along the predictable, obvious lines of conflict for a comedy or a drama and instead offer the viewer characters who are thinking adults who are able to discriminate and judge based on their experiences.

This is not to say all of the characters are masterfully fleshed out. Claire is a strangely pious Hollywood starlet whose conflict with Walt seems to come out of nowhere. And Bob Barrenger is a one-joke guy. He is an egomaniac, product of his own stardom, and he likes teenage girls. Virtually every joke surrounding him involves his predilection for teenagers, so when Carla eagerly makes advances on him, it is predictable, but reasonable that he would fall for her. And Walt's handling of the situation is hilarious.

It is worth noting - because so much of the humor is cerebral - that State And Main is one of the first films I can recall (by date) that rewards viewers for sticking around through the opening credits. While there are no additional scenes at the end of the credits, there are a few additional jokes near the bottom of the crawl which play perfectly off jokes delivered in the actual film. It is worth hanging around for them.

Part of what makes the characters so vivid is that they are performed by a truly amazing collection of actors. Clark Gregg, Rebecca Pidgeon, Vincent Guastaferro, Sarah Jessica Parker and David Paymer give some of their funniest performances of their lives as quirky residents of Waterford or people involved in Walt's picture. Alec Baldwin sets up his 30 Rock style comedy as Barrenger and reminds viewers that he has a sense of comic timing, even if it was neglected or poorly used for several years in his films. Even Julia Stiles is surprisingly good as the jailbait Carla, offering more than just her smile and eyes to characterize the girl.

But it is Philip Seymour Hoffman and William H. Macy who do the heavy lifting on the acting front in State And Main. Hoffman is given a great deal of dramatic work as the quiet and daunted Joseph Turner White. He is credible as he appears serious and shy in every scene he is in. But instead of just recapturing prior shy roles of his (like his character in Boogie Nights), Hoffman infuses an intelligence into White and one gets the sense White is always looking at things. He is constantly looking into people, even just with a glance, and that seems to be an acting choice on Hoffman's part.

William H. Macy has incredible abilities as an actor to play dramatic roles. In State And Main, though, he uses Hoffman and virtually everyone else as his straightman. He is charged with keeping the comedy coming and he expertly times each joke he shoots out while making every one of them seem like real dialogue coming from an actualized - if entirely absorbed - character. This is one of the performances that helps define Macy's range and ought to reassure any director checking out the field that Macy can do an amazing job with comedy.

Anyone looking for a fast-talking comedy that uses dry and subtle wit to generate real laughs will find much to love about State And Main.

For other works with Clark Gregg, please be sure to check out my reviews of:
Thor
Iron Man 2
Iron Man
The West Wing
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
Sports Night

8/10

For other film reviews, please be sure to check out my Movie Review Index Page by clicking here!

© 2012, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Reworked, But Still Pretty Much The Same, Strangers With Candy (The Movie) Disappoints!

The Good: Moments of humor, Guest stars
The Bad: Recast roles, Blase plot, No real character development, Repeats many jokes from the television show.
The Basics: At long last, I take in Strangers With Candy and find it to be an unenthusiastic retread of the television series.


It has been a weekend filled with me considering Strangers With Candy. The television show Strangers With Candy (reviewed here!) was a favorite of my ex-wife and when I was on the road with my wife last year, we caught a few minutes of the movie Strangers With Candy. Trying to cheer her up, I decided to get her out the film Strangers With Candy and we sat down to both watch it. She had forgotten about the film and I tried very hard to get enthusiastic about the movie when I was not wild about the show.

Ironically, she laughed less than I did and I actually enjoyed parts of it. Objectively, though, Strangers With Candy is in no way great. In fact, while I laughed quite a bit more at the movie than I expected to, I did not laugh all that much and if the movie was truly doing much different and/or better than the television series did, I would have laughed quite a bit more. While supposedly a prequel to the television series, Strangers With Candy is actually a reworking of the show that combines many of the best elements of the television series in order to make a movie that is barely above the ninety minute minimum threshold for feature films.

Jerri Blank spent thirty-two years on the streets and in prison before abruptly getting out. She returns to her father's house to discover a new stepmother she did not know about and her father in a coma. Jerri's half-brother, Derrick, like her stepmother, treats her terribly and when her father's doctor recommends she become something good to reinvigorate her dad, Jerri goes back to high school. Unfortunately for Jerri, Principal Blackman is under investigation by members of the school board. If he cannot illustrate anything extraordinary in his students, he will go to prison for misappropriating school funds.

The opportunity for Jerri and Blackman to become successful and exhibit a single extraordinary student comes with the regional science fair. Jerri, not scientifically inclined, is teamed up with both the smart Asian and outcast students, while Blackman hires a ringer teacher to get the good-looking students a project that will simply dazzle the judges. As the science fair approaches, Jerri struggles to fit in as an ex-con going to high school.

Strangers With Candy is an exceptionally simple premise and while the movie utilizes many of the most successful jokes from the television series, it frequently lacks the wit or successful ridiculous quality of the television series. In fact, it is rather early on in the movie - when Dr. Putney slides down the banister at the Blank home - that the truly original zany humor is exhausted. After that, most of the humor is simply characters - most notably Jerri's peers, her half-brother, stepmother and stepmother's meat man - insulting Jerri. This is a movie where "fag" and "fatty" and variations thereof are thrown around with alarming frequency.

Unfortunately, the result is not often humor. Instead, it's a series of cruel interpersonal interactions with no genuine character development and thus a rising action leading up to the science fair with no emotional investment for the viewer. As the science fair approaches, much of the best humor comes from Stephen Colbert's character, who loathes Jerri, is competing with the much more successful Roger Beekman and is breaking off his illicit homosexual affair with the art teacher, Geoffrey Jellineck. But even Colbert, in the role tailored to him, is unfortunately forced to reuse his jokes multiple times in the same movie, making them lose their punch and making it difficult to believe the film replays with any reasonable success.

What is astonishing about Strangers With Candy is the volume of truly amazing talent that comes out to participate in this troublingly weak parody of itself. The acting talents of Ian Holm, Allison Janney, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Matthew Broderick grace the screen for moments that are either incongruently funny given their celebrity or a waste of their exceptional abilities. Sarah Jessica Parker also appears in the film.

Oddly, in a film that claims to be a prequel, many of the roles are recast - most notably Jerri's father, Guy, and half-brother, Derrick. Moreover, given that Stew was introduced later in the series, his presence in the film robs this of being a true prequel.

As for the acting in Strangers With Candy, the big four - Amy Sedaris (Jerri), Gregory Holliman (Blackman), Paul Dinello (Jellineck) and Colbert (Noblet) - effortlessly fall into the roles they played for the thirty episodes of the series. None of them bring anything new to the characters or performances, so this is more of an homage to their own, earlier work than a truly new or different comedic experience. Their portrayals are simply a continuation of their troubling, melodramatic, effeminate and erratic (respectively) characters they became known for.

The result is a film that is actually less satisfying for those who liked the television series Strangers With Candy as it mashes some of the best jokes from the series into a movie that lacks the satire of the parody of after-school specials the series possessed. As for those approaching the movie before the series . . . the best I can say is that my wife, who loves outrageous comedies, has expressed no desire to see the series since we watched this.

For other works featuring Dan Hedaya, be sure to visit my reviews of:
Mulholland Drive
Alien Resurrection

2/10

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

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


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Absolute Worst Bet For Any Weekend: Did You Hear About The Morgans? Is Just BAD!

The Good: It DOES end!
The Bad: Not funny, Very predictable character arcs, Terrible acting, Lame plot
The Basics: Dreadfully unfunny, Did You Hear About The Morgans? is a stiff comedy without any humorous moments, which fails to do anything new.


Every now and then, I encounter something that is very pure. I have an experience that is so great or so bad that it leaves me with little to write objectively about. If it is a good experience, I can simply gush about the experience, but I end up feeling stupid and repetitive. On the converse, when something is so bad, I sometimes get to feeling I am kicking it when it is down when I begin to critically analyze it. Did You Hear About The Morgans? falls into that second category. The film is homogeneously bad, which actually leaves me with very little to write about it. And rather than be creative, I want to write one sentence and let that be the ultimate review of this film. That line is:

I did not laugh a single time during Did You Hear About The Morgans? That is all.

Paul and Meryl Morgan have lost the passion in their marriage. While they are very successful in their respective careers, they have no real love for one another and they do not communicate with each other. So, as they move toward their inevitable divorce, they begin to drift and make plans apart. But the demise of their marriage takes an odd turn: one night while out they become witnesses to a mob murder and they suddenly find themselves the targets of a trained assassin! The FBI, needing their witnesses to survive, relocates the Morgans to Wyoming.

Once in Wyoming, Meryl and Paul discover they can do nothing but wait for the FBI to apprehend the contract killer and for the murderer to go to trial. This means they must give up their New York City technologies and lifestyles and learn the slower pace of the Midwest. And under those conditions, their marriage suddenly gets new life.

What to say about Did You Hear About The Morgans? The film is not funny, not clever, not original, nor is it a showcase of the talents of any of the people involved. Hugh Grant is particularly stiff as Paul Morgan and he lacks any sense of his comic timing which made him famous or worth watching in other productions. Similarly, Sarah Jessica Parker can hardly be said to be acting as she is once again playing an uptight New Yorker who is busy beyond belief and entirely superficial. Hers is evidence of good casting more than anything like good acting.

As for the character development, I struggle not to say "there is none." There is character development: the protagonists are not in the same place at the end of the film that they are in the beginning. But the arcs are disgustingly predictable from the overwhelming sense of conflict at the beginning to the forced shared menace/conflict to the mutual frustration in Wyoming which helps bring Paul and Meryl together. The only thing more canned than the regular characters is the appearance of the generic sidekicks in Wyoming in the form of Clay and Emma Wheeler. They serve as guides to deliver the unfunny punchlines ("x doesn't work out here, neither does y") which the viewer sees coming miles away.

And the whole team of FBI agents and U.S. Marshals is comprised of people who could not possibly have made it to where they are supposed to be. And while middle America might be thrilled that there's a movie where their good ole ways are the cure for the Eastern Liberal quandaries of Paul and Meryl, the truth is no one is made more fun of than those same middle Americans in Did You Hear About The Morgans?

I went into this film having seen only a single preview, which didn't impress me and the full film completely lived down to the expectations from the trailer. Hasn't the whole "fleeing from the trained killer fish-out-of-water" comedy been done before? It has and the fundamental problem with Did You Hear About The Morgans? is that it is done again without anything new, original or even a decent sense of humor to it. Instead, this is a particularly droll comedy and the punchline is only on the viewer and the joke is that the studio got your eight bucks if you watch this.

On DVD, Did You Hear About The Morgans? includes the usual bonus features: deleted scenes, a commentary track, and trailers. I could not force myself to watch any of them, I cared so little about this movie.

For other comedies, please check out my reviews of:
Couples Retreat
Excess Baggage
Valentine's Day

0/10

For other movie reviews, please consult my index page!

© 2010, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.


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