Just the Ticket #62: The War At Home OR A Kiss Under the Sprinklers
Thanks to my daily-ish readership, Just the Ticket has passed 2000 pageviews this week. I appreciate you guys putting up with my irregular posting schedule and my sometimes overly summarized rants each issue in search of links to Amazon and the elusive profane joke. Today's title is from my usual brand of lexiconic mashuppery (two words I made up), making use of the two film titles up for review today: This Means War and Jeff, Who Lives At Home. Read on....
The first film to feature a kiss beneath the sprinkler system this week is This Means War. The "spy in love" premise has been done to death these past few years, from Mr. and Mrs. Smith (reviewed here) and Killers to Knight and Day and The Tourist.
The latest offering of its kind, War doubles up in the spy category with Star Trek's Chris Pine (looking and sounding like the long-lost brother of Zack from Saved By the Bell) and The Dark Knight Rises' Tom Hardy using their Central Intelligence Travel Agency resources to fight over and win over the same girl (Reese Witherspoon, Sweet Home Alabama).
Like your average, over-inflated action movie cops, these secret agent men are so un-covert that they wind up grounded (like misbehaving children, not like malfunctioning aircraft) from field work, and both unwittingly hit on Lauren (Witherspoon), a product tester whose laboratory looks like a hair salon painted and decorated for children.
Completing the whole over-the-top-yet-under-the-bottom picture is Cinematography (or, I guess you'd call it Art Direction when cut, color, and clarity are involved) composed of high contrast, glaringly bright lighting, and fuzzy visual quality that works well enough with the obviously faked rooftop action sequences (or rather, the one obviously faked rooftop action sequence at the beginning) but turns the rest of this rom-com with a shallow bend (no twists here, Ticketholders!) into a blindingly glossy mess. The one other exception is an interrogation scene near the end--also one of the only times we get to see the villain (played by Inglorious Basterds star Til Schweiger)--which is stereotypically dark and sepiatoned to impart an air of menace. That air, unfortunately, is rather thin, and dissipates with the surrounding rom-com atmosphere. No diamonds here, folks. Just cubic zirconia. Won't your fiance be disappointed?
Speaking of clashing moods, let's talk about the acting. Witherspoon's attempt to play against type in a comedy comes off as abrasive (as well as being better suited to her few dramatic forays, like her role as June Carter-Cash in Walk the Line), and when she does eventually fall back into rom-com mode, the results are syruppy and doe-eyed enough to give a 10-point buck diabetes. Chelsea Handler does a decent job as Lauren's BFF, basically playing herself, but with kids in tow and fewer Grey Goose promotions coming out of her mouth. But the real meat--which is actually 60% gluten-free tofurkey--of This Means War is the brotherly love-hate relationship between Pine's womanizing FDR (who has a pool on his ceiling) and Hardy's Tuck (who, thanks to his cover ID as a travel agent, has become the poster boy for divorced, pussy-whipped single fathers everywhere) as they do everything from trapeze lessons and private art tours to surveillance and adopting a dog to get the woman they love, so long as she never finds out they know each other.
I'm pretty sure this is the longest I've ever complained about anything, and all that being said, I see that the director--looking it up on IMDB...oh, it's McG, the guy who directed Charlie's Angels. That explains everything--was going for a look and feel of totally ridiculous, romantic comedy fun, and he succeeded. It kept me watching, too, which was a plus.
Well, more of a C+
Susan Sarandon (Leaves of Grass, reviewed here) and Rae Dawn Chong (Tales From the Darkside: The Movie - "Lover's Vow") share a kiss under the sprinklers in Jeff, Who Lives at Home. Jeff (Jason Segel, Knocked Up, having put on weight and put aside his deadpan-inappropriate characters of yore) is your basic 30 year old slacker: a jobless pot-smoker living in his mom's (Sarandon) basement, and adhering to a personal philosophy he concocted after watching M. Night Shyamalan's Signs. His brother Pat (Ed Helms, The Hangover), for lack of a better word, is a dick. He buys a Porsche (that's pronounced "poor-shuh," with emphasis on the "poor") without consulting with his wife (the understatedly brilliant Judy Greer, who had a cameo with Segel on and episode of How I Met Your Mother), and then immediately wraps the exhorbitantly priced pillbox around the nearest tree, all the while looking down on Jeff as the family failure.
Soon thereafter, so stops the laughter, and Jeff, Who Lives at Home falls boringly into indie territory. That means a lot of sitting and talking about stuff they're going to do a half hour or more further along in the movie that most likely will have no effect on anything. Except.... There are two plotlines here that actually amount to something sweet and tender and profound in the end.
One is the mystery-lite that gets under way when Sarandon's character starts receiving instant messages from a secret admirer (Chong) who works in her office.
Aside from the aforementioned kiss, neither this sub-plot, nor Pat's investigation of his wife's suspected affair really get any definition, but are instead motivators for the main idea behind Jeff, Who Lives at Home. Our main schlub gets to put his life's philosophy into practice when a wrong number leads him on a wild Kevin chase to the right place at the right time.
It's Extremely Loud, Incredibly Stoned with camera work reminiscent of The Office, but smarter, kinder, and easier to watch. At least, that's what she said.
B-
Next time, Just the Ticket goes on hiatus for a belated critical look at some of the new and returning shows this season. Stay tuned for the first issue of Stay Tuned.
The first film to feature a kiss beneath the sprinkler system this week is This Means War. The "spy in love" premise has been done to death these past few years, from Mr. and Mrs. Smith (reviewed here) and Killers to Knight and Day and The Tourist.
Like your average, over-inflated action movie cops, these secret agent men are so un-covert that they wind up grounded (like misbehaving children, not like malfunctioning aircraft) from field work, and both unwittingly hit on Lauren (Witherspoon), a product tester whose laboratory looks like a hair salon painted and decorated for children.
Completing the whole over-the-top-yet-under-the-bottom picture is Cinematography (or, I guess you'd call it Art Direction when cut, color, and clarity are involved) composed of high contrast, glaringly bright lighting, and fuzzy visual quality that works well enough with the obviously faked rooftop action sequences (or rather, the one obviously faked rooftop action sequence at the beginning) but turns the rest of this rom-com with a shallow bend (no twists here, Ticketholders!) into a blindingly glossy mess. The one other exception is an interrogation scene near the end--also one of the only times we get to see the villain (played by Inglorious Basterds star Til Schweiger)--which is stereotypically dark and sepiatoned to impart an air of menace. That air, unfortunately, is rather thin, and dissipates with the surrounding rom-com atmosphere. No diamonds here, folks. Just cubic zirconia. Won't your fiance be disappointed?
Speaking of clashing moods, let's talk about the acting. Witherspoon's attempt to play against type in a comedy comes off as abrasive (as well as being better suited to her few dramatic forays, like her role as June Carter-Cash in Walk the Line), and when she does eventually fall back into rom-com mode, the results are syruppy and doe-eyed enough to give a 10-point buck diabetes. Chelsea Handler does a decent job as Lauren's BFF, basically playing herself, but with kids in tow and fewer Grey Goose promotions coming out of her mouth. But the real meat--which is actually 60% gluten-free tofurkey--of This Means War is the brotherly love-hate relationship between Pine's womanizing FDR (who has a pool on his ceiling) and Hardy's Tuck (who, thanks to his cover ID as a travel agent, has become the poster boy for divorced, pussy-whipped single fathers everywhere) as they do everything from trapeze lessons and private art tours to surveillance and adopting a dog to get the woman they love, so long as she never finds out they know each other.
I'm pretty sure this is the longest I've ever complained about anything, and all that being said, I see that the director--looking it up on IMDB...oh, it's McG, the guy who directed Charlie's Angels. That explains everything--was going for a look and feel of totally ridiculous, romantic comedy fun, and he succeeded. It kept me watching, too, which was a plus.
Well, more of a C+
Soon thereafter, so stops the laughter, and Jeff, Who Lives at Home falls boringly into indie territory. That means a lot of sitting and talking about stuff they're going to do a half hour or more further along in the movie that most likely will have no effect on anything. Except.... There are two plotlines here that actually amount to something sweet and tender and profound in the end.
One is the mystery-lite that gets under way when Sarandon's character starts receiving instant messages from a secret admirer (Chong) who works in her office.
Aside from the aforementioned kiss, neither this sub-plot, nor Pat's investigation of his wife's suspected affair really get any definition, but are instead motivators for the main idea behind Jeff, Who Lives at Home. Our main schlub gets to put his life's philosophy into practice when a wrong number leads him on a wild Kevin chase to the right place at the right time.
It's Extremely Loud, Incredibly Stoned with camera work reminiscent of The Office, but smarter, kinder, and easier to watch. At least, that's what she said.
B-
Next time, Just the Ticket goes on hiatus for a belated critical look at some of the new and returning shows this season. Stay tuned for the first issue of Stay Tuned.
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