The MacGuffin

I can only imagine what the pitch meeting was like when the idea to make The Change-Up (2011) was decided upon. The people who convinced the studio executives to greenlight this film must have been expert salesmen, because the premise is a tired and recycled comedy setup that was old more than fifteen years ago. Not only that, but the tone of the film is slapstick—a gross-out comedy that masquerades as a tale about finding one’s true place in life, but in reality shamelessly caters to the lowest common denominator. Sure, there are times when it tries to be better than what it is, but at the end of the day, it’s too afraid of taking that step. This is an unfunny film about two people who have no business being associated with one another, let alone temporarily taking each other’s lives as their own.

The most embarrassing part about being from the South is being from the South. I would know. The gossip, the swapping of cornbread recipes, the way everyone says one thing and means “I hate you,” all make the South a place Outsiders don’t seem to understand. Therefore it was with severe anxiety and a full bottle of Xanax I settled in to see Junebug (2005), the story of a man’s Southern homecoming to let his new wife meet the family.

The film opens in the rural countryside of England, present day (which appears to be the 8’s, even though the film was shot in 2003). An SUV pulls up to a mansion and out pop four hot blonde women dressed in sheer outfits—guess who? There are bad bad people inside talking about this group of female assassins right as they break into the mansion and apprehend them with all kinds of weird gadgets like James Bond. The ladies are looking for a hard drive with the plan, to erase the whole thing. What they don’t know is that one of the bad guys is from Indiana Jones.

I’m not a huge Joe Dante fan, but I like him just fine. I’ve seen The Howling five or six times, enjoyed Gremlins when I was young, and have recently been pleasantly surprised by The ‘Burbs. For the last year or so, I’ve been hearing from the U.K.  about a 2009 3D movie from Dante, entitled The Hole, but no U.S. release date has been set. The U.K. DVD is out already, so I went to Scarecrow Video and picked up a copy to see what all the non-hullabaloo is about.

If James Bond and Jason Bourne had a baby and he grew up in the Old West…if Han Solo and Harrison Ford’s curmudgeonly character from Morning Glory had a baby and he grew up in the Old West…if any alien adventure movie had a baby with Hollywood’s version of the Old West…Every way I try to sum up some element of director Jon Favreau’s summer adventure Cowboys & Aliens, which opens today, seems to involve having elements we’ve already seen in other films crash together.

Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011) is a mediocre film disguised as a good one. Directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, and written by Dan Fogelman, the film charts a year in the life of a character who attempts to put his relationships with his wife, his family, and himself back into some sort of reasonable status. There is plenty of talent assembled here, especially with some first-rate actors. But while on the surface the film appears to provide an insight on love and real connections, and does have some pretty comedic moments, walking away I did feel that it never really had anything significant to say about those elements. Ultimately, it felt a bit shallow, even while it was fairly funny throughout.

I must start with full disclosure here. I was predisposed to hating this movie. The Smurfs represent everything I think is wrong with the entertainment industry. The very idea is a shining example of filmmaking based on licensing and market research. It feels like a marketing executive asks “What properties do we have lying around?” They find a kid-friendly property that has some Generation X name recognition so that parents potentially will drag their kids to the theater. And the Smurf idea has minimal plot, some cuteness, and an easy to explain concept. Couple that with potential merchandising, the fact that since nothing’s been done with the little blue guys for a long time it can probably be done cheap, add some stunt voice casting like Katy Perry, prime the pump with some conspicuous mentions of Smurfs on TV shows leading up to the opening weekend to freshen the collective memory, of course make the whole thing 3D, and it’s gotta be a recipe to make some MONEY. Ugh.

We open in 2008, in Seattle. A Tribe Called Quest, the influential and highly respected hip-hop group, may have played their very last show. In a small, cramped trailer, one of its members pace saround as the camera nervously follows to see what he’s going to say. The man is Q-Tip, arguably the band’s most well known and recognizable face, but as Michael Rapaport’s documentary Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest (2011) shows us, his face harbors a disappointment and frustration that has had been building for years. Dissent has entered the group, ego and pride has gotten in the way and threatened to end a lifelong friendship full of excitement, creativity, and good music. The film explores the foundation of this band, the era in which they came to be and how they influenced countless other musical acts that followed after them, and the animosity that grew between two of its key members.

In fiction and in film, in our collective imaginations, there have been a lot of visions of what extra-terrestrial life might look like. The most appealing of these populate worlds like Star Trek—the humanoid species we could easily communicate with. These are slightly more enticing to think about than bacteria in traces of water, though I admit I still get excited whenever scientists think they’ve found that. The other vision is what we really want though, isn’t it? Someone out there in a similar situation to ours? What about exactly the same situation as ours?

Will Canon’s debut feature Brotherhood (2010) is a film that of late I’ve been telling everyone I know to go see—and it’s not because of the film’s relatively clever recontextualization of film noir tropes and elements into a college setting, or how Canon achieves a dirty, blackly humorous note that, barring a fair bit of urban, suburban machismo and posturing that comes off slightly off-hand, and overly repetitive attempts at creating what seem to be new college frat slogans, sings like witching hour magic throughout. No, the reason I’ve been pimping this film so strongly is because it was shot in and exclusively around Arlington, Texas. Which, for the first sixteen years of my life—accounting for all but three and a half, by now—was my hometown; I know the burg like the back of my hand, all the way from Lincoln Square to the Parks, and off. Canon does, too—and while providing for a competent genre exercise, at the same time he gives us a visual snapshot of my home and his, the asshole of Texas, Aggtown.