Movie Review: Bridesmaids

To download to the audio version, right click here and choose "save as..." or "save link as..."

To listen, press the play button on the player below


Bridesmaids has been getting a lot of build up and positive buzz. I was excited to see it based on all that positive buzz. After watching the movie, I felt like I was stuck at the children's table at the reception. The movie fell flat on its face breaking its nose and I couldn't wait for it to be over.

The title of the movie is Bridesmaids. I'm expecting the focus to be on the antics of the group of bridesmaids for a wedding. Based on the trailers, both of them, I'm expecting a female version of The Hangover. The title was plural. I was sold a bill of goods. The main focus of the movie was on Annie (Kristen Wiig), the Maid of Honor for Lilian's (Maya Rudolph) upcoming nuptials. If they called it Maid of Honor or as one character said Maid of Dishonor it would have better represented what the movie was about. The group was window dressing for Annie's story.

Annie is having a hard time in life. She's being used as a toy by a guy (an uncredited Jon Hamm) as boy friend would not be an appropriate term to use to describe him. Her cake business has gone under due to the economy. She's in a job that she doesn't like. Her roommates are just all out weird. Her car couldn't pass a safety test. She's not having an easy time when Lilian asked her to be her Maid of Honor. Lilian knows this and that it's going to take extra finances to fulfill the role but she saddles the burden on Annie anyway. Where they talked about the economy in the opening scenes, it annoyed me that the bride wasn't thinking of the well being of her life long best friend but was caught up in herself.

As Annie meets the other bridesmaids there are personalities that get set up for the comedy and for clashing. It's obvious that there are two people who are going to have major issues with each other. Lilian has her new friend Helen (Rose Byrne) as part of the bridal party. Helen is her fiance's boss' wife and has money to boot! During the first meeting when Annie and Helen try to outdo each other with toasts to the bride, Lilian didn't step up and women up to straighten out things and set the expectations between the two women.

There were some moments of laughter. I don't mind toilet humor when dealing with bodily functions. After having lunch at a Brazilian churrascaria (a place where roasted meat is sliced off of a skewer right onto your plate) the bridal party heads to a super posh dress fitting where they start to develop symptoms of food poisoning. Stomach rumbling, belching and passing gas culminating with multiple people all dashing for the single toilet is the result while the hostess is yelling at them about the dresses and trying to get them to go use a restroom across the street. While you laughed at bodily functions the attitude of hostess and Helen had my stomach rumbling.

At one point Annie meets Officer Rhodes (Chris O'Dowd in a heavy Irish brogue) and a small relationship starts to develop. Annie is at such a low point in her life that she doesn't want to accept the friendship and encouragement that he offers to her. If this was an art house movie, great, wonderful. But this was supposed to be a comedy.

Lastly was the bachelorette party. Helen manipulates the ladies to have her way and hold the event in Las Vegas. It's the plane trip from hell for Annie. She doesn't like to fly and can't afford the trip in the first place, but Lilian seems ok with putting her best friend in such a bad position. Watching what Helen does overtly and as passive aggressive to Annie would earn her a spot in the Bad Girl's Club. Mixing drugs and alcohol on a plane is not a funny matter with current affairs.

I sat there for the two hours and five minutes of this R rated comedy for some strong sexuality, and language throughout cringing, upset and hoping it would be over soon. Many of the scenes shown in the trailers did not show up in the movie. While this happens quite frequently, especially with Will Ferrell movies, I don't think I've even seen as many scenes not make it into the final film as happened in this movie. If the shots had not been left on the cutting room floor, it maybe would have fared better as a comedy.

The script written by Wigg and Annie Mumolo who appears as Annie's seat mate on the plane could have given us much better work. The idea of Annie's downward plunge and hitting bottom then working herself back up or a more raucous comedy could have been developed from this script. It could evolved into two very different and workable scripts. What we got was a combination that instead of being funny or thoughtful was sad and at times self absorbed and mean spirited.

On a side note, this weekend I was able to try the jalapeno poppers at my local Regal theater. I ordered and they came out relatively quickly. Although the signage showed six poppers and no quantity with the description and price I received five pieces for the $4.50 price plus Ken's Steak House ranch dressing for dipping sauce. They also offered a discount coupon through Facebook that got a small soda for a buck. I upgraded to a large and for $6.50 I got what you see in the picture.

Back to the movie, make sure you stay through the beginning of the credits. There is some additional footage that is pretty funny. Finally, for me the star of the movie was Melissa McCarthy who played Megan. She's played Dena in Samatha Who? and plays the title roll of Molly in CBS' Mike and Molly. She's heavy set and tom boyish in the role. She's loud and somewhat uncouth but she showed more heart in her character than the rest of the bridesmaids combined. If anything, it would be interesting to see if Wiig could come up with a script for Annie and Megan to reprise their roles on the silver screen or maybe even a direct to DVD release.

The Movie Monkey

To subscribe to the audio podcast of the reviews via iTunes click here. Audio versions are released the following Wednesday.

Movie Review: Going the Distance

To download to the audio version, right click here and choose "save as..." or "save link as..."

To listen, press the play button on the player below


Labor Day weekend, the unofficial end of summer. Long weekend. Hopefully a weekend to cap off the summer nicely. Wanting to laugh, I chose the romantic comedy with Drew Barrymore and Justin Long playing two lovers who were trying to make a bi-coastal relationship work. By the time the 109 minutes had passed, I felt like I was Going the Distance just to make it through the movie.

Garrett (Long) has just been dumped by his girlfriend. To get over the sorrow, his roommate Dan (Charlie Day) and friend Box (Jason Sudeikis of SNL fame) take him to a bar where he meets and immediately bonds with Erin (Barrymore) over a game of Centipede and bar trivia. Instant sparks between the two! Both come to the conclusion that they would like to continue to see each other but it comes with a caveat. She's leaving in six weeks to go back to San Francisco at the end of an internship at a New York city newspaper.

Predictably they get along famously and when her departure time arrives, they decide they want to try to make it work via a long distance relationship. E-mails, video chats, texting and phone calls are tools in the arsenal to keep and grow the connection between them. It's not like the old days where you'd have to wait for the post office to deliver a letter or run up huge long distance bills. With laptop cameras standard today, "seeing" each other is a very simple process outside of dealing with time zones. They might not be able to go to the movies together, but they can watch the same YouTube video simultaneously via the web.

Eventually they are going to have to make a decision. Who is willing to compromise and make the move. Erin's living in a room in her sister's and brother in law's house. She's got it pretty comfy. Garret has his awesome job with a record label that allows him to live with Dan in an apartment constructed of paper thin walls which provides for a running joke throughout the movie. What to do, what to do?

Following the formula: boy finds girl, boy looses girl, boy regains girl, the first is covered adequately. This happens for about half the movie. The second and third parts of the movie are not as strong as they should be. The conflicts that you would expect to happen, don't really happen and for the ones that do, they seem to overcome them like a knife cutting through room temperature butter. It didn't come through like the obstacles they faced were particularly tough to defeat.

One aspect of the movie that detracted from the overall tone and plot was the language. I recently heard that a freelance writer makes three cents per word in their stories. If that's the case, writer Geoff LaTulippe made about $67.35 with the swear words in this movie. It was rated R for sexual content including dialogue, language throughout, some drug use and brief nudity. That didn't bother me, not trying to be a prude or anything. The drugs and the language were in there and they didn't add to the story. It was fluff filler and didn't give any more depth to the characters or move the story forward. I think they were using it to try to distract you from realizing the weak writing that permeated this film.

A few of the scenes were funny. Barrymore has shown that she can do an awesome job. Look at Whip It. Oh wait, she starred in and directed that one! Maybe she should have directed this one too. So much more could have come from this movie in both the comedy and romance. Grease Sing-A-Long, I'm hoping that you'll give me a good end to the summer movie season because Going the Distance didn't go the distance for me.

The Movie Monkey

To subscribe to the audio podcast of the reviews via iTunes click here. Audio versions are released the following Wednesday.

Movie Review: Our Family Wedding

This weeks rom-com is Our Family Wedding starring America Ferrera and Lance Gross from Ugly Betty and House of Payne. After finishing the movie I went up to the refreshment counter to get a refill of my large soda before heading out to the bus stop. I was asked by the person behind the counter what movie I saw and what I thought of it. Speaking to the concession person I told her it was good, not worth the price of a full ticket but maybe a matinee price. While sitting on the bus and taking the ride from the Dole Cannery where I usually see my movies to Downtown Honolulu I had a chance to reflect on what I had seen.

Then I got distracted. As the bus was passing by I'olani Palace and the Kamehameha the Great statue there were all sorts of vehicles parked along Mililani Street and around Ali'i 0 Hale indicating that some sort of filming was going on. I got off at the stop and poked for a moment. Turns out the remake of Hawaii Five-O was there doing filming. I took a picture of some trailers and posted up to my Twitter, Flickr and Facebook accounts.

The trailers were for "Danny Williams", "Chin Ho Kelly", "Steve McGarrett" and "Mary McGarrett". I then got back on the bus to complete the ride home. In case you're wondering, if you have one of the new state quarters, the Hawaii quarter has the statue on the back of the quarter and Iolani Palace is the location used for the Five-O office in the original series. On the bus I pulled myself back into thought and as I reviewed the movie in my mind realized this movie was neither romantic or a comedy, it's really a tragedy.

Ferrera plays Lucia who is in love with Marcus (Gross) but neither has told their parents the game plan to get married. The two families get together for dinner where Lucia's Mexican family gets to meet Marcus's African-American father. The two dads, Lucia's dad Miguel (Carlos Mencia) and Marcus' dad Brad (Forest Whitaker) immediately start to clash for various reasons. Even in a posh restaurant the two dads start throwing around stereotypes raising voices and embarrassing everyone. Have we seen this before? Yes we have. Take part of Guess Who and My Big Fat Greek Wedding, try to fix them into the formulaic rom-com but don't develop character depth or put in comedy and go light on the romance and you end up with this flick.

I really like Ferrera and hopefully once Ugly Betty ends, she'll have more time to pick roles better than what the role of Lucia offered her. The character didn't get enough development for us to care about her decision and why she thought standing by Marcus was a good decision.

As I watched Gross, I really didn't see much apart from what he's done as Calvin Payne. He had a lot of help around him. Taye Diggs makes a cameo. Charlie Murphy in his role talks about being a whipped husband. Warren Sapp has a moment of screen time. Ultimately, it was Calvin Payne on the screen and not a fully formed Marcus.

Mencia was not inspired at all. Every time he was on the screen I was hoping he'd soon get off the screen. Enough said about him.

Whitaker's character didn't seem realistic. As a DJ, would he really make that kind of money to support the life style that was shown. Highly doubtful.

The set up and premises were not in any way believable. From the police department to the modern bathroom to how to combine traditions the plot didn't flow. But like most romance stories, Act One thru Three: boy finds girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl were followed.

One scene that I found difficult to take in was during the boy loses girl act. In my head, I have a heard time wrapping my brain around a dad trying to sooth his own problems with alcohol and when the son shows up with his problems the dad offers the son alcohol so they both could try to wash away their troubles with 100 proof on the rocks. Just because their personal lives are on the rocks doesn't mean you should use the same metaphor while drinking.

Was it 100% bad. No, but there was way more bad than good. The ending of the movie showing the blending of the traditions between the two cultures seemed forced. The one scene that I thought was really good was in the planning of who sits where at the reception. They had a peg board of sorts that represented the layout of tables. Using pegs to represent people and the "What if?" scenarios did get some of the biggest laughs from me and other people in the theater.

The movie ran 90 minutes and rated PG-13 for some language and some sexual content. From what I understand, Red Box on the mainland rents for a dollar a movie. That price seems about right for this instead of the price of a matinee.