Posts tagged married
“Wanderlust” Has Happiest Ending Ever
Mar 11th
“Happiest Ending Ever”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Wanderlust stars Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston in what is not so much a romantic comedy as it is just a happy comedy, if there is such a classification.
In fact, the plot is as simple as “Boy has girl, boy almost loses girl, boy and girl stay together.”
However, what makes the movie interesting is where most of the story takes place, which is in a hippie commune that was started in 1971.
George and Linda are a young married couple in New York City whose professional lives take a sudden turn for the worse, and so they decide to pull up stakes and move to Atlanta, where George’s brother and his family live.
After a long drive, Linda insists that she has to get out of the car, and so they drive into a place with a sign that identifies it as “Elysium,” where they are greeted by a slightly overweight, naked man.
Startled, George tries to drive away, but he wrecks the car, and they are forced to stay there in what the residents call an “intentional community.”
When they introduce themselves to the group, George is asked, “If you’re George, where is John, Paul, and Ringo?”
The group claims that they have no leaders, that Mother Earth is the only leader they need, and there are no rules, just the way they all think about stuff.
In addition, there are no doors, even on the bathrooms, all the members share everything, and they believe in open sexual boundaries, which means that anything goes and with anyone.
At first, George likes living there more than Linda does, saying that he feels like he can breathe there for the first time, but then Linda starts to enjoy it more than George does, even though the most attractive woman in the group tells George that she believes that they should have sex together.
The scene in which George tries to prepare himself by boosting his confidence in front of a mirror is one of the funniest in the movie.
However, the plot turns weak when one of the oldest cliches in the world of movie plots occurs, that of developers wanting to take over the land and develop it into something else.
Wanderlust, though, has the happiest ending ever, and make sure you stay for the outtakes.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“Young Adult” Is So Dark, It’s Black
Dec 23rd
“So Dark, It’s Black”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Young Adult, because of the successes this year of Bad Teacher and Horrible Bosses, could have been called Bad Graduate or Horrible Alumna.
Instead, it is called Young Adult, because the protagonist, Mavis Gary, is the ghostwriter of a series of young-adult novels, but also because even though she is 37, she acts as if she were still in high school, where she was the popular prom queen.
The film was directed by Ivan Reitman and written by Diablo Cody, who previously worked together on the 2007 Juno, for which Cody won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and Mavis in this film has even been referred to as a grown-up Juno.
Charlize Theron plays Mavis, and when the movie opens, she is living unhappily in Minneapolis, where she learns that the wife of her high-school sweetheart, Buddy Slade, has just recently had a baby.
So, Mavis says, “It’s like he’s a hostage,” and she drives back to her hometown of Mercury, Minnesota, where she intends to win Buddy back, rescue him, or whatever other euphemism she can think of for stealing Buddy away from his wife and newborn baby.
However, before Mavis can meet Buddy for an “innocent drink,” she encounters Matt Freehauf, whom she doesn’t remember from high school even though their lockers were right next to each other.
Matt was and still is a geek, he is crippled, and then Mavis remembers that he is the “hate-crime guy,” the boy from their high-school days who was brutally attacked and crippled by some jocks for being gay, even though Matt wasn’t gay.
Mavis tells Matt that she is back in town to get Buddy back, because they were meant to be together, and Matt tells Mavis what she already knows, that Buddy is married and his wife just had a baby.
Matt lives with his sister, has a distillery in his garage, and Mavis keeps calling on Matt for alcoholic friendship when her plans to steal Buddy away from his wife keep not working out, especially when Mavis makes a scene at the baby’s naming ceremony.
Mavis believes that most people in Mercury seem to be so happy with so little, and yet it is difficult for her to be happy.
Young Adult is a comedy, but it is so dark, it is black humor.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
Young Adult – Movie Trailer
Dec 23rd
Charlize Theron plays Mavis Gary, a writer of teen literature who returns to her small hometown to relive her glory days and attempt to reclaim her happily married high school sweetheart (Patrick Wilson). When returning home proves more difficult than she thought, Mavis forms an unusual bond with a former classmate (Patton Oswalt) who hasn’t quite gotten over high school, either.