Movies this time of year are really hit or miss, aren't they? I saw LOL which I thought I would absolutely despise, but it turned out to be slightly better than expected. Slightly. I also watched Dark Shadows which I thought would be decently funny and was instead dreadfully disappointed. The only movie I saw that was worth watching was The Five-Year Engagement. Oddly enough, I'm heading towards a four-year engagement in my own life...
I really wanted to give this movie an "awful" rating. I really did and perhaps I should have. But I wasn't completely miserable while watching it so I decided to be nice. The movie tells the story of Lola (Miley Cyrus)--or LOL as everyone calls her--a teenage girl looking for love. "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree" they say, and her mother, Anne (Demi Moore), is searching for love as well. Their stories often parallel in interesting ways, and essentially this is a movie about women and sexuality. The director, Lisa Azuelos, also directed the 2008 French film LOL (Laughing Out Loud) that this movie was based on. Unfortunately, she also wrote the screenplay and I think she's a better director than she is a writer. While the the movie is well-shot, the situations try too hard to be edgy and the characters fall flat. It's like I could sense what this movie wanted to be, it just wasn't quite there yet.
While not the comedic gem that Bridesmaids was, The Five-Year Engagement had me laughing and smiling the whole way through. The movie begins where most romantic comedies end: the proposal. Tom (Jason Segel) proposes to Violet (Emily Blunt) and she happily accepts. They have the engagement party--with the best drunken toast ever give by Violet's sister Suzie (Community's Alison Brie with an English accent)--and everything looks promising... that is, until Violet gets an awesome career opportunity in Michigan, whisking Tom away from his chef's job in San Francisco. They keep finding excuses to postpone the marriage and in the meantime, grow further and further apart. This movie is about falling in love, falling out of love and then falling in love again. It reminds us that no one is "perfect" for us (in a hilarious conversation between sisters done in Sesame Street voices) and that love takes work. Oh, and did I mention it's funny? So very funny!
The Tim Burton/Johnny Depp collaboration is growing stale. It really is. And if you don't believe me, go and watch Dark Shadows. Actually, scratch that. Nobody should have to see Dark Shadows. It's horrible. It's a dark comedy that isn't dark enough or funny enough, and the result is a lot of cool set pieces and costumes with no story to bring them to life. A movie cannot exist based on pop culture references and special effects alone, even if it is based on a 70s soap opera. Depp plays Barnabas Crouch, a vampire who has been locked up for centuries by his scorned lover Angelique (Eva Green). He breaks free in the year 1972 and finds the last descendants of his once-prosperous Collins family. Here a lot of potentially interesting characters are introduced, but none of them are ever explored fully. The plot meanders dully with a lot of painful dialogue and tedious exposition and halfway through I realized I could have just watched a quick slideshow of image stills and been more satisfied. Not even a cameo by Alice Cooper managed to save this abysmal movie.
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Fun Fact:
My wedding dress was made from a Dark Shadows halloween costume pattern.
Only me, right?
Okay, it wasn't THAT fun of a fact. ;)
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