I won’t comment about the Oscars (since I didn’t watch them) other than to say that the fact that Logorama won the best short film category is awesome.
At least for now, it’s available through its homepage (slow, though) and these links:
Archive for category Movies
Logorama
Mar 8
It’s pretty clear that Avatar and District 9 are the best science fiction movies of the year. Star Trek was very good as well, but in terms of visionary content and originality it can’t really keep up with the other two, which are both truly high-water marks in science fiction filmmaking and effects technology.
I gave both movies 5/5 — which is the best of the two?
I’m going to give the nod to District 9, mostly on the basis of its plot and premise, which in my opinion is just more thought-provoking and emotionally impacting than the somewhat more formulaic but more visually impressive Avatar.
How did I arrive at that conclusion? Let’s compare the movies and see what they have in common. It’s more than you might think. Both films include (mild spoilers):
- The fundamental theme of how humanity reacts to the Other.
- Corporations with quasi-governmental, quasi-military powers dealing with a “problem” that other governments and corporations refuse to deal with.
- A secondary theme of transformation into the Other.
- A secondary theme of self-loathing.
- A secondary theme of colonialism/race relations.
- As an antagonist, a badass tough-guy ex-military leader whose reaction is always to shoot first and ask questions later.
Of these, I think it’s very interesting to note the Reese’s peanut butter cup antagonistic power structure that exists in both films. “You got your corporation in my military! No, you got your military on my corporation!” They could have just come straight out and called both organizations Blackwater or Halliburton and their point would have been crystal clear. On the surface it seems like a garden-variety left-wing commentary on Big Business and the dangers of militarization, but I think in both cases it’s more properly seen as an anti-libertarian message. In both films, the situation seems to be that the government has abdicated its responsibility for its particular problem with tacit public consent, much like Pontius Pilate washing his hands of responsibility for the fate of Jesus, and turned power and responsibility over to a private, profit-driven organization which is not accountable directly to the public, and which is therefore willing to do those unpleasant (and inhumane) things which must be done to control and exploit the situation.
Also interesting is the common theme of self-loathing. Jake Sully in Avatar starts out desperately wanting to regain the function in his legs, and this speeds his alienation from humanity and his identification with the Na’vi — through the Avatar program, he regains the use of his legs in his alien body, and so naturally wants to spend all his time in it. By contrast, Wikus in District 9 is quite happy with his life until his accidental exposure to the prawn biotech fluid. When he begins to physically transform, he desperately wants nothing more than to reverse it, to the point of trying to cut his own extremities off. His increasing identification with the prawn is entirely physical, and even at the end he’s still resisting, still holding out hope that he can reverse the transformation. In Avatar, I got the sense that Jake Sully would be quite happy to never see a human being again.
It’s almost more interesting, I think, to compare how the films differ:
- Avatar has beautiful aliens that appeal to our romanticized ideals of pre-technological life. District 9 has aesthetically repellent aliens who wallow in filth and who live in a manner revolting to humans.
- Avatar‘s protagonists are motivated by a desire to emulate and eventually actually become Na’vi. The main character of District 9 is willing to go to extreme lengths to avoid his own transformation, as mentioned above.
- Avatar‘s aliens behave in a comprehensible fashion — a human can readily learn their language and customs. The aliens of District 9 are almost completely incomprehensible in language and behavior, although a few have learned English. More to the point, the prawn of District 9 appear to have an intraspecies diversity greater than humans; there are a great many “low-caste” aliens that are either completely ignorant or utterly stupid, and a few that are extremely intelligent and competent that apparently drive their high-tech society. The tribes of Na’vi in Avatar are egalitarian, organized on tribal lines familiar to any human anthropologist.
- District 9, interestingly, has an alien “cute kid” that features prominently in terms of screen time and plot importance, whereas there are few if any children on-screen in Avatar.
- District 9‘s prawns are dependent on humanity for survival (for unspecified reasons) while the Na’vi of Avatar neither want nor need anything from humanity, and would be just as happy to see them all disappear.
In terms of filmmaking itself, District 9 goes for a documentary-style immediacy, while Avatar goes for big-budget blockbuster perfection. Both have phenomenal visual effects, although I give the nod to Avatar here for the sheer scope of its worldbuilding and the deft, groundbreaking use of 3D technology. I felt the acting was equivalent in both movies — Giovanni Ribisi and Stephen Lang were standouts in Avatar, but the other roles I thought were just good, not great. Sharlto Copley in District 9, however, I felt did a fantastic job of portraying the difficult character of Wikus Van De Merwe, and turned in what I felt was the best, most believable and authentic performance of both movies.
When I went over these lists of similarities and differences, the main thing that crystallized for me was that the prawn of District 9 actually came across as believable aliens, for the most part, while the Na’vi ultimately didn’t, at least not the same degree. And although I could understand the reactions, motivations, and behavior of both Wikus in District 9, and Jake Sully in Avatar, I was much more profoundly moved by Wikus’s plight. District 9 was simply more real to me, in terms of its story.
I think others felt the same way, and a good illustration of this is seen in how the audience reacted at the end of each movie. I saw both District 9 and Avatar in packed theaters. At the end of Avatar, everyone in the theater was excited, animatedly getting up to discuss the movie and talk about their favorite parts. We couldn’t wait to leave the theater and talk about all the cool stuff we’d seen. When District 9 was over, the entire theater sat still, shocked into inanition for a minute or so, and then got up and filed out in total silence. I’ve never experienced that before. District 9 was that powerful, that moving, and in the end, that much better of a film.
Movie Review: Avatar
Jan 11
Avatar — James Cameron
Rating: 5/5
I’m not sure which of three Avatar movies I should review:
- The heroic tale of the disabled Marine corporal who is sent to spy on and betray the native Na’vi aliens on the distant world of Pandora in the service of a rapacious, soulless corporation. He eventually learns to understand and love the alien people, finally becoming both their liberator and truly one of them at the same time.
- The horribly tragic story of the death of humanity, desperately seeking vital resources at exorbitant cost from an unimaginably distant, completely hostile world, only to be betrayed by one of their own after diplomacy, nonlethal combat and psychological warfare have all failed to appeal to the alien savages. In the final scene, the heroic and loyal colonel confronts the traitor, after the humans, who could obviously easily destroy all the Na’vi if they truly wanted to, are being soundly defeated as a result of their restrained, humane warfare. He asks the traitor the cutting question “how does it feel to betray your race?” But the traitor is too far gone to even speak at this point, and just hisses like an animal as he continues his work of selling out his species and destroying humanity’s last hope for survival, condemning billions to freeze in the dark back on the mother planet.
- The epic saga of a round of Starcraft 2 gone bad, as the Terrans squander a huge early tech and resource lead by trying to overexpand and create a secondary base, allowing the other side to tech to air and eventually zerg them down via an ambush in an unexplored area of the map. If you’ve ever wondered how massed Mutalisks can take down a Yamato, this is the how-to video. Message to Terran player: Grow a pair. And build more Ghosts.
I’m pretty sure James Cameron intended movie #1, which is kind of a shame, as the others would have been a bit more fresh from the perspective of plot originality (and let’s face it, this was a better Starcraft movie than any conceivable Starcraft movie could ever be). Fortunately, the somewhat formulaic plot of movie #1 was still executed quite well, with decent acting and truly amazing cinematography and visual effects. I saw it in IMAX 3D, which I highly recommend to anyone else who sees the movie. The 3D is unobtrusive for the most part, but really adds to the immediacy.
Avatar is also hard science fiction, which is very unusual and very impressive for science fiction movies these days. By “hard” science fiction I mean science fiction that sticks very closely to known physical laws as far as possible. The space travel is sublight, with cryogenic stasis used for the passengers due to mass and life support issues. Although “unobtainium”, the room-temperature superconductor that is the main reason for the human presence on Pandora, may not truly exist, it probably could, and its presence could explain the “floating mountains” on Pandora that otherwise seem wildly farfetched. Really the only piece of technology that has no reasonably extrapolated physical basis is the projection unit that projects human consciousness into an Avatar body. It looks like an MRI machine, but apparently operates on some sort of psychic basis.
In Avatar, Jake Sully, a Marine corporal whose legs were paralyzed in combat, replaces his dead brother on a mission to Pandora. The brother was a science PhD who had trained for years to be one of the Avatars — teleoperators of hybrid human/Na’vi bodies who were supposed to study, communicate with and build ties with the Na’vi population of Pandora, a near-human-habitable moon of a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri system.
In his Avatar body, Jake has the use of his legs again, but on his first trip out into the wilds he gets separated from his group by the attack of a wild animal and is lost in the bush. He is rescued by Neytiri, a young Na’vi girl and the daughter of the clan leader. She wants to kill him but decides to take him back to their home, where — although he is distrusted — the leaders are intrigued enough by his “warrior” background to try to educate him in their ways, under Neytiri’s tutelage.
Jake then learns the Na’vi way of life, one of oneness with nature, as he learns to use the biological apparatus all Pandoran life possesses to commune with horse-analogues and pterodactyl-like flying mounts the humans nickname “Banshees”. At the same time, the corporation in charge of resource extraction on Pandora is using the information Jake is learning to plan a relocation of the Na’vi away from their home, which happens to sit on a gigantic unobtainium deposit.
When push comes to shove, the Avatar crew, including Jake, switch sides, helping the Na’vi fight the human encroachment and protect the unique planetary network that all Pandoran life partakes in.
The worldbuilding here is fantastic. The alien landsape, flora, fauna, and natives all look and seem completely real, and the artistic vision represented in the portrayal of Pandora is nothing short of staggering. Details of alien physiology are consistent in many cases, and you can make interesting speculations based on the species observed as to what evolutionary paths the Na’vi took compared with other species in their world.
The human technology, also, is extremely well-realized and very believable. Computer technology is ubiquitous and used casually in very sophisticated ways, military hardware looks advanced but operates on believable principles — even the mining hardware and the starship that starts the movie off were obviously thought through in painstaking detail.
Although the movie is over two and a half hours long, it doesn’t feel like it. It’s well-paced and well-acted, and there is always something compelling happening on screen. If you don’t have some sort of racial or political axe to grind, and you like science fiction at all, it’s one of the most enjoyable experiences you’re likely to have at the theater for quite some time.
Avatar
Jan 8
I saw Avatar in IMAX 3D, and I’ll be writing a full review of it for next Monday. But what I can tell you now is that it hits a new high-water mark for digital effects, in my opinion. Cameron has succeeded in creating a believable alien world that seems real in all particulars and is fully immersive. Opinions differ among my friends, but I found that the effects pushed past the “uncanny valley” — the point at which something is humanlike enough to not be cute but not humanlike enough to look real. The Na’vi seemed just as real as the humans to me, and with the addition of subtle and effective 3D, I think the sky’s the limit as to what filmmakers are going to be able to do with digital effects in the coming years.
Go see it if you haven’t yet!
Movie Review: Idiocracy
Sep 10
![idiocracyfoodpyramid[1]](http://www.wigdahl.net/quern/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/idiocracyfoodpyramid1.jpg "idiocracyfoodpyramid[1]")
Idiocracy — Kevin Smith
Rating: 2.5/5
OK, this wasn’t a great movie. In many respects, it wasn’t even a good movie. Mike Judge’s parody of the degeneration of mankind isn’t really in the same league as his classic Office Space, but it does have funny moments.
The premise, clearly stated in a hilarious five-minute clip at the start of the movie that is easily the best part of the whole film, is that evolution no longer favors the positive qualities of mankind, but simply rewards those who reproduce more. After seeing “Clevon” and “Clevon, Jr.” you’ll understand where he’s going pretty quickly.
Luke Wilson plays Joe Bauers, a completely average soldier tapped as an experimental subject for a human hibernation project. After a mishap, he ends up 500 years in the future, after humanity has become a species of complete idiots. Joe is now the smartest man in the world, and the President of the United States, Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (an arena-fighting champion / porn star) taps him to solve all the country’s problems, promising his constituents that he’ll solve them all in a week.
The acting is hard to judge in this movie; everyone is basically playing idiots, which doesn’t make it easy to gauge their skills. Luke Wilson does do a very good job of playing an unexceptional Everyman convincingly, which seems like it would be fairly hard to do.
There’s only so much riffing on the shallowness of popular culture that you can absorb before it all starts sounding the same. Several of the ongoing gags reference existing brands like Fuddruckers, Starbucks, Carl’s Jr., etc., while others invent new brands — ‘Flaturin’, ‘Tarrleyton’ cigarettes, and the ubiquitous ‘Brawndo — the Thirst Mutilator’. Many of these gags are funny, but only the first couple of times.
The plot is OK, as far as it goes. It wasn’t particularly believable, but it didn’t seem like it was really intended to be realistic. In the end, the movie was a vehicle for an extended look at the relationship between stupidity and popular culture, and succeeded modestly on that level. I’d recommend seeing this if you are a Mike Judge fan or enjoy mindless comedies — otherwise, it probably isn’t worth the time.
Movie Review: District 9
Aug 21
![restroomd9-440x586[1]](http://www.wigdahl.net/quern/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/restroomd9-440x5861-225x300.jpg "restroomd9-440x586[1]")
Alien Nation meets… Cry Freedom?
Rating: 5/5
It says something when after a movie is over, the entire theater sits in silence for a minute, and the silence holds as the audience files out. This movie was very powerful; it took hours for the impact of it to fade to a point where I wasn’t walking around with a stunned expression on my face. If anyone needed more proof that Peter Jackson knows how to make gripping genre films, District 9 is it.
You get the backstory of the film fairly quickly, at the beginning, so I’ll give you a bit of it here. If you don’t want any spoilers at all, even mild backstory ones, skip down to the final section.
***
In a near future that looks much like today, a gargantuan alien ship has arrived at the Earth and hovered to a stop over Johannesburg, South Africa. After three weeks of inactivity, humans cut their way onto the ship and discover around a million starving, diseased aliens, quickly dubbed ‘prawns’. They are airlifted to temporary lodgings just outside of the city, where it’s quickly found that humans and prawn don’t mix well.
The humans resent and fear the influx of a huge number of aliens, whose bizarre and often violent reaction to the squalor they find themselves in doesn’t help their public image any. It isn’t long before apartheid-style laws are implemented to separate the prawn from the human community, culminating in their eventual lockdown into the eponymous District 9, a fenced shantytown surrounded by security guards and heavy weapon emplacements.
***
The movie is filmed documentary-style, with plenty of shaky-cam scenes. Normally I don’t like this, but it’s not excessive here and lends to the immediacy of the film. There are no name actors in the production — all of the actors seem to be South African nationals, and they do a great job. The writing and plotting is very tight; the movie clocks in at under 2 hours, a rarity these days, and leads you through a very intense, gripping ride without ever leaving you feeling completely overwhelmed.
There are some negative issues with the movie. There are a few too many convenient coincidences, and a good deal of suspension of disbelief is required with respect to aspects of the alien technology. While the movie does a fantastic job with the social ramifications of the presence of the aliens, it doesn’t always make sense from a scientific perspective, and there are a number of ways in which the reactions of human society both at the international level and the individual level don’t make a great deal of sense. The aliens are not immune to this either, even granting that they are alien and that we don’t know even 10% of their full story.
Most of these (fairly minor) shortcomings are easily overcome with a good dose of willing suspension of disbelief, and the compelling power of this movie will make you want to take it completely at face value. It’s very worth seeing, and I hope that this heralds the start of a great career for writer/director Neill Blomkamp. If you like science fiction at all and can handle an intense film with moderate gore and profanity, District 9 is a must-see.
Movie Review: Twilight
Aug 20
![twilight-poster1[1]](http://www.wigdahl.net/quern/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/twilight-poster11-213x300.jpg "twilight-poster1[1]")
We liked the books, so we couldn’t resist checking out the movie…
Rating: 3/5
I really wanted to like this more; I’d heard from a couple of people that the movie was very good — even better than the book.
It isn’t.
There are a lot of ways movies can get off track when trying to carry forward the core identity of a novel onto the screen:
- The actors don’t act like the characters in the book (this is not always “bad acting” — it’s more often bad screenwriting or bad direction, in my opinion).
- The actors don’t look like the characters in the book. This is often subjective, but if the character is specified to look a certain way and he or she doesn’t, there’s cognitive dissonance.
- They leave out critical scenes. Even the gold standard of book-to-film conversions, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, had to cut stuff out. But you can’t cut out parts that are critical to character development or central to the plot, particularly if you then fall into the next problem…
- They change scenes into unrecognizability or simply add new scenes out of whole cloth. Sometimes you have to change scenes so they’re filmable, but there’s no excuse for just jamming new, unrelated material into the film, particularly when the original scene from the novel would have worked better.
- The special effects don’t live up to the imagery from the book.
Unfortunately, the movie adaptation of Twilight falls into most of these traps. Although most of the characters act appropriately most of the time, the main character of Bella (Kristen Stewart) never cheers up, never cracks more than one or two smiles in the whole film, which seems strongly at odds with her behavior in the latter half of the novel. Of course, much of those scenes were cut in favor of more action.
In terms of appearance, I thought the characters were generally well-cast. But when many of the characters are supposed to be supernaturally attractive, having them played by human actors and actresses with little in the way of augmenting special effects leaves them a bit short of the mark. Rosalie (Nikki Reed), for example, is supposed to be the most gorgeous person in the world. She’s pretty, but not in any kind of jaw-dropping sense, particularly as she appears in the movie.
As far as the choice of scenes goes, Twilight hits most of the high points, but the novel takes the main focus of the book, the investigation and pursuit of the mystery of Edward’s (Robert Pattinson) nature, and pushes it down in importance, instead trying to punch up the action levels by inserting gratuitous murders that were not in the novel. As a result, the filmmakers had to construct cheap visual shortcuts out of whole cloth to use in substitute for characterization. Examples include: Bella’s dad cocking a shotgun before opening the door to meet Edward for the first time, and Rosalie’s bowl-smashing scene at the Cullen residence.
I really wanted to like this movie and I have to say that it wasn’t all bad, or even mostly bad. For all its faults, it did capture the essence of the book, and I thought that the relationship between Bella and Edward (the core of the whole series) was reasonably believable, if not fully developed.
I’m honestly not sure whether I should recommend this movie if you’re a Twilight book series fan or not. Robin didn’t like it and doesn’t plan to see the others (which means I won’t either…); I’m on the fence. I guess if seeing movie adaptations of novels you’ve read doesn’t generally bother you, you should be fine. If not, you might want to give it a pass.
![slumdog_millionaire_movie_poster[1]](http://www.wigdahl.net/quern/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/slumdog_millionaire_movie_poster1-202x300.jpg "slumdog_millionaire_movie_poster[1]")
Slumdog MillionaireRating: 5/5
When a movie comes along that lives up to its hype, I’m pretty ecstatic. And Slumdog Millionaire had a whole lot of hype. The Academy Awards ended up awarding it the Oscar for Best Picture, and it’s easy to see why. This movie hits on all cylinders: a gripping plot, smart writing, good pacing, excellent acting, and wonderful cinematography. Although it’s fundamentally a serious film, it has moments of comedy, many of which are all the more affecting given the subject matter of the film.
Jamal K. Malik (Dev Patel) is a contestant on the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”, the famous quiz show. He’s also a “slumdog”, a Muslim denizen of the slums of Mumbai, who works as a “chai wallah” (tea server) in a large call center for outsourced customer service and marketing. After having advanced all the way to the final question, he’s interrogated/tortured by the police because no one believes that he could possibly know the answers to all the questions he was asked.
In a series of conversations between Jamal and a police inspector (Irrfan Khan) we discover just how Jamal knows the answers to the questions on the show, and in the process get a guided tour of the formative events of Jamal’s hard childhood, and understand the importance of the two most important people in his life — his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal), and the fellow slum refugee and childhood sweetheart Latika (Freida Pinto).
When you figure out the structure of the film, it seems perfect, and obvious in retrospect. But even knowing the overall arc this film describes, it’s impossible to predict the twists and turns that Jamal and his brother encounter growing up. Instead, you are treated to lushly-framed scenes of Indian slum life and a constant flow of struggles, setbacks, and growth.
Slumdog is unapologetically inspired by Bollywood cinema, with it’s “masala” style incorporating a mixture of tragedy, comedy, action, and romance. Although there are no song-and-dance numbers within the movie itself, there is one during the credits that is very entertaining. It’s hard for me to recommend this movie highly enough; it’s much like someone with a Western palate trying an Indian meal: it’s not anything like you’d expect, but it’s very, very good.
![rDV7kyzWPor2jdoulS0RAEkKo1_500[1]](http://www.wigdahl.net/quern/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/rDV7kyzWPor2jdoulS0RAEkKo1_5001-231x300.jpg "rDV7kyzWPor2jdoulS0RAEkKo1_500[1]")
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Rating: 4/5
We did get out over the weekend to see the newest Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Ultimately I found it to be a very good movie, well worth seeing, but one that was in the end merely evocative of the book rather than a true, faithful adaptation of the book.
The movie starts with Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, Harry’s guardian and mentor, arriving to take Harry with him on a trip to recruit a new professor, Horace Slughorn, after which he’s dumped off near the Weasley home prior to heading off to Hogwarts.
Harry Potter’s sixth year at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry starts painfully, as his attempts to figure out what the secretive Draco Malfoy is up to lead to him getting roughed up fairly badly, even before he gets off the Hogwarts Express. From there, we’re whirled into the events of the book, with Harry discovering an old Potions textbook heavily annotated with spells and advice from someone enigmatically referring to him- or herself as “The Half-Blood Prince”.
The students plot and scheme with almost equal fervor to both unravel the plans of the Dark Lord Voldemort, and to pair up romantically. Romances are shuffled and tested as Harry struggles to obtain a very vital memory from Professor Slughorn, a memory he is loathe to part with.
All the standard elements of the Harry Potter movies are here — a Quidditch match, classroom scenes, Professor Snape showing outrageous favoritism to his chosen Slytherin students, Hagrid waxing sentimental over some hideous magical creature only it’s mother (and Hagrid) could ever love, and some magical duelling.
I was disappointed both in scenes left out (anything having to do with Dumbledore’s Army, along with all but two of the Pensieve memories and the funeral at the end) and the new scenes tacked on (the assault on the Weasley home being the worst). We didn’t see much of anyone but the main three characters, and many of the professors may as well not have been in the movie at all for the minimal screen time they got.
The acting was very good — Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson have matured into excellent actors, and although Rupert Grint’s performances are a bit too slapstick for me, he does have a gift for comedy and reliably gets me to laugh at the appropriate times. Jim Broadbent as Horace Slughorn stole the show as far as I’m concerned, except when Helena Bonham Carter was chewing scenery as Bellatrix Lestrange.
In the end, though, although I think the movie has many, many strong points and is overall very faithful to the spirit of the novel, I don’t think it stands on its own as an adaptation, as some of the earlier movies did and as the Lord of the Rings movies did. At best, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a great vehicle for reminiscence, each scene reminding you of the fuller, more complete events from the book, but forcing you to supply the extra details to knit everything together in your own head.
I’ve talked to a few people who have not read the book but have seen the movie, and their reaction has generally been confusion. There’s just too much going on in Half-Blood Prince for it all to make it cleanly into a 2-1/2 hour movie. Thank goodness Deathly Hallows is going to be split into two installments.
Movie Review: The Proposal
Jun 24
![TheProposal_02[1]](http://www.wigdahl.net/quern/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/TheProposal_021-300x239.jpg "TheProposal_02[1]")
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
This is a light and light-hearted summer romantic comedy, and for the most part delivers the goods, although it’s not without its problems.
Sandra Bullock plays Margaret Tate, a bitchy Canadian book editor, who terrorizes her serf/employees and walks all over her assistant, Andrew Paxton (Ryan Reynolds). All this comes to a screeching halt, however, when she’s informed that her visa application has been denied and she’ll be deported to Canada and lose her job unless she comes up with a way to stay in-country.
At that moment, Andrew walks into the office, and Margaret comes up with a plan. It should be pretty obvious what her plan is. Margaret and Andrew negotiate terms, and a bargain is struck.
The fly in the ointment is the friendly neighborhood INS agent, who smells fraud and vows to prove the two are in cahoots in order to keep her in the U.S. In order to get him off their back temporarily, Margaret commits them to flying up to Alaska for his grandma’s 90th birthday party. Grandma is played by the scene-stealing Betty White, and is as funny as ever in this role.
While in Alaska, they meet the rest of Andrew’s family, declare their engagement, and slowly fall for each other for real as they fake it for the family’s benefit.
I would apologize for blowing the plot, but it’s a summer romantic comedy. They’re as predictable as sunrise, and this one is no exception. The chemistry is good, the writing is pretty sharp and funny, the supporting cast is good, there’s an interesting twist in that the normal gender roles are somewhat reversed here, and ultimately that’s enough to make it a very enjoyable movie.
On the negative side, much of the time the movie seemed choppy and over-edited, and I got the sensation that some fairly important scenes got left on the cutting-room floor. The excellent Mary Steenburgen and Craig T. Nelson were underused, and I thought quite a few opportunities for exploring Margaret and Andrew’s relationship in more depth were missed.
But overall this is still a good movie, well worth seeing if you get a chance.