The Proposal

First Hit: Light fluff, cute at times, silly at other times, but after digesting it there wasn't anything worth seeing.

Sandra Bullock plays Margaret a hard driving Manhattan book editor.

The counter point is Ryan Reynolds playing Drew an Alaska native in New York working as Margret’s assistant. Margaret plays a no nonsense editor who doesn’t care who she hurts or how she is perceived by her co-workers.

The first scene showing this aggressive behavior is of her ruthless firing of another editor. Drew kowtows to his boss in every way just so he can have a chance at moving up in the firm.

The setup: Margaret is from Canada and her Visa is being revoked, she on the spur of the moment tells her manager that she is getting married to Drew. It is at this moment in the film where Reynolds does some of his best acting. His eyes tell the tale and his dialogue is well done. To seal the deal, Drew tells Margaret he’ll marry her if she gives him a promotion to assistant editor right away. She agrees and then they fly off to meet Drew’s family.

There are some odd and funny moments along with a ridiculous one where an eagle steals the family puppy and Margaret throws her cell phone at the eagle. Funny thing about the dialogue is that no one brings up the obvious disparity in this proposed marriage; the age difference. Not that it is a bad thing, but by brushing it under the rug and not making it part of the film; we are led to believe that there is no age difference. Bullock looks and is clearly much older than Reynolds. 

Lastly, as you all might expect, they kiss and magic happens and so the characters figure out how to make their relationship work.

Bullock plays her standard sort of character, semi tough but soft and funny. In this film she is suppose to have a harder edge and she carries this shift adequately. Reynolds is a better fit in this film and is a bit more believable. If you like Betty White she does her standard; direct poignant remarks for laughs role, this time playing Reynolds grandmother.

Overall: Really not much of a film, even for fluff therefore I would’t recommend it to anyone.

Easy Virtue

First Hit: A very disappointing film despite two wonderful actors.

The story is basically about the elder son in the Whittaker family named John (played by Ben Barnes) who is off gallivanting in the south of France when he spies a slightly older American woman Larita (played by Jessica Biel), who has just won an auto race in Le Mans.

They fall madly in love and he brings her home to meet his parents (Mr. and Mrs. Whittaker played by Colin Firth and Kristin Scott Thomas respectively). Mrs. Whittaker despises Larita, as does her daughters, because she is a woman of the world, brash, American, and without refined English behaviors.

Mr. Whittaker is quiet, a bit sarcastic, and in his own world. He doesn't care much for anyone in the house except himself. The house, a very large rambling English estate is falling into disrepair and everywhere you look there are signs of the heritage and estate falling apart.

The audience quickly sees that John is a naïve love struck son who Mrs. Whittaker expected to save them from ruin. However, John is clueless and even when he gets a clue, he has no skills to change their fate. What happens during the rest of the film is meaningless except for the exchanges between Mr. Whittaker and Larita and Mr. Whittaker and Mrs. Whittaker.

One scene which exemplifies the ridiculousness of the film is when Larita accidentally sits on and kills the family dog. Not only does she sit on it once, she sits on it 3 or 4 times and then tries to hide the evidence.

Jessica Biel was miscast, misplaced and misdirected. Scott Thomas was good but a far cry from her previous film “I’ve Loved Her So Long”. Firth was very good and is what kept the film interesting. The writing and direction was extremely poor and it is as if this film didn’t know what it wanted to be, a comedy or drama of which it achieved neither. The rest of the cast, especially the Whittaker girls, were distractions and unbelievable.

Overall: This film made little sense, the chemistry between Barnes and Biel was unbelievable and embarrassing which are probably the feelings Noel Coward would probably feel with this film supposedly being based on something he’d written.

The Hangover

First Hit: A very funny film in spite of the subject.

There is nothing funny about a hangover. It has been many, many years since I’ve had one and don’t ever anticipate having one again; especially like the one portrayed in this very funny film.

The film begins with a wedding location being set up outside the bride’s home. The bride, Tracy Garner, (played by Sasha Barrese) is fretting and worried because she has not heard from her groom Doug Billings (played by Justin Bartha) in two days. Tracy receives a phone call from her groom’s best friend Phil Wenneck (played by Bradley Cooper), who has a cut lip, is unshaven and looks like he’s been up all night. She asks him where Doug is and his confessional response is “we’ve lost him”.

The film then reels back in time to two days before the wedding and the four guys take off for two days in Las Vegas for a bachelor party. The bride’s brother Alan (Zach Galifianakis) is a bit touched and Doug’s dentist friend Stu Price (played by Ed Helms) makes up the gang of four.

Alan buys some Rohypnol (Roofies aka date rape drug) thinking he’s buying Ecstasy and he, unknowingly to the others, spikes their initial toast with it. The next scene is their trashed out Las Vegas hotel room, complete with a live tiger in the bathroom, Stu has a tooth missing, no one can remember anything, and they can’t find the groom.

The middle part of the film is spent trying to find out what happened and locating Doug. Eventually they find Doug, get him back for wedding (sunburned and haggard) but none of them really knows what happened during the fateful night.

As the wedding reception winds down, Alan finds their camera which was in the car they had in Vegas. They smile look at each other, and they make a pack to look at the pictures once, together, and then destroy the evidence.

The film was clever in that only until the end did you get an idea of what actually happened that fateful night, and only in still pictures which allows the audience to continue to imagine and speculate. The direction from that aspect was very good. The acting was good and I thought Galifianakis, playing a troubled brother of the bride, was the best acted character. Heather Graham playing Jade, an exotic dancer, who befriended Stu was sweet.

Overall: This was not a great film and it was a very funny film which stayed with me after I left the theater. I was surprised at how often I laughed out loud as did the audience I was sitting with. It also created a level of suspense, of what happened in Las Vegas, which continued until the very end and even today, 4 days later.

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian

First Hit: Barely mediocre at best.

This film seemed to more about the special effects and the hope of bringing in a sizable chunk of change as it tries to ride the coattails of the first film.

The same characters are back, Ben Stiller as Larry Daley who has become a millionaire businessman, Robin Williams as Teddy Roosevelt, Owen Wilson as Jedediah Smith, and a few others.

The main interesting addition is Amy Adams as Amelia Earhart. The main protagonist is Hank Azaria as a English lisping Egyptian who wants the tablet. The tablet we’re speaking of is the magic behind the museum coming alive at night.

Now that the Smithsonian has the tablet, the Egyptian wants the tablet to open the portal gates to the nether world. Larry doesn’t want this to happen (and neither do I but for different reasons) because all the museum characters will parish if this happens.

That’s the plot the best I could understand. So with the cast of museum characters Larry and crew try to keep the tablet from falling into the Egyptians hands.

Stiller attempts to be a pensive and thoughtful person who is attempting to find what makes him happy. He attempts to be serious but this film isn’t and can’t be taken seriously. Adams as Earhart has the right tone and is the only good thing in this film. Williams as Roosevelt is suppose to be the wise one, but it falls flat. Direction is immature and does little to advance the film as it progresses.

Overall: This film is a shadow of its predecessor and that film was barely moderately good.

I Love You, Man

First Hit: There are some funny bits in this film along with some good serious truthful moments; however it felt long, repetitious, and overdone in parts.

Paul Rudd plays Peter Klaven a moderately successful real estate agent who has a dream of building a group of homes and stores on a bluff near downtown LA.

To finance this venture he must sell Lou Ferrigno’s home for which he has the exclusive listing. He is engaged to Zooey (played by Rashida Jones) who feels like she has hit the jackpot with Paul as her boyfriend.

As a boyfriend, Peter is thoughtful, kind, considerate, and pays attention to her. All her girlfriends think she’s so lucky but there is an underlying concern; Peter doesn't have any guy friends. The fact is that Peter doesn’t is the gist of the film. He and his fiancé decide that he needs to find some guy friends before the wedding or else the wedding party will be uneven.

In his quest to find a guy friend, he has a number of man dates. There are funny bits in some of these encounters. Then during an open house he is having for Lou’s home, he runs into Sydney (played by Jason Segel) who is blunt, insightful, and outspoken. They hit it off because in many ways they are opposite and they both love the band Rush.

Through a series of man dates, their relationship expands and eventually he asks Sydney to be his best man. However, Zooey doesn’t like that Peter is less available and pays less attention to her now that he has a guy friend to hang out with.

I found the repetition of scenes, like Peter attempting to come up with a nick name for Sydney, to be tiring and overplayed. The direction of the unevenness and the upsides of this film the responsibility of Director John Hamburg and co-writer Larry Levin. Rudd was OK as Peter; while Segel was the strongest consistent character as Sydney. I found the couple Jon Favreau and Jaime Pressly as Zooey’s best friend and husband, to be overplayed, unrealistic, and boorish.

Overall: This film’s unevenness took away from the truly funny parts and in the end, this film felt very long. It might have been better to cut 20 minutes from it by reducing extraneous and repetitive scenes.