Carrie (2013)

I Can STILL See Your Dirty Pillows

I love my Film Criticism class.  At first I was a little bit resentful that I showed up for class to find that we were watching the 1976 Carrie movie.  I had already seen and reviewed this movie!  And more than that, I didn’t really like it that much.  But after the movie, I found out some very exciting news: our midterm was to watch the new remake of the movie and compare the two.  I had already considered seeing this movie out of potential morbid curiosity.  But even better than that, I’d have to assume I’ll just be able to pull my midterm right out of this review.  But you guys will get the Director’s Cut of my midterm about the movie Carrie, based on the novel by Stephen King, written by Lawrence D. Cohen and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, directed by Kimberly Peirce, and starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Julianne Moore, Judy Greer, Portia Doubleday, Gabriella Wilde, Ansel Elgort, Alex Russell, and Barry Shabaka Henley.

Carrie White (Chloë Grace Moretz) is a shy weirdo that gets abused by her schoolmates for not understanding what’s happening when she gets her first period in the shower.  To top that off, her mother (Julianne Moore) abuses her because she thinks Jesus gave her a period as punishments for her sins or some such nonsense.  But Carrie starts to realize that she’s not just an ordinary creepy girl.  She starts to realize that she can do things with her mind; a phenomenon she finds is called “telekinesis.”  But, more important than that (if you’re a high school girl), is that Tommy Ross (Ansel Elgort) asked her to the prom!  Sure, he asked her at the behest of his girlfriend, Sue Snell (Gabriella Wilde), because they felt sorry for Carrie.  But Carrie still has a problem: Chris Hargensen (Portia Doubleday).  Chris is the head of the bully girls that pick on Carrie, and she resents Carrie because picking on her got her punished and banned from the prom.  And that’s just good logic right there.  Chris devises a plan with her boyfriend Billy (Alex Russell) to make Carrie pay for the punishment that she brought on herself.

I should do remakes more often!  I just got to copy and paste that whole thing from my other review!  Now, my midterm essay is supposed to be more about the differences between the two movies, so this won’t be my typical review.  But I’ll still get the review in there somewhere.  Let’s start with the story.  The story was almost exactly the same.  This movie claims that it stuck closer to the original novel than the original movie, and that just makes me think I wouldn’t like the novel.  I don’t particularly care about either story.  But the differences that I noticed actually made me like the story a little bit more.  The fact that Carrie’s mom had a job didn’t make that much sense to me.  It seems like it’d be hard to keep a job with that level of crazy going on.  I thought the ending of the original movie was much more effective, but this one was apparently more like the novel (at least according to Wikipedia).  The scene afterwards worked much better as well.  First of all, the sequence happened in a dream, so Carrie might not actually have decided to come back from the dead.  But if she did, it just makes much more sense that she could maybe have survived bringing the house down on her head instead of bringing the house down on her head, being dug out, prepared for burial, buried, and then coming back to life as it seemed the remake was implying by having Carrie’s gravestone start cracking.

The look of the movie would obviously have improved over time just because of advances in technology (not to mention the extra $28.2 million the remake had to work with).  Most everything in the movie just looked a lot better.  I like that they kept the fact that Carrie starts and ends the movie covered in blood, but they did it differently.  The original started with the shower scene which this movie still had, but this one started with Carrie being born.  I guess that makes it more symbolic that not only the movie but Carrie’s life started and ended covered in blood.  I thought the prom scene in this movie was much better too, even before it gets to the “bloody prom” part.  They still have the scene where Carrie and Tommy dance in this movie, but thankfully Peirce didn’t make the strange choice to film the two of them dancing in a centrifuge as De Palma did.  But I liked it much better when it got into the “bloody prom” part.  It was much more brutal as I imagine it should have been in the original.  The original movie had Carrie attacking people with a fire hose.  In the remake, Carrie crushes people with bleachers, throws heavy decorations at people, electrocutes them, and lights them on fire.  The ensuing car crash was also done much better.  It made more sense that they would have tried to run Carrie down because she kept them from leaving town.  In the original, they just kind of show up and the movie doesn’t really bother trying to tell us their motivation for running her down.  Then it was also graphically better when she slams the car to a stop.  I did think it didn’t make sense because the speedometer made it seem that they had gotten up to about 100 mph trying to run her down but they didn’t fly through the windshield until Carrie slammed the car into the gas pump.  I think going from 100 mph to 0 so instantly would have sent them both out of the car.

One thing that came up in class was the fact that De Palma filmed some of the scenes in a very perverted fashion that really didn’t seem to fit the movie.  Things like the shower scene and the detention exercises seemed more like they were out of Porky’s than out of a horror movie.  There was a little bit of that in this movie, but I only noticed it in the beginning when they were playing volleyball in the pool and they were filming all of the “high school students” underwater and below the belt.  I guess it helps that this movie was directed by a woman instead of a man.

There were a lot of differences in the performances in this movie.  Chloë Moretz did a decent enough job, but I didn’t feel she could really touch the quality of work Sissy Spacek put out in the original.  Spacek’s Carrie was afraid of her powers for most of the movie.  Moretz relished them almost immediately.  I thought it was a bit of a stretch for this movie to want me to believe that this girl would lose her mind when she got her first period but think it was cool that she has telekinesis.  She apparently has pyrokinesis as well because she can weld locks with her mind, and she also has some amazing baby gender-detecting ability.  I guess she did get a lot more practice with her powers in this movie than Spacek did, which I also thought was weird.  Seeing her practice with her powers made this feel more like I was watching a prequel to X-Men.  The strength of her powers also varied as needed by the movie.  At one point she’s lifting a car, but minutes later she can’t push her mom off of her?  On the other hand, I thought Julianne Moore did a much better job than Piper Laurie.  Moore played it a lot more real and Laurie played it almost cartoonishly over the top.  It makes sense since after I read that Laurie thought the movie was a satire of horror movies after she read the script, but the character works much better if she doesn’t cause the audience to laugh at some of the things she does.  It made me think that my dream team would’ve been Spacek as Carrie and Moore as the mom, if that would’ve been age appropriate.  Maybe with some clever editing…

I also thought they made some strange changes in the other girls of Carrie’s school.  I thought the role reversal was weird between Sue and Chris.  The Chris of the original (Nancy Allen) was a hot blond, and Sue (Amy Irving) was the cute brunette.  In the remake, Sue was the tall, hot blond (Gabriella Wilde) and Chris was the cute brunette (Portia Doubleday).  I guess anyone can be a bully, but typically the tall, gorgeous blond is the mean one, having been spoiled by being able to get her way her whole life with her looks.  I also thought that the bullies weren’t as cartoonishly mean to Carrie as they were in the original.  When Carrie sucks at volleyball, Chris makes a joke about it but is generally encouraging.  Carrie didn’t get hit in the face with a baseball cap because of it.  And when Carrie was freaking out in the showers, the girls thought it was strange that she didn’t know what a period was, but they seemed to be genuinely offering her tampons until she kept freaking out about it.  Chris did start to become much more unlikeable when she filmed it and put it on the internet, and even more unlikeable when she didn’t delete the video from her phone before going into the principal’s office.  No one likes a stupid person.   I also thought it was interesting that the roles were reversed between Chris and her boyfriend Billy, who I thought was The Situation for a good part of the movie.  Chris was the manipulator in the original movie, and Billy was in this one.

The Carrie remake was scarcely different from the original.  In some ways it was improved, such as in the look and in the greater majority of the performances.  The only performance I liked in the original movie was Sissy Spacek, and the only performance that was not improved on for the remake was the very same role.  The story was basically the same.  If you were forced to make a choice between the two of them, I guess I would recommend this one, while still saying that Spacek is worth checking out in the first movie.  But if you don’t need to choose, then I’d say you can get by skipping both of them.  Carrie gets “You know the devil never dies, keeps coming back.  But you gotta keep killing him” out of “There are other people out there like me who can do what I can do.”

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Arrested Development: Season One (2003)

Say What You Will About America; Thirteen Bucks Still Gets You a Hell of a Lot of Mice.

I don’t often get requests to review TV shows, which I generally regard as a blessing, since a review of a TV show can take quite some time and I’ve never found myself particularly good at it.  But, when today’s TV show was requested, I was actually quite happy about it.  Not happy about getting to write a review of it, as I’m not nearly as practiced at it as I am with movies and even video games.  What I was happy about was getting to watch the TV show.  I’d never seen a single episode of this show as I tend to not keep up with television that much, so much so that I actually cancelled my cable service because I could do without the greater majority of them.  But I’d heard so much about how awesome this TV show was I was happy to have a reason to watch it.  So happy, apparently, that I actually bombed through all 22 episodes of the first season in one day.  Let’s see if it can live up to the hype as I review the first season of Arrested Development, created by Mitchell Hurwitz, and starring Jason Bateman, Portia de Rossi, Will Arnett, Tony Hale, Jeffrey Tambor, Jessica Walter, Michael Cera, Alia Shawkat, David Cross, Henry Winkler, Judy Greer, Liza Minnelli, Patricia Velásquez, Carl Weathers, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jay Johnston, Jerry Minor, Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts, Justin Lee, Jane Lynch, James Lipton, and John Michael Higgins.

George Bluth Sr. (Jeffrey Tambor) retires as the founder and CEO of the Bluth Company and is promptly arrested for spending the company’s money on personal expenses.  Bluth’s wife, Lucille (Jessica Walter) takes over as CEO, naming her extremely sheltered youngest son, Buster (Tony Hale), the president.  The middle son – and the only son actually equipped to run a business – Michael (Jason Bateman) leaves the company as a result, but comes back when they all realize they need him, and because his own son, George Michael (Michael Cera) wants to stay with the family.  Mainly because he’s developed a crush on his cousin, Maeby (Alia Shawkat), daughter of Michael’s sister Lindsay (Portia de Rossi) and her husband Tobias (David Cross).  The majority of the family lives in one of the Bluth model homes, with the rest of them, including the oldest brother Gob (Will Arnett) the aspiring magician, visiting frequently to try to borrow money from Michael as he tries to save the company while not even knowing what his father got into.

I don’t know if I’d say that this show has lived up to the hype so far, but it’s certainly not the fault of the show.  From what I had heard, I half expected to be laughing non-stop while watching.  That wasn’t what happened, but I found the show to be extremely well written, very funny, and even funny enough to get me to laugh out loud on more than one occasion.  The first episode was a little disappointing, but it seemed to mainly be all of the setup to get all of the backstory out of the way, but they pick up their speed pretty quickly after that.  The jokes mainly come from how ridiculous the family are, and are often shown in quick cutaways, almost like a live action Family Guy.  And, more often than not, my favorite part of the episode was actually the very end, where they show scenes from the next episode that may or may not actually happen, but they work very well as rapid fire jokes.  And a lot of the jokes were pretty smart too.  I liked when Gob got literally stabbed in the back as Michael was figuratively stabbing him in the back.  I was also a fan of the part where a guy said to Michael, “If you care about your brother, you’ll get in the car,” and Michael said, “Which brother?” and then, when the guy answered, “Gob,” he kept riding away.  Later, when George Michael was trying to find out if he was actually related to Maeby and he asked Gob if Lindsay was ever pregnant, Gob answers, “Oh yeah, dozens of times.”  I also like the part where George Bluth was talking about his twin brother and says, “You should’ve seen his face,” but then remembers that they’re twins and shows him what the face looked like.  A lot of the jokes seemed extra smart and well thought out as so many of them come together in the final episode, though this could’ve been done without planning to do it before hand.  I also liked a lot of the jokes that went on in the background, like when Gob was complaining about his girlfriend the Mexican soap opera star and saying that he’d kill someone if he ever had to smell some Mexican dish again, and the maid in the background closes her Tupperware that she was eating out of.  The story was never super important to the quality of the show, but there were a couple of reveals that were pretty obvious.  The whole part about “there always being money in the banana stand” could be seen coming from miles away, as well as the part about the blind lawyer being the Bluth’s opposing prosecutor in the trial.  Hell, they even outright spoil one themselves in the scenes from the next episode by saying that the lawyer isn’t really blind, but they say so many things in those next episode sequences that I didn’t know if it was true or a joke.  If it sounds like I’m just listing some of my favorite jokes from the show … well, I am.  But the show is well-written and funny, so you should watch it.

I liked all the performances in the show as well.  The greater majority of them are people that I liked going in, so it’s not really a surprise to me.  Jason Bateman plays a fantastic straight man, though he’s not above getting a little wacky himself.  It’s not too necessary in this show as his family does the bulk of the goofiness.  I was torn on the rest of the family for a while since most of them seemed like such unlikeable people I didn’t know why I’d want to spend time with them.  But you warm up to them fairly quickly.  I warmed up to Portia de Rossi because she was hot, especially when she was being sprayed by water and dancing in a cage in one of the later episodes.  I warmed up to Will Arnett because I’ve always liked him, and because he was one of the characters that started a lot of the funniness.  He also had his real life wife Amy Poehler in a few episodes as the wife he eloped with, and I’m always happy to see her as well.  I didn’t know Tony Hale before this show, but he gets a lot of funniness out of his Buster character.  I liked that he was able to get laughs from things as simple as standing silently in the background of scenes.  David Cross did a great deal of the comedy as well, as his character seemed totally gay and totally eccentric.  I liked the little physical things he did, like when he rolled up on the stage at the school play, or when he licked the end of his pencil and then kept licking it like he liked the taste.  He also got to work with Bob Odenkirk again in one episode, and those guys are genius together.  Michael Cera was an odd one for me.  Not because his performance in this show was not dissimilar from many of his other characters, but because of his relationship with his cousin Alia Shawkat.  Even though his crush on his cousin is pretty inappropriate, I found myself kind of wishing they would end up together.  I also liked Judy Greer in her few appearances as the assistant to George Bluth.  She’s a pretty attractive lady and I thought it was pretty funny when Gob would have her take off her glasses and her eyes would go cross-eyed, and she’d let down her hair and it’d go all crazy, and later she got a boob job and her nipples seemed to be pointing in odd directions.  Another big thing about the show is all of the guest appearances.  Liza Minnelli was in a few episodes, and was pretty damned funny as well.  Henry Winkler was usually funny as the inept lawyer, and he even busted the Fonze move in one episode.  Jane Lynch, Heather Graham, Carl Weathers, and a bunch of other random guest appearances were also great.

I’m sure a crappy show could not have kept me interested enough to actually get through 22 episodes of the first season in one day, but that was thankfully not the case with Arrested Development.  It was extremely well-written, very funny, and with fantastic performances to back it all up.  I don’t want to do it too soon and have the next review follow too quickly, but I can’t wait to get into the second season.  And, since you can stream the whole thing on Netflix, I don’t know why you’re not doing it right now.  Turns out my Friendboss Josh isn’t so much of an asshole after all.  Arrested Development Season One gets “That was a good investment” out of “It was shoplifting and I’m white.  I think I’m going to be okay.”

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Love and Other Drugs (2010)

Who Can Sell Dick Drug Better Than Me?

I’ll fess up to this right off the bat: the only thing that interested me about this movie was getting to see the boobs of one of the stars. This is strange because I’ve already seen her boobs in a different movie. And it’s strange ’cause I’m super gay. What? I didn’t type that! I LOVE TITTIES! This movie – which I call Anne Hathaway’s tits part 2 – is generally referred to as Love and Other Drugs, directed by Edward Zwick, and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway (and her boobs), Hank Azaria, Oliver Platt, Josh Gad, and Judy Greer.

Jamie Randall (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a young man without a sense of purpose in life. Well, a purpose beyond pussy. He has just gotten fired from his electronic store job, mainly for having sex with the boss’ girlfriend, but also probably a little for having the gall to say that Samsung TV’s are last year and Magnavox is the wave of the future. Over dinner with his successful doctor father, successful doctor sister, and his successful businessman brother, his brother Josh (Josh Gad) gets him a job as a pharmaceutical sales rep. He starts off with regional manager, Bruce (Oliver Platt), who wants to use Jamie to get a better job in Chicago. As part of their rounds, Jamie tries to get Dr. Knight (Hank Azaria) to prescribe Zoloft instead of Prozac. Jamie talks his way into getting to follow Dr. Knight around as an intern and one day observes Dr. Knight with Maggie Murdock (Anne Hathaway), who suffers from early onset Parkinson’s. She also takes this opportunity to get one of her boobs out because of a small blotch on one of them. Shortly after, Maggie whoops on Jamie for not actually being an intern and looking at her boob, and Jamie uses his handsomeness to turn his apology into a date with Maggie. Maggie doesn’t want anything serious because of her disease and Jamie is a womanizer, so this movie goes a little down the “Friends with Benefits” and “No Strings Attached” path, but sways off towards drama because of Maggie’s Parkinson’s.

Let’s manage some expectations here. If you’re in the market for Anne Hathaway’s boobs and a lot of scenes of her having sex with Jake Gyllenhaal, this may be the movie for you. If you’re looking for a good movie, well there are better places to find that. This isn’t a bad movie, but I found it very off-putting. The story was pretty basic rom-com that we’re especially familiar with in the wake of such movies like Friends with Benefits and No Strings Attached, but it’s much more drama than the one of those two movies I’ve actually seen. But they did a thing with this movie that I may have mentioned – but surely thought – while watching the movie TipToes. That thing is that it seemed as if a good portion of the movie was meant to be empowerment for a certain type of people. TipToes was for midgets and this movie is for people with Parkinson’s, and maybe women too … and perhaps a little bit Anne Hathaway’s boobs empowerment. A lot of the movie is about how Gyllenhaal wants to try to cure her but that’s a bad thing because she’s every woman and she can live with her disability. At a certain point in the movie I thought to myself “Alright, I get it. You’re a strong woman who knows what she wants. Move on and stop being a dick”. She was constantly shutting down poor Jake because she didn’t want to open herself up to someone ditching out on her because of her disease, so she wanted to keep it strictly physical. And I know it’s unfair, but I think that’s slutty more than it’s empowered. The sex scenes weren’t even that good. Something about them put me off too. And beyond the sex scenes, all you really have is some failed attempts at comedy and a lot more “Wah wah life is hard, I have Parkinson’s” stuff. Michael J. Fox has his Parkinson’s like a hero and you can too, so knock it off with the whole emotionally distant thing.

The performances were mostly good here. Jake Gyllenhaal is a pretty solid actor and manages to deliver here pretty well. He’s a cocky ass, but also pretty charming, and you never really have any inability to believe that he could pull in the tail that he does in this movie. Anne Hathaway is beginning to make me sad in some of her movie choices recently. I understand that you want to distance yourself from the whole Princess Diaries thing so that you don’t get typecast in all the rest of the movies in your career, but do you have to make every other movie you show up in a movie about you getting fucked stupid and getting your boobs out. I think Anne is gorgeous, but I can feel myself lose interest because she not only gets naked in a good amount of her movies now, but she does it for shitty movies like this and that Crash movie. If you need to get your tits out for a movie that may land you an Oscar, I get it. But this won’t do that. To be fair, she gave a good performance here. Acting like she had Parkinson’s but trying to suppress how miserable that made her was really convincing, but also she kind of pissed me off when her and Jake were obviously falling for each other but she kept shutting him down. The only other person that stuck out to me was Josh Gad, but not in a good way. I’m sure I’ve seen this guy before but don’t remember in what, but he pissed me off really early on and never really attempted to get back from that. The first time we see him, he’s a cocky fat asshole. And what makes it worse for me is that he chews loudly and talks while chewing and that is a major pet peeve for me. It really grates on my nerves. Plus, there’s a scene where Gyllenhaal has a reaction to Viagra and busts into the room where Josh is having sex with a really hot girl and just says “Let’s Go” and Josh pulls out and drives him to the hospital. Who would do that? I would say “Gimme five minutes. Your dick problem takes a back seat to my dick problem.”

If you’re the kind of person that will watch a movie strictly because a hot actress gets her boobs out in it, Anne Hathaway does so in this one. But I would say from personal experience, you may be let down by it. I went in looking for that and I got it in spades, but left the movie wishing I hadn’t bothered watching it. It’s not bad, it just seemed to waste my time. It’s called a romantic comedy by the websites I have checked, and though it does have romance, it lacks comedy. It’s more of a romantic drama, and I don’t like dramas. There are some good performances here, but the whole movie came off as off-putting instead of interesting. So I say you can skip it and join Mr. Skin if you want to see her boobs. Or you can probably find them for free somewhere. Either way, I give this movie “You pity fucked a sick girl” out of “You need someone to take care of you”.

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