Just Go with It (2011)

While waiting for this film to entertain me, the darndest thing happened- the credits rolled. That’s my cynical take on Adam Sandler’s first “comedic” offering in 2011. A more balanced approach would go something like this: Just Go with It is an uninspired film suffering from lazy writing and made worse by performances by all but one of its stars.

Adam Sandler stars as Danny, a plastic surgeon in LA. When picking up girls, he pretends to be stuck in an unhappy marriage. Lo and behold, Danny finally meets “the one”- Palmer (Brooklyn Decker). Trouble is, she doesn’t want to be any part of what she thinks is adultery. Instead of coming clean, Danny tells her he is getting divorced from his wife soon. This leads Danny to go to extremes to sell the ruse. For a fee, he enlists the services of his single-mom receptionist (Jennifer Aniston) and her kids, but gets much more than he bargained for.

The first and most critical mistake made here is Danny’s characterization. I know we live in morally ambiguous times but there’s absolutely nothing likeable about a man pretending to be unhappily married to attract women. The fact that he is willing to use a nice woman and her children to that very end is borderline reprehensible. Oh sure, there’s a good natured twist at the end of it all but that ending is so obvious from the start that the journey is hardly worthy of the final destination.

The script is full of the kind of situational gags, physical comedy and toilet humor Sandler fans have come to expect. Sandler, however, appears to run on autopilot through the entire film. It’s hard to tell if he is bored with the film or if he’s forgotten that it takes effort (not just his presence) to produce comedy. In her first film role, it is clear that Brooklyn Decker is more accustomed to strutting around in bikinis than acting. Paper-thin as her character may be, Decker fails to do more than look pretty.

Jennifer Aniston, however, saves the film. Instead of trapping herself in the confines of romantic comedies and roles too serious for audiences to accept her in, Aniston lets her hair down and seems to be having a ball here. Her character’s frustration with Sandler brings out the best from her natural sass and charm. She gets and delivers the best lines in the film.

Despite Aniston’s best efforts, Just Go with It falls flat. Having made his millions already and ventured into more challenging roles recently, it seems Sandler is content to ride the coattails of his own success here. Unfortunately for him, the fact that he is in the film does not automatically make it funny. Aniston’s solid performance cannot win out over Sandler’s weak performance and Decker’s non-performance, leaving you with only a couple of giggles and an occasional chuckle, but never any hearty laughs. This is simply not acceptable from a comedy.

RATING: 1.5 out of 5

Far and Away (1992)

There’s just something about sprawling historical dramas that captivate audiences. We’re drawn to them like almost nothing else. Are we all secretly history buffs who take pleasure in seeing the hard times and details faced by those of yesteryear? Is it maybe because these films provide us with both the exotic and the familiar? Whatever the real answer is, Far and Away is one of those films that sucks you in with a little bit of everything and keeps you there quite nicely.

After his father’s funeral, Irish peasant Joseph Donnelly (Tom Cruise) witnesses the family home being burned by the lackeys of their landlord. Fed up with aristocratic oppression, Joseph sets out to kill his landlord but his plan goes awry and he is injured in his attempt. The landlord’s daughter Shannon (Nicole Kidman) is fascinated by the lively fellow and she saves him from a pistol duel with her suitor. They run away together, boarding a ship for America. Along the journey they learn of an upcoming land claim race in the Oklahoma Territory.

Their heads filled with dreams of land and prosperity, Joseph and Shannon encounter a rude awakening upon their arrival in Boston. Far from the land of opportunity they were expecting, America for Irish immigrants turns out to be a maze of hucksters, cheats and politics. Pretending to be brother and sister, the two fall in love as they struggle to survive in a cold, uncaring new world.

Does the current generation even know/remember that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were married for a whole decade? This fact certainly serves as a minor impetus for those of us in the know to check out any movie that they co-starred in as a romantic pairing (the same was probably true for audiences at the time). That may now be little more than a nostalgic factoid lost on future viewers but it is most certainly an intriguing behind-the-scenes thing to consider while watching this fanciful flick.

Far and Away really does have a little bit of everything, which is both good and bad. The period detail is really something but it does cross a few lines (what historical epics don’t though?) by not making enough of the costumes look truly lived in. Everyone likes a little romance but Joseph and Shannon’s antics border on soap opera cheesy at points. Then of course there’s the balance between a sprawling tale spanning an ocean and half of another continent and a Hollywood tale packed with a few too many lucky coincidences.

The acting really stands out as the driving force of the film. Do Cruise and Kidman go overboard now and then? Yes. But they give themselves so fully to their roles that you can’t help but believe in and desperately get behind these characters. Joseph and Shannon won’t go down as one of those iconic epic film couples but they have enough spunk and sass to make Far and Away a crowd pleaser.

The story is quite simple and predictable but this is an early entry in director Ron Howard’s serious stage as a filmmaker. The film has plenty of potential to devolve into a corny immigration comedy full of Irish stereotypes but Howard, having directed several screwball comedies before this, knows where to draw the line. He keeps the film fun and fresh when it’s called for and never lets it wallow in mood and harsh reality for too long.

Far and Away may not appeal to film snobs who only appreciate the utmost dramatic (which for some reason usually translates to depressing) and realistic historical epic tales. Rather than focusing on high-art cinema, he aims to make the kind of films that he grew up watching and loving. He is a movie lover’s director, plain and simple. What it lacks in staying power, this film makes up for in enjoyability.

RATING: 3.5 out of 5

Moulin Rouge!* (2001)

Having met some artsy fartsy types in high school and especially college, I can understand why this movie got so much praise. In case it hasn’t been made clear yet, let me address this issue right now- I am not an artsy-fartsy fruitball who goes gaga over campy Broadway-esque productions that force your suspension of disbelief to work overtime to make the absurdity assaulting your eyes palatable. Even if you’re doing a musical, there’s still a way to get the job done right and make it seem realistic.

Needless to say, Moulin Rouge! is not that movie.

It’s not terrible though. The story works, and could potentially make for a genuinely enjoyable feature, but something in the execution plagues this movie, and his name is Baz Luhrmann. His frenetic style of directing, with a cacophony of vivid colors and an endless supply of jerky camera movements is perfect for the ADD generation and the fruitball Academy members and critics who I do not and will never see eye to eye with.

On top of all this, the film is rife with camp and boisterous overacting. And the music! Whoever thought that using a few lines from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” would be a clever out-of-context use for a highly recognizable piece of nostalgia should be shot in the public square. Nirvana songs do not belong in fruitball musicals. If they were trying to make it seem like the music department couldn’t come up with anything original and enchanting with all the out of context lyrics that were mish-mashed together, they did a good job.

The sum of all this left me feeling like I had been assaulted rather than entertained. There’s just too much trying to be done in this film, and when a director doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone, you end up on the outside looking in at the film, rather than being immersed into its world. I’m not a big romance guy, so it doesn’t help that the cheese ball love affair is overblown, idealizing the bohemian lifestyle and making it seem like some kind of blissful ignorance where down-on-their-luck writers struggle to make a living but it’s ok, because they have a song in their head, love in their heart, and friends who blah blah blah!

If they’d have portrayed the bohemian life as it really was (and some would say still is), there’d be more urgency to the story, and the love affair even more heart-wrenching. But what you’ve got with Moulin Rouge! is a film that could have used a few more rewrites, a smaller budget and a different director. The semi-solid story makes up for a lot of its shortcomings.

RATING: 3 out of 5