The Queue Continuum: Buried

I had wanted to check out Buried while it was in the theaters but never got around to seeing it. Obviously, this urge was driven by my Ryan Reynolds fandom, which many would classify as irrational or inexplicable.

Needless to say, when faced with a Sunday in which I awoke at 7:00 AM with nothing on the docket for my only day off of the week, I queued it up like John de Lancie.

I can say without reservations that this is arguably Reynolds's finest hour, at least until the Deadpool movie happens. Sure, he's his funny self in Waiting..., Van Wilder, and Two Guys, A Girl and a Pizza Place, an amiable father in the underrated Definitely, Maybe*, and an apt sleazeball in Adventureland, but he had not been previously required to take on a role like that of Paul Conroy in Buried.

*Perhaps it's no coincidence that both the movie and the Oasis album of the same name are underrated. The title doesn't help much, as it seems unable to assess itself, but the movie (which I've written about here) and the album are both damned entertaining. I'd certainly say that the Oasis album is superior, but I could throw either on and be happy.


Coming to in a slipshod wooden coffin buried in the Iraqi desert, Conroy is stripped of everything but a Blackberry, a Zippo, his flask, and some lights. What follows upon his regaining consciousness is an exercise in claustrophobia that does not relent and would surely have induced unbearable unease had I actually seen it in the theater.

Relatively unknown director Rodrigo Cortes never lets his camera leave the box. What unfolds is a suspenseful one-man show that drives anxiety and fear to great heights. It may not reach the apex that 127 Hours does, but it succeeds in surpassing the likes of Phone Booth, whose sense of claustrophobia simply isn't as fully realized.

It's at your beck and call. Be not afraid.

Man on Film: The Change-Up

I guess this is as good a place to start as any in my massive backlog of entries to write. Some may be less long than others, but given the monumental task at hand that has to be expected, if not excused. 

Generally speaking, I like the body-switch comedy. Sure, that affection is driven mostly by an appreciation for camp, but the affection remains. After all, this is the genre that includes Like Father, Like Son, Vice Versa (that link right there is for the the two combined...), 18 Again, and Dream a Little Dream.

With its raunchiness front and center, The Change-Up should have sated my yearning. Adding Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds to the mix should have sealed the deal.

Unfortunately, their presence (if you somehow missed it, this guy is a fan of Ryan Reynolds) raises the stakes, and the script/direction doesn't ante up.

There are some funny bits. At this point, The Change-Up is an afterthought anyway. You are probably more likely to see it on TV or video. It isn't completely bereft of comedic value, making it worth queuing up on Netflix when it makes its way there.

As a bonus, Olivia Wilde is in the movie, and it has been scientifically proven that she's a stone-cold fox.

The Queue Continuum: Chaos Theory

The conclusion that I have drawn upon finishing Chaos Theory is that it would appear that maybe I need to stop watching movies solely because they have Emily Mortimer in them. Well, this one also had Ryan Reynolds, so this whiffed on two fronts.

Directed by Marcos Siega, who directed a handful of Veronica Mars episodes and is a supervising/co-executive producer on The Vampire Diaries, Chaos Theory is a rather forgettable comedy in which missing a ferry sets off a chain of events in which Frank Allen's (Ryan Reynolds) life is turned upside-down. Truths are left unspoken. Frank wallows in self-pity. Susan (Emily Mortimer) is livid with her husband. Then she begs his forgiveness to no avail. Aside from a meltdown while giving a motivational speech, this simply doesn't have much to offer past the intrinsic likability of its stars, which it tries to undermine at every turn.

It isn't quite awful, but it is hardly good either. Enter at your own risk.

Why does this keep happening, Emily?   

Man on Film: The Proposal

First things first: When we headed out to the theaters, we were going to see Public Enemies.

Second things second: I was not very excited about seeing Public Enemies.
Third things third: The difference in my desire to see Public Enemies over The Proposal was nominal at best.

Fourth things fourth: Public Enemies was sold out*, and I was not too bent out of shape over it.

*Seriously? What the fuck? It's not even really supposed to be that good, and it opened on July 1st. I know it's a Friday at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar, but y'all be fucking crazy. I'd understand if it was The Hangover or something, but we're talking 'bout Public Enemies.

All right. The movie. It was all right, I guess. If you've seen one romantic comedy in the past twenty years, you've seen them all.

It was incredibly formulaic. Guy can't stand girl. Girl blackmails guy into marrying her to avoid getting deported. Hijinx ensue.

I think it is obvious why I went to this movie and didn't hate it. Ryan Reynolds is the bomb. Totally funny. Great comic timing. His delivery is always spot on. I like Ryan Reynolds about 15 times more than I dislike Sandra Bullock (which really isn't that much considering that I really like Ryan Reynolds), so at least it wasn't a completely wasted outing.

That being said, I do not recommend that anyone actually go out of their way to see this movie.

Now, as for the experience of seeing a mainstream rom-com in the theaters, I can't say that I've seen one since maybe American Sweethearts (holy shit was that awful...), but it was really bizarre being at the Alamo with a bunch of middle-aged people who laughed at totally odd times. Who are these people? A guy in the road behind us was cackling (literally sounded like a witch) at the weirdest times. Some lady started losing her shit during the predictable Betty White deathbed scene. The guy beside me and his wife made these bizarre comments occasionally. The guy on the other side of the Special Lady Friend made some comment to his wife about someone's Louis Vuitton gear.

What. The. Fuck?

Was I secretly in Columbus, OH?

Man on Film: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

I've been meaning to write up a ton of music stuff, but I kind of have to be listening to the album while I do an entry on it. As I tend to sit down at the computer while I am watching the Royals (there are 20 seconds between pitches, so there's definitely time), this is not the easiest thing to fit in since I use the auditory cues of the broadcast to keep tabs on things. As such, you get my reaction to Wolverine.

First off, I expected this movie to blow hard. Nearly everything I read implied that this was in fact worse than X-Men 3. In the last ten years, I have only seen one movie in the theaters that I hated more than X-Men 3, and that was Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (which I wrote a rather angry review of over at IMDB, which I will actually cut-and-paste here*).

*(Spoiler Alert) This film is like having a fat man who ate at IHOP run a marathon and then drop a diarrhea dump on your chest and proceed to use your face as toilet paper

I should preface this review by saying that I was indifferent as to how I might feel about this film going into it. I thought the first film was fairly good. It was entertaining, but nothing that made me yearn for a second one. That being said, I hadn't read a review of this film (and still haven't) and had only heard that it had received mixed reviews. I had tempered expectations going into the theater, but I was certainly open to a good time.

A good time was not had. This film was quite simply awful. I have not seen anything in a long time that made me marvel at the fact that it was actually the finished product of a gigantic summer film churned out by a Hollywood Studio. I saw X-Men 3. While that was dreadful, this was eons past X3 in terms of excrement put to celluloid.

The plot was akin to a second-grader's class project. There was zero character development and not a single moment in which you thought you were seeing an original thought projected onto the screen. While it is a sequel, at some point the things that happen to the characters should matter, and if something bad happens to a character, the events that have molded him or her to that point should affect the audience somehow. Instead, the tools responsible for this screenplay have events happen without emotionally investing the audience in any way, shape, or form as to the fate of the characters on-screen, simply hoping that writing an event will somehow tug at the heart-strings of the audience without ever having to earn it.

I don't know that it is entirely the filmmakers' fault, because it seems that Verbinski & Co. were tied to some P.O.S. script that was churned out in a matter of days to get the cameras rolling, so Disney could bend the movie-goer over and sodomize them while getting paid for it. In the place of an actual story, they were probably told to blow up the film with mind-numbing action sequences and lame special effects.

To add insult to injury, the film clocks in at a mere two-and-a-half hours, which for a film with a plot wouldn't bother me in the least, but when you can write out the entire plot of this film in a matter of moments, seeing that paper-thin storyline stretched into 150 minutes is unbearable.

I could even make an exception to all of the aforementioned gripes and say that there was something in the film worthwhile if there was one performance from the cast that was mildly amusing. Alas, there is not. The actors all seem to have mailed it in, including Depp, who had a single chuckle-worthy moment as a follow-up to an Oscar-nominated turn in the previous Pirates outing.

***********SPOILER ALERT*************** When it comes down to it, all you'll get from this film is an obscenely long prologue to Pirates of the Caribbean 3: The Search for Spock--I mean Jack, because the entire plot of this atrocious piece of refuse is enough to fill a mere introduction to a real story.

Of the X-Men series, I really only loved X-Men 2. I thought the first one was overloaded with way too many characters crammed into the mix just for show. The dearth of characters was such that there was little-to-no room for character development, and the casting of Anna Paquin as Rogue was simply infuriating to me. Additionally, there were way too many villains just kind of hanging around apparently tasked to look vaguely intimidating while doing little else. So fuck the first one.

The second one was amazing. I was shocked. There is really not a disparaging word I have to say about that film. It touches on the themes of alienation and extermination that made the comic books great. The villainous military element was startlingly scary while paring the focus down to a more realistic enemy.

Then there was the third installment which was unspeakably bad. The shitty thing is, there was no way it wasn't going to suck balls with Brett Ratner at the helm. Despite the low expectations, it exceeded the expected awfulness to take a seat directly behind PotC:DMC in the unenviable realm of worst movie of the 2000s*.

*Southland Tales obviously ends up in this category, but I didn't see it in the theaters, thankfully. It also happens that Jeremy, who is apparently as willing as Jackie and I are to see just how bad a movie can get, decided to dive into ST, as well as Wolverine.

So I expected this to somehow be worse than that. Upon deciding to test our tolerance for utter shit, Jeremy, Jackie, and I sucked it up and went on Sunday night. On the phone when we decided to do it, Jeremy suggested that he may actually want to walk out, which he doesn't do.

Well, we didn't walk out.

Don't get me wrong. This was not a good film. It was actually bad.

There was no cohesive thread to the narrative. Much in the same way Pirates 2 came off, Wolverine seemed like a movie of action sequences that was pieced together with little regard for themes, story, or dialogue. As was the fault of the first X-Men movie, there were far too many characters thrown into the film with little idea as to how to utilize them, not that such an undertaking would have been possible in a film any less than nine hours long. Ryan Reynolds and Taylor Kitsch were both very good as Wade Wilson and Gambit, respectively, but had a combined screen time of somewhere around ten minutes. Liev Schreiber is good as Sabretooth, but it feels like they didn't make Sabretooth animalistic enough. Jackman does exactly what he has done for the three prior X-Men installments. He owns the character and pulls off the extreme badass well.

As for the other stuff, the effects were at times solid and at other times laughably bad. The scene where he is inspecting his new claws in the bathroom mirror is abysmal. For most of the movie, the claws look amateurish. Some of the action sequences work. Others are not quite as good.

Going much more into this would be absurd. I don't know why I've written so much. Well, maybe I do. Wolverine was my favorite comic book character as a teen. He took over where Spiderman left off. Wolverine was so much darker. The darkness quenched a thirst for something slightly more adult in the admittedly lighter comic book fare of the Marvel Universe. For the most part, the character has been portrayed well in the film medium. It just so happens that the films themselves have often been lacking. I guess that speaks to Hugh Jackman's skill as an actor.

Enter the confessional

I am watching "Definitely, Maybe".

There, I said it.

It's on TV, and I am not keeping it here without a modicum of guilt.

And no, I am not talking about some music doc about Oasis' first album. I am talking about the movie with Ryan Reynolds and Abigail Breslin.

For starters, it is not particularly good. Moreover, I saw most of it the other night before heading out to a party Saturday night.

Still, I sit here with it on. Again.

What is wrong with not-so-young Josh, you might ask? The answer to that question is not a short one.

In this instance, I will have to say that I like Ryan Reynolds. Say what you want, but I think the man is funny. I like his energy. I like his delivery of lines. I think Van Wilder is very funny, and I am not entirely sure that it is the source material that amuses me or its star. He made an otherwise unwatchable "Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place"* entertaining.

*I'll admit that once Nathan Fillion joined the cast there were then two reasons to watch, as his goofy work as the affable blue-collar boyfriend/fiance/husband was pretty enjoyable. Whether or not his addition contributed to the official name-change to "Two Guys and a Girl" is kind of irrelevant because I still refer to the entire series by it's full, first season name--much like the Washington Bullets, the California Angels, or the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, and the reverse of "The Hogan Family".

Back to the film, though, I could try to justify my watching this by citing the fact that his character works within the world of politics, which I might like to do someday. I chalk up my motivation for watching the film to liking any or all of the following actresses: Isla Fisher, Rachel Weisz, and Elizabeth Banks.

While those things all have a shred of truth to them, to use one or all of them as an excuse for watching this would be a lie. I am watching this because it's a Ryan Reynolds star vehicle.

So fuck you.

Or something.

P.S. He smokes Morleys in the film. I have to wonder if that's a shout-out to "The X-Files".

P.S. (Part II) Was the hanging of the sign in the deli Two Guys Deli a nod to Reynolds' sit-com past?