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?   

The Queue Continuum: City Island

This was in the second row of movies newly added to the Instant Queue.  I saw Emily Mortimer's name in the credits, and I kind of find her adorable.  Unfortunately, Andy Garcia is top-billed, and that should have been enough to scare me off.  It wasn't.

If you want to watch an indie comedy about a dysfunctional family with Garcia and Julianna Margulies as the patriarch and matriarch, then this is your movie.  The list of people who that applies to cannot be a long one...

Emily Mortimer was not in this movie enough to offset the pain that the rest of this film causes. 

Do you really want to watch a cloying movie in which the charisma-challenged Garcia plays a prison guard who secretly wants to be an actor and finds his abandoned son as an adult in jail and brings him home without telling anyone why?  The answer should be no.  If it wasn't initially, perhaps once equipped with the information that Garcia also does a Marlon Brando impersonation at an audition because he thinks that's how actors act will scare you off. 

I suppose these are the perils of having even more movies available at the touch of a button.

Man on Film: Lars and the Real Girl

It fell considerably short of being great and failed to meet my somewhat realistic expectations for the film.

Ryan Gosling continues his string of deftly nuanced performances with another great turn as a socially stunted young man raised by his withdrawn father following his mother's death while birthing him. He is able to channel a youthful naivete in such an inviting way that it is not much of a reach to imagine a small town bending over backwards to accommodate his break. His ability to carry on one-half of a two-sided argument with himself without losing it left me astonished at times.

Paul Schneider rounds out what has proven to be a great year for him, following up his scene-stealing work as Dick Liddel in The Assassination of Jesse James... by stepping into the shoes of the older brother whose years-past abandonment may or may not have contributed to his brother's delusional disorder. Perhaps this finally marks a time in which he is up for roles he can chew on outside of the David Gordon Green canon, rather than being stuck playing townies in dreck like The Family Stone. Emily Mortimer is strangely captivating--her warmth more and more compelling in everything she does.

Enhancing the performances of the principle cast, the cinematography and score capture the static and isolating winters of the Upper Midwest (even though it was predictably filmed in Ontario, which was personally disappointing for reasons relating to mild homesickness).

Where the film falls short is in its saccharine narrative. The ending is especially sappy, making for a surprisingly family friendly film when the "Real Girl" is an anatomically correct sex doll, but the tugging of the heart-strings feels a little forced. Its real emotion lies in the hearts of its main characters (as was on full display in the apologia between Schneider and Gosling in the basement), and the final act could have probably done without dialogue of any sort for the last two or three scenes and been the better for it, letting the images speak for themselves.