Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising

The Girl Week Blogathon: Spy

Insidious: Chapter 2

Directed by James Wan.

2013. Rated PG-13, 105 minutes.

Cast:

Patrick Wilson

Rose Byrne

Ty Simpkins

Lin Shaye

Steve Coulter

Barbara Hershey

Leigh Wannell

Angus Sampson

Danielle Bisutti

When we last left the Lambert family, they rescued their son from the annoying ghosts that started following them around. Unfortunately, Elise, the lady they hired to help them, died in the process. Well, where there's a dead body, there are police. And they don't wanna hear any crap about a haunted house. Yes. We know that's the truth, but try explaining that in a court of law. Thought so. Anyhoo, as far as the cops are concerned, all signs point to Renai (Byrne) as Elise's murderer. While they're conducting their investigation, the Lamberts figure out they have bigger fish to fry. With Josh (as the main target of the happenings, they realize that the house is still haunted.

We're treated to another round of things going bump in the night. And much of the day for that matter. However, it's the things going bump that make all the difference between this movie and its predecessor. Okay. This is as good a time as any to tell you I didn't like the first Insidious. To me, the ghosts in that movie never seemed like they were really threatening to the people involved. They just showed up, made a funny face and lurched toward someone like they weren't actually trying to get them. It was all rather silly. This time around, the ghosts have more purpose. It feels like they want to do some damage. Better yet, we get a nicely fleshed out back story for them that is much more interesting than what's happening on this side of purgatory. 

I'm not being completely fair. The stuff going on with the family is better than it was in the first movie, too. A lot of this has to do with its juxtaposition with a better ghost story. Fine, I'll take it however I can get it. Much of it plays like The Amityville Horror. This is also fine because it adds some much needed life to the proceedings. The kids are de-emphasized as we focus on whether or not Josh has been driven crazy by his supernatural house guests, or is something entirely different going on. All of the extra intrigue helps this one zip by instead of trudging forward like one of the first movie's apparitions.

 Director James Wan has built up his own little cottage industry of haunted house flicks starring Patrick Wilson. This includes both Insidious movies and the far better The Conjuring and its sequel on the way. Thankfully, this second Insidious has more in common with The Conjuring than with its predecessor. It isn't quite that good, but it functions solidly. The major plus here being the Psycho inspired ghost. It adds a sense of urgency to the proceedings that was sorely missing the first time around. Having said all of this, I understand that plenty of people loved the original, or at least shelled out money to see it. I also know that my opinion runs counter to popular thought on both films, but what can I say? I think the first one sucked and I like this one okay.

MY SCORE: 6/10

Click here for my review of Insidious

The Internship

Directed by Shawn Levy.

2013. Rated PG-13, 119 minutes.

Cast:

Vince Vaughn

Owen Wilson

Rose Byrne

Aasif Mandvi

Max Minghella

Josh Brener

Dylan O'Brien

Tiya Sircar

Tobit Raphael

Jessica Szohr

Rob Riggle

Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are luxury watch salesmen that work as a team, because salesmen aren't a bunch of heartless cutthroats. It's okay for me to say that, I was in sales for five years. While I'm at it, let's address me going with the actors' real names instead of their characters' monikers. It's something I almost never do. However, let's keep it real. This is the same Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson we always get. 'Nuff said on that front. Turns out, the company they peddle time pieces for has abruptly shut down. A few nights later, Vaughn is job surfing online when he decides to google "google." Bada-boom, bada-bing, he and Wilson are now part of a highly competitive internship program on the campus of the search engine giant. The winning team of interns will earn full-time gigs. Of course, our heroes have no tech experience at all. Wilson doesn't seem able to turn on a computer. Vaughn can surf the web, but is pretty computer illiterate, himself. Of course, they wind up on a team of misfits. A really long commercial ensues.

If you've seen the trailer for The Internship then you know I'm not kidding about this being a commercial. Hell, the trailer is essentially a commercial for the commercial. So how do they flesh things out? We start with a live-action version of Monsters University. No, I'm serious. Same basic plot, same stock characters. Swap out John Goodman and Billy Crystal for Vaughn and Wilson, respectively. Add a few cuss words, a love interest for Wilson, a scene in a strip club, slap the Google logo all over everything, have everyone speak of the company with great reverence, and voila!

You just want to know if it's funny, right? In spots. Vaughn does his usual fast-talker schtick while Wilson does his normal routine. If you find either or both of these guys funny then you'll find things to make you laugh, potentially lots of things. It helps if you're in their general age group. Lots of the jokes center on the generation gap between them and their fellow interns. When the team is given a task, our heroes start trying to talk their way through it, regardless of whether that's a useful thing to do, and make lots of reference to 80s pop culture. One reference, far older than any of those is one I found most interesting. At one point, Wilson breaks into a paraphrased and truncated rendition of the legendary Langston Hughes poem "A Dream Deferred." The kids don't get this or most references and go about actually trying to solve the problem. Rinse. Repeat. The flip side of this is that neither Vaughn or Wilson has any clue about computers nor current pop culture. Sort of. For instance, a big gag involves the guys being sent on a wild goose chase to find Professor Charles Xavier. I get that they didn't immediately recognize the name as being leader of the X-Men. I even get that the joke can go on for a moment while they catch up. However, this isn't something you have to be young and hip to know. Even if we ignore the fact that X-Men was one of the country's most popular comic books right when these guys were right in the target audience for such things, and had a Saturday morning cartoon, we still know something impossible to overlook. They have been making X-Men movies for more than a decade and unless I'm mistaken, all of them have taken in hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. These movies have also shown up all over TV numerous times. Finally, our "old" guys know something far younger in terms of being a pop culture phenomenon, The Hunger Games. To be fair, as full of holes as the logic for this scene is, it is one of their funnier bits.

The rest of the cast is filled out with characters we've all seen before in a number of movies. Remember how much I said this resembles Monsters University? Yeah, same characters here, pretty much. We have the cocky and arrogant bully as our bad guy in the competition. We also have the unforgiving authority figure presiding over the whole thing. Just about everyone else is one form of geek or another. Therefore, the story feels like a by-the-numbers job that fails to add its own twist to the proceedings. It just tries to float by on the charm of the two lead characters. They do an amiable job, but can't really make it anything special. It is occasionally funny, breezes by without causing us to think, and just isn't anywhere near as good as Monsters University at doing essentially the same thing.

The Place Beyond the Pines

Bridesmaids

Directed by Paul Feig.

2011. Rated R, 125 minutes.
Cast:
Kristen Wiig
Maya Rudolph
Rose Byrne
Melissa McCarthy
Wendi McLendon-Covey
Elle Kemper
Chris O’Dowd
Jon Hamm
Jill Clayburgh
Terry Crews
Rebel Wilson

Annie’s (Wiig) life is in shambles. The bakery she owned recently fell victim to the recession. She loses her job, gets kicked out of her apartment and the man she really likes only uses her for sex. She does get to be a part of something good, though. Her best friend Lillian (Rudolph) is getting married and has asked Annie to be the maid of honor. Things are all hunky dory until she meets rich girl Helen (Byrne), who also happens to be vying for the title of Lillian’s best friend. Competition inspired hijinks and shenanigans ensue.

Bridesmaids is essentially a female version of a raunchy bromance. Think Wedding Crashers for women. Not surprisingly, it suffers from some of the same maladies that afflicted that movie. There are pockets that are outrageously funny and/or gross, but there are also sections that just drag along through the quagmire of rom-com clichés. Of course, Annie meets the sweet guy who is way better for her than the jerk she’s been pining for. Of course the comedy of errors she commits in trying to outdo Helen for Lillian’s friendship causes a big blowup. And of course you already know how this is going to play out.

Like I said, when the jokes come they work. Most of the credit for this should go to the “other” bridesmaids. Chief among them is Megan played by Melissa McCarthy, most recently of Mike and Molly sitcom fame. Her butch-but-hetero portrayal gets the most laughs. When given the room to breathe she, along with Rita (McLendon-Covey) and Becca (Kemper) tend to crack us up. However, they’re marginalized almost to the point of irrelevance. Instead, we get much more of Annie, Lillian and Helen interacting with one another. The problem is they’re all pretty straight-laced. To create hilarity these characters need the zany ones to react to and be affected by. This makes Bridesmaids and uneven watch. We trudge along to the beat of Annie’s pathetic drum until the rest of the gang pops in to make funnies for a few minutes then pops out again leaving us to be with Annie and her problems again.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not a bad watch. It’s just not as funny as it should be. The pieces are all there for a truly great comedy. They just seem disadvantageously arranged like those of a chess player exposing her queen way too soon. Even after making this mistake, a skillful player can still do some damage and Bridesmaids does. Within this decent but largely forgettable film lies a couple unforgettable scenes. Most notable being the food poisoning. The whole movie definitely does not need to be that, essentially a vomit and poop fest, but it could certainly stand to ease up on the ‘woe is me’ vibe we get much of the time.

MY SCORE: 6/10

Insidious

Directed by James Wan.
2010. Rated PG-13, 103 minutes.
Cast:
Rose Byrne
Patrick Wilson
Ty Simpkins
Barbara Hershey
Lin Shaye
Leigh Whannell
Angus Sampson
Andrew Astor
Ruben Pla

Meet the Lamberts. They’ve just moved into a big pretty house. Almost immediately things start going bump in the night…and sometimes during the day, too. Mom Renai (Byrne) notices things the most. She whimpers and cries a lot. Dad Josh (Wilson) is almost perpetually on his way out the door and sleeps fairly hard do he doesn’t notice anything at all. Their oldest son Foster (Astor) says he’s scared once then we hardly ever see him again. I guess Hollywood is compliant with child labor laws after all. Speaking of which, there is an infant who’s name I can’t recall. She’s also sensitive to the strange happenings and cries almost as much as her mother. Finally, there’s middle-child Dalton (Simpkins). He seems to be the target of all this paranormal activity. See what I did there? Smooth, huh? He bumps his head, sees something scary and a day or two later slips into a coma. The doctor says it’s not really a coma. He doesn’t know what it is, but whatever. Mom and Dad bring Dalton home so he can be in his own bed during his not-coma and weird things keep going on.

Before I go any further, let’s talk about this house. It’s a gorgeous house with at least two floors of living space plus an attic. All of the rooms are huge including a living room in which their piano looks small. For a family of five, with the parents presumably in their thirties, it’s pretty much a dream house. Mom is an aspiring but non-paycheck earning songwriter. What does Dad do? He’s gotta be a young hotshot exec at some highly successful company, right? No. maybe he’s a lawyer or a doctor? Try again. Pat yourself on the back if you said school teacher. I’m not talking professor at a prestigious university. I’m talking middle-school. Uh-huh. Let’s move on.

As they tend to do in such movies, the noises and sightings intensify. Unable to take it any longer, Mom demands the family move immediately. The very next day, or so it appears, the Lamberts are moving into a smaller but still very nice house they’re leasing according to the sign on the lawn. Seriously, what district does this dude teach in? Anyhoo, in their new-new home there’s more random noises and sightings of grumpy looking dudes stomping around. Who ya gonna call? Momma-in-law (Hershey) has been hanging around the new-new place and is seeing stuff, too. She calls Ghostbusters, sort of. It’s really Elise (Shaye) who is a friend of hers who has a pair of geeky employees with lots of equipment. Long story short, we get the revelation we either figured out on our own or already knew because it’s in the trailer. Lady, it ain’t the house. It’s that little snot-nose that’s been lying in bed for the last 40 minutes of this flick. I won’t tell what happens after that because then we’d be getting into spoilers. It’s far beyond me to totally ruin a movie watching experience for you. Maybe.

I will do what I’m here for. I’ll tell you how I feel about all this. If you’ve ever seen a haunted house movie, this one will be less than thrilling. It is even more derivative than most. It feels like a mashup of Paranormal Activity and The Amityville Horror with a heaping helping of Poltergeist thrown in. At this point, the entire sub-genre can only be so creative. This one merely regurgitates what it got from those others without the tension carrying over. It never grabs you. The whole thing feels more hokey than scary. It doesn’t help that this set of apparitions is comparatively impotent. They pace back and forth, hide in corners and occasionally reach for someone. Sadly, it’s painfully obvious they’ll never get there. Worse, they look like they know they’ll never get there. The last scenes provide some intrigue and is a decent setup for a sequel. It’s just not a sequel I’m particularly anxious for.

MY SCORE: 5/10

Sunshine

Directed by Danny Boyle.
2007. Rated PG-13, 107 minutes.
Cast:
Cilian Murphy
Chris Evans
Rose Byrne
Michelle Yeoh

Fifty years into the future the great sustainer of life, the sun, has started dying. Eight scientists/astronauts are on their way to the fading star with a giant nuclear bomb strapped to their ship, the ominously named Icarus II. They hope to release the bomb into the sun, then detonate it in hopes of reigniting it and save mankind from freezing to death. We learn that seven years earlier the same thing was attempted by a crew aboard what else? The Icarus I. No one involved was ever heard from until our heroes pick up their distress signal. There are decisions to make, tempers to calm, emergencies to quell and consequences to deal with. All of this is handled well as the opposing forces of selfishness and selflessness. In the bigger picture, there’s also man’s will to survive vs. God’s plan. However, if you’re paying attention and have seen the Ridley Scott classic you’ll notice a number of references to [i]Alien[/i]. It feels like a nice homage at first. I was hoping it was just that and not a sign of things to come. After all, the tension from such an inherently dangerous and important mission is more than enough to carry the movie. Alas, directory Danny Boyle can’t control himself and we find ourselves suddenly thrust into a very weird space-monster movie. Lame.

SCORE: 5/10

X-Men: First Class

Knowing

Directed by Alex Proyas.
2009. Rated PG-13, 121 minutes.
Cast:
Nicolas Cage
Chandler Canterbury
Rose Byrne
Lara Robinson
Nadia Townsend
Alan Hopgood
Alethea McGrath
Ben Mendelsohn

Way back in 1959, a grade school class does one of those time capsule things. You know, they all put some crap in a tube and bury it and some class in the future will dig it up. One student, a particularly odd little girl, leaves a page full of seemingly random numbers. Fifty years later, the capsule is indeed unearthed and said page winds up in the hands of college professor/single dad John Koestler (Cage). He soon discovers that the numbers actually lay out the exact dates and death tolls of “every major disaster in history.” Somehow, this is all on what appears to be a standard 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper, maybe an 11 x 14 but, whatever. And the fact that he seems to be a functioning alcoholic who made this amazing discovery during a night of drowning his sorrows in a bottle of wine is never addressed either, but I digress.

The real dilemma is that there a three dates that haven’t happened, yet. According to the new holy scroll, they’re approaching fast. Koestler tries to investigate the origin of the paper and what could happen next. There’s also some jazz about his relationship with his son that we’ll talk a little more about in a moment and his relationship with his own father. That second relationship could’ve easily been cut from the movie and it wouldn’t have skipped a beat.

The relationship between Koestler and his son is all a setup for a meant-to-be tear-jerker ending. It doesn’t do its job. If it jerks your tears then your tears must be very easily jerked. It also works toward two big special fx sequences. They’re both nice, the one involving the train is better, but nothing we haven’t seen before.

It’s equally intriguing and cheesy. Unfortunately, these things seem to counteract one another instead of working in tandem. So just as it seems to be getting interesting, something silly happens, not in a good way. This occurs repeatedly. Fortunately, star Nicolas Cage has all sorts of experience in similar movies and carries us through with his usual flair for going just enough over the top to be fun.

As far as disaster movies go, it puts itself in a bad spot. It never commits to the absolute nihilism of [i]2012[/i] and its premise is too flimsy to really inspire the type of deep thought it wants to.

The Opposite View: Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

What the Internet Says: 6.4/10 on imdb.com (7/27/10), 33% on rottentomatoes.com, 41/100 on metacritic.com

MY SCORE: 5/10