Movie Box Review

This year has brought us a far-fetched, but ultimately moving and deeply romantic story about a couple who have finally gotten together and married after a great deal of turmoil and who then face their greatest challenge of all:  a fluke accident deprives the wife of any memory of her beloved, and when, despite all his desperate efforts, he's unable to make her remember their past, he sets out, with equal parts tenderness and determination, to make her fall in love with him all over again.

I speak, of course, of the final season of Chuck.

As it happens, the new movie THE VOW tells much the same story, only without the chase scenes and machine gun battles.  Unfortunately the filmmakers also left out the emotional depth and snappy dialogue that Chuck provided.  In their stead, we get much sappiness and almost nothing that's convincing.  

In The Vow's version, Paige (Rachel McAdams) and Leo (Channing Tatum) are 4 years married, and share a marital bliss that only movie couples about to suffer tragedy are permitted.  She's a sculptor and he owns a struggling recording studio; their combined incomes allow them to own a house and studio roughly the size of a city block.  One night a truck rear-ends their car, and Paige is propelled through the windshield in slow-motion (miraculously without shedding a drop of blood).  When she comes out of her coma, she's fine... except that she's entirely forgotten the events of the last 5 years, which includes her entire relationship with Leo.  As much as he lovingly leads her through their things and prompts her with memories, he remains a complete stranger to her.

The people she does remember are those from earlier in her life, and conveniently for the movie's sake, it turns out that this was just about the time she completely changed everything in her lifestyle, leaving law school, the suburbs, her parents (Sam Neill and Jessica Lange) and her then-fiancee Jeremy (Scott Speedman) for reasons that aren't revealed until the end of the story.  Since she doesn't remember the reason she left them, those are the people she now feels comfortable with, and she goes back to her former pre-marriage life.

This is where The Vow almost threatens to become interesting, because the old Paige was very nearly a Mean Girl, a rich, closed-off law student whose friends might as well be named Muffy and Heather.  A movie about a free spirit who retreats to the world of snobbery and creature comforts might have something on its mind, but this isn't that movie.  The script, credited to the team of Abby Kohn & Marc Silverstein (responsible for He's Just Not That Into You and Valentine's Day) and shockingly to the great Jason Katims, of Friday Night Lights and Parenthood (one would like to think his contribution was limited to Leo's recording studio, since it echoes a plotline on Parenthood), makes Paige's parents cartoons of well-off arrogance, and the ex-fiancee is of course an insensitive villain who ultimately has to be punched by Leo.  So Paige's desire to re-enter their clearly inferior world just makes her seem like an idiot, and the explanation of why she moved away in the first place is a silly plot revelation.

Tatum and McAdams are both likable, charismatic performers, and they're all The Vow has going for it (aside from one decent scene for Jessica Lange in the last reel), but they don't have the tools to create characters that aren't on the page.  Tatum mostly looks doggedly puppydogish (taking off his shirt at every opportunity), while McAdams alternates between "puzzled" and "troubled".

The direction of Michael Sucsy, who made the HBO Grey Gardens, is slick and completely lacking in personality, as are the technical credits.  You know a romantic movie is in trouble when the central couple temporarily break up and you find yourself thinking that maybe they really are better off apart; The Vow accomplishes the truly difficult feat of making Nicholas Sparks adaptations look nuanced and convincing.

FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS - Worth A Ticket:  Almost Great

For about an hour, as you watch his new FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS, you could be forgiven for thinking that writer-director Will Gluck is the future of Hollywood romantic comedy.  Gluck came out of TV with the very underrated Fired Up, about a pair of college guys who dress up as female cheerleaders to get girls (I'm serious--watch it on video), and then he had his break-out with last year's terrific Easy A.  Friends With Benefits seems to be well on its way to building on this with an unusually smart, funny romance--until it isn't.

As everyone knows by now, Friends shares its premise with No Strings Attached, the very lame comedy that rode Natalie Portman's concurrent Black Swan stardom to a $71M gross ($148M worldwide) earlier this year.  In both, a couple that isn't romantically involved decides for the sake of convenience to get together for sex, with the idea that they'll be able to keep it separate from any emotional entanglement.  Of course, in both cases that's not the way it plays out.

The dreary thing--OK, one of the dreary things--about Strings was that it never really honored its own premise:  from the start, it was clear that Ashton Kutcher's character had a puppydog crush on Portman's, so the story became a matter of waiting for Portman to be willing to accept emotional commitment and open herself to Kutcher's love.  The script had to come up with psychological issues for Portman to triumph over, and there was hardly any fun to be had in the movie at all.  (Not to mention that it was almost stubbornly devoid of laughs.)

Friends With Benefits, in contrast, delivers on its initial idea.  Dylan (Justin Timberlake) is a magazine designer from LA headhunted for a NY job by Jamie (Mila Kunis).  He's new in town, they're both busy people who've recently been dumped, and they strike up a friendship--then decide that the sensible thing to do is add purely physical sex to the equation, since neither wants to be in a real relationship.  Of course, even while they're denouncing the cliches of romantic comedy (Kunis has a great bit attacking Katherine Heigl movies, and there's even a film-within-the-film that features Jason Segal and Rashida Jones), the two of them are falling for each other, and it doesn't take a prophet to figure out where it's going to end up.  What makes Friends work for quite a while is the very quirky, genial, appealing script by Gluck, Keith Merryman and David A. Newman, which has the kind of old-fashioned snappy banter that nowadays is rare outside of an Aaron Sorkin project. 

It also helps that Timberlake and Kunis actually seem to like each other, and they have real screen chemistry together; it's a relief to watch a big-screen romance where neither of the characters is an idiot, a doofus or a selfish creep with a heart of gold.  Timberlake's been kicking around with his film career for several years now, and he was excellent in The Social Network, but Friends is his first genuine leading man role, and he handles it like a veteran, smoothly hitting all the laughs and carrying off the more dramatic moments.  Kunis, too, has been on the brink of breaking out since she moved over from TV, and she makes a hugely appealing, sexy and often hilarious lead.  Gluck is a casting whiz, and like Easy A, Friends is also loaded with fabulous supporting actors:  Woody Harrelson, Andy Samberg, Richard Jenkins, Jenna Elfman, and Easy A's own Emma Stone and Patricia Clarkson all make appearances.  

So how does it all go wrong?  Gluck and his co-writers can't manage to stick the landing.  After being intelligent and witty and charming for more than an hour, easily convincing us that these two smart people would ultimately figure out that they're made for each other and fall into each other's arms, the script invents melodramatic and unnecessary plot turns to push them together, then break them up, and of course reunite them.  The last reel is cluttered with "call-backs" that repeat scenes and motifs from earlier in the movie in a grindingly obvious way.  Jenkins is forced to more or less replay his role from Dear John, as the movie recycles one of the lousiest recent movie cliches:  the Alzheimer's patient who manages to reach lucidity just long enough to impart some parental wisdom.  Timberlake and Kunis suddenly act in ways inconsistent with their behavior earlier in the movie, just to keep the plot's wheels turning.  By pandering to exactly the same rom-com conventions they ridiculed earlier, Gluck and his team drive their project straight into a wall.

It's sad to watch, because once you're on a movie's side, the last thing you want is to have the filmmakers wrench it away.  And even with its missteps, Friends With Benefits is still worth seeing, the first two-thirds are the most likable comedy of the summer.  It's jsut that when things get bogged down, you might want to consider checking out the next auditorium at the multiplex and watching the giant robots destroy Chicago; it's less painful than watching Friends With Benefits destroy itself.

Today:  PlayStation Central

US Release:  May 13

US Gross:  $29,136,626

Overseas Gross:  $47,367,388

Worldwide Total:  $76,504,014

US Release:  June 24

US Gross:  $65,211,014

Worldwide Total: $93,811,014

 

Sony is having a remarkably quiet summer, mostly letting its lower-budget divisions do the talking. (Possibly the studio is conserving its strength for next year, when it'll have 2 of the biggest mega-busters of the season:  Men In Black 3 and the Spiderman reboot.)  "Lower-budget," of course is a relative term, and Screen Gems' PRIEST cost $60M, which means more like $125M with global marketing.  At that price, a worldwide gross of $76M is bad news.

BAD TEACHER is a more successful example of keeping to a budget.  The studio says the film was produced for only $19M (Cameron Diaz took just $1M upfront), and even with worldwide marketing costs and the traditional softness of American comedies overseas, $94M in the bank with plenty of revenue still to come should make for comfortable profits.

While Sony Pictures Classics is run as a completely separate division within the company, and has only limited territorial rights to Woody Allen's MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, the film is a tremendous hit on its smaller terms, with $35M earned in the US and a relatively puny marketing budget (hardly any TV ads).  It's the biggest specialty release anyone's had since the holiday/Oscar season bonanza.

The studio has run the gamut in its limited number of releases this summer.  Priest was a terrible movie even within its grubby genre, and richly deserved its boxoffice fate.  Bad Teacher is no classic, but it's amusing and likable.  Midnight In Paris may be the best picture released during the first half of 2011.

STILL TO COME

ZOOKEEPER - July 8: A co-production with MGM (Sony is in business with the still-moribund lion through its James Bond deal, which gave MGM interests in several other high-profile Sony releases).  Zookeeper has the good fortune this week of hitting the third weekend of Cars 2, a much weaker Pixar release than it could have anticipated, which could boost its weekend receipts.

FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS - July 22: Another Screen Gems release, this is the better version of No Strings Attached, but coming along second and without the Black Swan-driven star power of Natalie Portman--and with the superior Crazy, Stupid, Love opening a week later--it may not have much impact.

THE SMURFS - July 29:  Counterprogramming to Cowboys & Aliens on the one hand, and Crazy, Stupid, Love on the other, it's not likely to hit beyond its kiddie target audience. 

30 MINUTES OR LESS - August 12:  More low-budget R-rated comedy, although this one has a buzzy cast (Jesse Eisenberg, Aziz Ansari, Danny McBride).  It'll have to hope that The Change-Up, the prior week's comedy with Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman, doesn't have any staying power, which may not be a bad bet. 

COLOMBIANA - August 26:  Coming from yet another low-budget division (TriStar), this is a negative pick-up from the Luc Besson action factory, with Zoe Saldana as the assassin heroine.  This isn't the slot for a picture with legs, but Jason Statham has made a cottage industry out of some quick late-summer dollars here in movies like Crank, Transporter 2, War and Death Race, and since his new Killer Elite doesn't open until Sept 23, there's a brief window for Sony to take those revenues.

THE MONEY:  C, any gains by Bad Teacher are erased by Priest, and Sony doesn't even feel like it is playing in the big studio league.

THE QUALITY:  B-, but they're lucky Woody Allen was on the team.

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