Bridesmaids: everyone in the world has now seen Bridesmaids. I saw it in a theater this morning with four people. I'm sure part of the reason that there were four people is because it was 10 AM, but the other part is definitely because we were the last four people to see it.
I really, really, really, really, really, really enjoyed it. It was funny and bittersweet and the one makeout scene between Kristen Wiig and Chris O'Dowd (who, by the way, is super, super cute...really, phenomenally cute and I wish he were in more stuff and not just that Romola Garanimals miniseries I've been meaning to watch) was hot and Jon Hamm and Wendy McClendon-Covey and Ellie Kemper and hooray. I forgive Kristen Wiig for Gilly (so long as she is never ever Gilly ever again).
Then I bought a second breakfast of popped-corn and water (it's like I was journeying to Mordor!) and saw Larry Crowne. I was prepared to like it--I read Dave White's review and thought, "That sounds like everything I ever like in a Tom Hanks movie!"--but it turned out that by the time it was wrapping up, I felt impatient and annoyed and almost like walking out.
I don't think it's just my short attention span talking. There were things I really liked, of course, and Tom Hanks most of all. Sometimes I claim that Bruce Willis was my first crush, but I'm pretty sure it was Tom (Chekov from the original Star Trek clearly, clearly does not count). I can't remember what I saw first, but it seems like it must have been either Splash or Big. Probably not Dragnet: The Movie, which I shouldn't still love as much as I do, I suppose. But I love him, and I'll always love him. I love him particularly when he's corny-ass about America and music and more America, like in Forrest Gump or Saving Private Ryan or even You've Got Mail (big corporate Joe Fox!). But despite the Tom Petty-rich soundtrack, the shots of every race and age and religion sitting on a living room set outside, interacting just like a family, I felt like the movie didn't come together thematically. Or maybe it was just that it didn't engage me. I'd like to blame it on Julia Roberts. After all, she was off-putting and not likeable in a way that suggested she was trying to be unlikable-but-likable and took the corner too hard. But that wasn't all of it.
It's weird. I'm a pretty easy target. I'm a sap. I love when a movie is about how we're all different and we can do it together, even when corporations threaten the very core of who we are, when banks trick us into buying homes we cannot afford, when purple mountain's majesty above the fruited whatnot. But it felt or sounded the way I imagine a novel adaptation screenplay would sound and feel if I wrote it, with my rudimentary understanding of Steinbeck and Russo and...I don't know, name another author who writes about everywhere America and how one lone man fights and triumphs in ordinary, extraordinary ways. You know? Like PAN TO A DOZEN OR SO SCOOTERS THAT, AS ANXIETYGRRL TEXTED ME IN A TOTALLY APT GUESS, STAND FOR OUR FREEDOMS. See, guys if we take both CONVERSATION and ECONOMICS, then together, we can...
...purple mountain's majesty. Fruited. Boo.
Tom Hanks is still great at physical comedy, and he has the same goofy abandon and lack of shame he did when he was in Big. It's not like I hated it. I'm disappointed. I really wanted to be suckered and delighted, and I think I thought too hard and too much about it instead of just laughing at Wilmer Valderrama being a suspicious dinkus.
Ironic, isn't it, that I end on a suspicious dinkus note? I can't claim that it was sloppy or that it didn't do what it set out to do. Maybe I was not in the mood to love America...this 4th of July weekend.
Ugh.
By the way, my favorite trailer was easily the one for One Day, which is not based on the Barenaked Ladies smash single, but instead on some quality paperback I will probably never read. Insufferable almost-parody-quality voice-over narrator exposition? Check. Anne Hathaway being coltishly independent yet cloyingly cute? Check. Britain? Check. Mom dying of cancer? Check. Some irritating overwrought connnnnnncept to keep the lovers apart? Check. I haven't been this annoyed with a trailer since The Romantics (that's right, you all may have forgotten that Katie Holmes is still trying, but I haven't...I haven't...sometimes at night, I can still hear the screaming...the green mile is so long...)
