Movie: Megamind.

I saw Megamind tonight and enjoyed it a lot.  I even really enjoyed the 3D, and I have not been a 3D supporter at all.  (Converted movies look like absolute junk – I saw The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3D a few years ago; it looked awful.  Up wasn’t impressive enough in 3D for me to want to fork over the extra cash.  I skipped Toy Story 3 in 3D for this reason, but now I am questioning that decision, especially since the preview for Disney’s upcoming Tangled looked superb in 3D.)

For game aficionados, Megamind is notable for its portrayal of a super omega named Hal, voiced by Jonah Hill.  I find Jonah Hill pretty revolting to look at these days (due to my fat bigotry), but his voice was very well-suited to the character and he turned in a great voice performance.  If you’re not sure how to act around women, just make sure you don’t find yourself emulating Hal in any way.  He was that oh-so-adorable mix of hapless and creepy.  Eesh.

Spoilers may abound in the comments.

Eat lots of pasta, Pray…sort of, Love yourself more than anyone else in the world.

On Sunday night two of my friends wanted to see Eat Pray Love, the new Julia Roberts movie based on the memoir of the same name by Elizabeth Gilbert.  Having glanced through the book at Borders a while back and therefore knowing what the movie would be about, plus not being a terribly big Julia fan, I wasn’t particularly interested in seeing it.  However, I played the good sport and went with them.

Here is a good logline for the film:

After divorcing her husband because he doesn’t fulfill all of her wildest dreams and make her feel “alive” every minute of the day, a selfish, self-centered woman embarks on a fling with a younger actor and when he doesn’t fulfill all of her wildest dreams either, she takes a year to stuff her face with pasta in Italy for four months, then try to meditate in India for four months, then study with a guru in Bali, where she meets a swarthy Brazilian divorcé and falls in love and doesn’t spend all that much time with the guru anymore because she’s too busy having sex.

From a production standpoint, the film is very nice to look at.  The locations are real and lovingly photographed.  The movie also contains a lot of witty one-liners, thanks to co-writer/director Ryan Murphy, the creator of Glee and Nip/Tuck.  And props to the cinematographer, hair, makeup, and wardrobe peeps for keeping Julia Roberts perfectly groomed and dressed throughout.  Sure, she looked way too glamorous to be believable in the settings her character was in, but that’s Hollywood for ya.  (Even more Hollywood for ya:  the amusing casting of the men in the movie.  The guy who played the supposed schlub loser husband:  Billy Crudup.  The guy who played the young, hot, loser actor:  James Franco.  So who do they get to play Liz’s one true love, since clearly we’re not supposed to believe either of Crudup or Franco is man enough for Liz?  Javier Bardem, one of the few actors today who can portray dangerous masculinity.)

For all the beauty of the movie, though, and all of the exhortations for us to believe that we’re watching Liz’s journey of awakening and self-discovery blah blah blah, I didn’t feel that the film was ever able to convince us (or at least me) that Liz did the right thing in ditching her husband and traveling around the world in search of ~feelings.  There is a brief scene in the movie where Liz and her lawyer meet with Crudup’s character.  He has decided to represent himself, because he believes that Liz is going through a phase and that she’ll eventually come to her senses and come back to him.  Liz tells him they are incompatible.  (Later in the movie she tells others that they got married too young and grew apart…which could possibly be believable, except that Julia Roberts is 42 and the characters were married for only 8 years.)  Crudup doesn’t believe it.  He loves her.  They took vows for life.  Exasperated that he’s not just rolling over and taking it, Liz tells him that he needs to choose a direction for his life.  Apparently he killed all the tingles by dabbling too much and not committing to a life path that made buko bucks.  Crudup cries, with all of the pain of a man whose love has been rejected, “YOU!  I choose YOU!”  To which Liz has nothing to say, because she knows she is doing a monstrous thing and wants desperately not to feel guilty about it.

That’s really what the movie boils down to:  Liz’s journey to find people to entertain her so she won’t have to do any work in a relationship.  She makes friends in Italy, but their relationships seem to be about constant eating and entertainment.  In India she is very bad at meditating, yet she finds a cantankerous (sexually unattractive) older man to hang around with who negs her all the time.  In Bali she is supposed to study with a guru, but then she meets a Brazilian who won’t leave her alone.  I think we’re supposed to believe that he opens her up to love again, but it just comes off as her finding someone who makes her feel a certain way and whom she doesn’t have to do anything for in return.  The really strange thing about this movie is that I thought the men were written and portrayed with deep, real honesty, while Liz was the selfish delusionoid.

OT: Go see Inception.

Inception was so good that I’m hijacking my own blog to tell people to see it.

Comments are open to spoilers, so reader beware if you haven’t seen the movie yet.

…Okay, slightly on-topic:  all of the actors, both male and female, in this movie are beautifully lensed and a pleasure to look at.  However, even though Tom Hardy’s Eames has the devil-may-care alpha swagger, I was most taken with Cillian Murphy’s Robert Fischer.

The most painful LJBFing (for a woman).

Don’t worry, faithful readers.  I haven’t forgotten about the second half of the last post.  Stay tuned.

I saw the movie Just Wright on Friday.  For those unfamiliar, it’s a romantic sort-of-comedy, sort-of-drama starring Queen Latifah, Common, and Paula Patton as a physical therapist, NBA star, and gold-digger, respectively.  Obviously, Queen Latifah and Common’s characters end up together at the end, but not before navigating a shapely bump in the road called Paula Patton.  In this case, Patton’s character’s gold-digging strikes very close to home since she is Latifah’s character’s godsister.

Although the script never fleshes the characters out much beyond the surface, a lot of women will be able to relate to Latifah’s Leslie, who is always passed over by men for Patton’s Morgan and long ago learned to accept that men will always see her as the “friend.”  Common’s Scott is no different:  despite some sparks with Leslie during a chance meeting at a gas station, the minute he sees Morgan, Leslie is but an afterthought.  In practically the blink of an eye, Scott proposes to Morgan, assuring his skeptical mother that Morgan is different from the girls he normally encounters.  The future looks set — until Scott injures his knee during a game midway through the basketball season.  Scott’s agent arranges for a top-notch physical therapist to work with Scott, but when the therapist turns out to be a sexy blonde, Morgan gets Leslie to work with Scott instead.  It’s while Leslie is rehabilitating Scott that Morgan returns Scott’s ring with a note, telling an irate Leslie that she can’t be married to a has-been.  It’s also during this time that Leslie and Scott begin to get closer.

Although nothing unpredictable happens in this movie, it did contain what I thought was one of the most painfully realistic moments that most women have experienced at least once in their lives:  the female version of “let’s just be friends.”  In the scene, Scott asks Leslie why her phone isn’t blowing up with calls and texts.  He points out that in the time she’s been working for him, she hasn’t been going on dates.  Leslie absorbs his observations with dignity and simply says that she’s single.  I’m not sure that any woman can go through this experience without feeling slightly humiliated, especially when the person who has noticed that you’re a romantic dud is someone you’re attracted to.  But Scott unknowingly makes the experience even worse, because he goes on to say (helpfully, I’m sure, in his mind) that Leslie is smart, funny, and attractive.

It’s really the fact that he says Leslie is attractive that twists the knife.  Most women enjoy hearing that they are smart and funny.  If a man whom a woman is attracted to tells her that she is smart and funny, she will maybe feel a little disappointment that he didn’t say more, but she generally will not feel despair.  It’s when the issue of looks enters the picture that women can really be devastated.

Women instinctively know that their looks matter to men and that some men will never be attracted to them because of their appearance.  Much as women hate the priority that looks have, all women want to be considered attractive by men, especially men they’re attracted to.  As a result, nothing is quite so painful as being told you are physically attractive yet the man doesn’t want you.  This is by far the most horrible way that a man can “let’s just be friends” a woman.  A woman can get over “you’re really cool, I like you a lot, but I just don’t see us this way,” but a woman will feel her soul being crushed when a man says, “you are beautiful, but I don’t have any feelings for you.”  Every woman’s next thought is, “If you think I’m beautiful but don’t want to be with me, then there must be something terribly wrong with me.”  Every woman’s brain translates the man’s words as “I would fall in love with and/or have sex with every horrible, lying, ugly, stupid shrew in the world before I would fall in love with or have sex with you.”  It’s not just a rejection of her as a person, it’s a rejection of her as a woman.

Obviously, in the movie, Scott comes around and sees that Leslie really is the right person for him, so all’s well that ends well.  (Although I had to suspend disbelief that an NBA star would marry and, presumably, remain faithful to a woman, much less a woman of Leslie’s size.  I just can’t believe that an NBA star as big as Scott would not have a nationwide harem with svelte “girlfriends” in every city.)  Anyhow, my point is this:  men, if you really care about a woman, don’t compliment her looks directly unless you have immediate intentions to act romantically.  In other words, it’s fine to say “you look nice today” or “I like that dress on you.”  It is NOT okay to say “YOU are attractive” or “YOU are beautiful.”  Especially not beautiful.  I highly recommend not saying “you are beautiful” to a woman unless the next words out of your mouth are “I love you.  Will you marry me?”

P.S.  for the Culture Police types – The movie is a very true PG.  There is next to nothing objectionable in the film other than a very brief, very not-showing-anything love scene between Leslie and Scott.  No language, and Leslie has a very good relationship with her married parents.