Five Movies

 The Five Year Engagement with Jason Segal and Emily Blunt. It was funny and sweet while at the same time showing relationship problems in a realistic light; Segal can craft a quality script. However, I would say that the last half hour was Hollywood tripe - in the real world the relationship would have ended where it temp. did in the film. Lisa disagreed and liked it start to finish. I grade this romcom a B+

Casa de mi Padre is a spanish language spoof by Will Ferrell that treads too carefully down the middle; too little comedy to make it worth your while for laughs, not enough dramatic substance to flesh out what what had the makings of a decent story. I'm glad I rented it, but I'm equally glad I didn't pay to see it in the theaters. Grade: C-

I found Intruders to be a genuinely frightening and well done Boogeyman tale. It's the story of two children, separated by language and geography (the boy in Spain, the girl in the UK) who write a story about a figure they call Hollowface, who then enters their world to terrorize them. Lisa was not as enamored of the film as I was, but I thought it was intelligent and, at the very least, certainly well filmed. [Note the brief but intrusive intervention of the Nanny State once NHS is involved; it made me ill]. Grade: B

The worse thing about The Corridor is that one of the actors looks like Bradley Cooper's slightly less attractive brother, and another sports a fake bald head that looks like it was crafted with Elmer's Glue and yarn in my kids Kindergarten class. Beyond that, the movie was OK. Nothing earth-shattering or original: some buddies on a camping trip find an alien 'corridor' in the woods, with predictable results. The bulk of the movie, like I said, was OK, but the opening sequence, where one character has gone nuts and assaults the others over the corpse of his mother, was damn engaging. Grade: C+

I also watched "Ted" one morning. It's ridiculous and low-brow, vulgar and devoid of any plot points you haven't seen 1000x before (well, maybe not the teddy bear on cashier sex; that was new). My verdict? Funny as hell. I LOL'd time and again and had tears streaming down my face. I didn't wet my pants laughing, but that's probably just because I was dehydrated. Grade: A