Movies (post Oscar)

After finishing the Oscar movie list I kind of forgot to keep up with my quasi movie reviews. We/I’ve watched a few in the last couple weeks:

The Simpson’s Movie – We didn’t get around to seeing this in the theater and didn’t get around to renting it until now. It was the first Blueray movie we got to make sure the PS3 player worked correctly. Not having an HDTV, it really didn’t make the movie-viewing experience better, but whatever. The movie itself was pretty funny. I’m thinking it’s similar to other “tv-shows-turned-movie” wherein some things are only funny if you’ve seen the original show. Having only watched it once I’m sure I missed many references. I caught enough to appreciate the nerdy-ness of Matt Groening and the other writers. How it is possible for people to remember so many previous things and be able to throw them into a new storyline? One of my friends from college had pretty much every “Simpsons” episode memorized and could spout off dialogue in an appropriate context. While it was kind of creepy, it still amazed me that he could devote so much of his brain capacity to a cartoon show. Oh well. I thought the movie was pretty good even though I seem to recall that the overall reception of it wasn’t too stellar.

The Graduate – Also kind of amazing that I had never seen this movie considering how much of a classic it’s supposed to be. I must say I was kind of surprised. Everything I’d heard about the film didn’t really prepare me for what the actual plot turned out to be. It’s much darker than I anticipated (dude, he totally stalks the poor girl!) And man, Simon and Garfunkel really got on my nerves quickly. It’s an interesting movie with some interesting camera work and sound editing. I’m not sure it’s the masterpiece I expected it to be, but it was better than the semi-related Rumor Has It. Ha ha.

Miss Conception – Ok, so this was probably a bad choice on my part, but this movie was awful. Heather Graham plays a lady who can’t agree with her boyfriend on when to have kids. After kicking him to the curb, she finds out she only has one egg left and will thereafter be as barren as the Sahara. And she ovulates in two weeks so she’d better get moving to find herself a baby-daddy. Oh Barf. She and her two classic side-kick friends (gay male friend, bitter female friend) come up with a foolproof, three-prong plan which (of course) doesn’t work. But wait! This is a comedy! Everything works out in the end even though it negates the premise of the entire film. *sigh* Absolutely nothing redeeming about this film at all. It wasn’t even that funny. And it just makes me nuts when females are portrayed as sperm-hungry mommy wannabees with raging biological clocks.

Scenes from a Mall – I appreciate most of Woody Allen’s work. And Bette Midler has her days as well (although she can tend to get kind of shrieky sometimes.) So I figured this would be a fun movie. While I admit it did start to get tedious towards the end, overall it was a good movie. I want to congratulate whoever came up with the idea of giving a surfboard as an anniversary gift in the first 10 minutes of the film and then requiring the characters to carry this neon green thing around for the rest of the movie. The mime character kind of got on my nerves, but I’m guessing that was kind of the point.

Superbad – I’m afraid this falls into the Napoleon Dynamite category. That movie was so popular and everyone raved about it. I watched it and thought it was boring and had no plot. Now Superbad has a plot, but I really don’t see what all the fuss was about. Entirely too much unnecessary profanity and dirty conversation which takes away from the finer points of the movie (not that there were many.) I mean, the DVD even has a counter feature so you can keep track of how many cuss words and sexual references there are. I suppose this appeals to a certain demographic (hello adolescent males!) but I’m not it. I was just put off by the swearing and the ridiculous storyline. I never went to parties like that in high school. I can’t relate. And unlike American Pie (the original), I just didn’t care whether the guys got any or not.