Meh. I hide decent hope for Robert Zemeckis’s (Cast Away, Allied) Welcome to Marwen. Parts of the trailer looked kind of corny, but so did parts of his trailer (as well as the movie) for Forrest Gump, the Oscar winner for Best Picture in 1994. Zemeckis has also achieved success with unique movies like Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Death Becomes Her, The Polar Express, and more. Combine that with the special talents possessed by Steve Carell (Beautiful Boy, The Way Way Back), and I thought that there was a legitimate chance that the pair could make this odd story work. I don’t think either can be at fault for this rather mediocre film. Sure, there is a story here, but I think it was probably better told in the 2010 documentary Marwencol. Perhaps Zemeckis got a little cocky and thought he could further dramatize a story and turn it into a Lars and the Real Girl type of movie, a film which, despite my original reservations, I ended up loving and a film that I can’t recommend enough. Comparisons between these two movies were made from the first trailer and continued all the way through the movie. Unfortunately, in the end, Zemeckis and Carell could not achieve the same mastery that Craig Gillespie and Ryan Gosling could eleven years earlier. The problems with Welcome to Marwen were numerous and far exceeded most of the positives brought to the table.
Category Archives: Leslie Mann
Vacation (2015)
Forget what the critics say (27% on Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB Metascore 34/100). If you like the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies, I think you’ll enjoy the Ed Helms (The Hangover, television’s The Office) led Vacation. It follows the same formula as the other movies in the series, and it has Ed Helms! Ed Helms is one of the funniest men in Hollywood! He took his bit part in the middle half of The Office and made it impossible for the writers not to keep him. With respect to Rainn Wilson, John Krasinski, and Jenna Fischer, The Office became Ed Helms’ show once Steve Carell exited. Even when his movies miss (The Hangover Part III, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard), it’s not because of him. He keeps these terrible movies from becoming complete zeroes. So how good he misses here as a grownup Rusty Griswold with all nuances of his father Clark (Chevy Chase – Spies Like Us, Three Amigos) and his mother Ellen (Beverly D’Angelo – Coal Miner’s Daughter, American History X)? He doesn’t miss at all. Instead, he crushes it in 2015’s comedy of the year.
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This is 40 (2012)
This Is 40 is an incredibly depressing movie that is not really funny. I love a good, raunchy comedy as much as anyone, but when it’s raunchy and not funny, it becomes dumb. I say this with lots and lots of love for director Judd Apatow. Apatow has written and directed two of the funniest movies of all time (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up). He has also helped produce some of the other major comedies of the last decade, including Superbad, Step Brothers, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Still, this is just the fourth movie he is directed, and one of those, Funny People, was anything but funny. This Is 40 should have been a big hit. Apatow is talented enough to make a movie surrounding this topic into something funny. But ultimately, This Is 40 is a failure. I have yet to talk to someone who has seen this movie and said, “I loved it and can’t wait to see it again.” I’ve heard, “I didn’t like that.” I’ve heard, “I saw it, and I’m glad I saw it, but I wouldn’t watch it again.” My thought on the movie was, “I saw it, and I’m not sure that I’m glad I saw it because, being near 40, I found parts of it to be too real and parts of it to be not real.” I’ll try to explain.
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