Category Archives: reviews

Movie Trailer World Premiere: “Delivery Man”

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What does family mean to me?

I was posed this question by my friend at Disney, who asked me (along with 532 other “mommy bloggers”) to participate in a unique stunt: to offer the premiere of the official trailer for the new Vince Vaughn movie on our websites. By now, y’all are used to me saying that I DO NOT shill. So, let me start this off by reminding everyone that I don’t shill and that I only write about or promote things of interest to me. Disney didn’t pay for this space and there’s no quid-pro-quo going on. I’m writing and posting this trailer because the topic is of interest to me and…really, if the trailer is an indication, this is a movie that’s got some serious promise.

Before I get back to the question at hand, let me give a brief take on what “Delivery Man” is all about. Vince Vaughn (“Swingers”, “The Internship”) plays the lead – David Wozniak – a bit of a loser, a drifter, someone who doesn’t seem to have his act quite together and who is failing at his attempts to hang onto his girlfriend (Colbie Smulders – whose jumpsuit alone stole many scenes in “Marvel’s The Avengers”). Wozniak’s life takes a decidedly left turn when he’s informed that his decades-prior sperm bank donations prolifically spawned 533 children, 142 of whom are suing the sperm bank so they can find out the name of their dad. Wozniak then stumbles through trying to learn what it means to be a dad by playing “guardian angel” to some of those kids, against the arm-waving advice of his attorney  friend, played by Chris Pratt (“Parks and Recreation”, “Zero Dark Thirty”).

Chris Pratt and Vince Vaughn

Wozniak gets schooled on what it means to be a parent

Clearly, the movie has some classic elements of the typical Vince Vaughn comedy – he pratfalls, he acts the oaf, he does things that make you wince and squirm in your seat because no well-adjusted person would do half of what he does. However, the movie also appears to have a strong emphasis on what it means to step up to the plate to be a dad, even when your family is as non-traditional as they come. Pratt’s character clearly provides not only the voice of caution but also that of experience: playing a dad on-screen, he’s showing what the traditional dad figure looks like, which is a stark contrast to the converted dad played by Vaughn.

Wozniak looks over profiles of his kids

Is this Vaughn’s shot to show he has range?

I can’t truly predict whether this movie will be one-star or four, but I can say that it’s intriguing to see Vaughn try to branch out into something a bit more dramatic. This has the potential to be his “Truman Show”, which displayed Jim Carrey’s solid dramatic chops in a fashion that took seemingly everybody by surprise. Having seen Vaughn be ever so money in “Swingers” years ago, and loving him as the “EARMUFFS!” dad in “Old School” and Wes Mantooth in “Anchorman”, I’d like to see if he has some serious range.

So, then, back to the idea of family…and this is where the whole Vince Vaughn piece really comes together for me. When you’re a parent, you can’t always be serious – it would be too exhausting. Kids want, need, and crave playfulness, humor and a sense that a smile is always around the corner. On the other hand, you can’t always just be a playmate – you have to provide structure and security, things that kids need but can’t create easily on their own. Family structures have evolved so much over generations, and the family image some people loudly deify as “traditional” isn’t even a century old. Go back hundreds of years and traditions involved families run by and around the mothers or grandmothers, families where multiple generations lived under the same roof, and families where children followed only in the footsteps of their father. Well, male children, at least.

What family means to me is the people that I come home to – whether that home is my house or somewhere else. For so many years before I started dating dh, my friends extended the family into which I was born; in addition to my parents and my sister, I had several close friends with whom I share everything but a common genome. Ten years ago, I decided to make a family with my best friend by marrying him, and then we expanded our family further by having dd 3 years later and ds 3 years after that. Our family unit may seem “traditional”, but I think we’re no more or less valid as a family than unmarried couples with kids, families with parents of the same gender, single parents, childless couples…

To me, family is whatever you make of it. It’s the people who support you and who love you, even when you’re driving them up the wall. Family doesn’t have to be one-man-one-woman. Families are based on love, not on chromosomal content.

So, without any further ado, here’s the official trailer for Disney’s, “Delivery Man”, which opens in theaters on November 22, 2013. And before you get any ideas about taking YOUR family to see it, please note that it is rated PG-13 for mature themes, so it’s probably not appropriate for the smallest members of your brood.

  

20 books and 20 lbs (week 26): Can I have progress, maybe?

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After the complete exhaustion brought on by reading Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children”, getting through books 5 and 6 on my list was a complete breeze. In seemingly no time, I finished off both “Let’s Pretend This Never Happened” by Jenny Lawson (aka “The Bloggess”) and “Crash” by Lisa McMann.

Book #5: “Let’s Pretend This Never Happened” by Jenny Lawson

I’ll admit that I wasn’t a huge reader of Jenny’s blog, mostly because I don’t find myself having the time to keep up with all of the blogs that I’d like to read. So, there were some things about Jenny’s life, like Beyonce-the-metal-chicken, where I was just completely out of it and didn’t get the joke. And then I read her book. And not only did I get the joke: I couldn’t stop laughing.

Reading her autobiography, you get the sense of someone who has an incredibly eccentric sense of humor and universal appeal. I know this sounds like a complete contradiction in terms, but Lawson’s ability to make you get why the jokes are funny, to follow along (even when rolling your eyes, like her long “suffering” husband, Victor), to feel like you want to be as cool and quirky as she is. Of course, the complete irony is that Lawson is typically and rather famously paralyzed by attention in social circumstances; as much as she wants people to laugh with her, she’s thrown completely by being surrounded by so many people who worship every word that drips from her fingertips.

Lawson’s story begins with her youth in the uber-rural town of Wall, Texas, and it continues as she meets Victor and they settle into their version of married, suburban life. You see her struggle to find her voice, sometimes reveling in her quirkiness and other times being heavily concerned that others will shun her for it. Of course, these days she need have no fears: the ones who don’t get the jokes can pound sand as they get trampled by the hordes of her adoring fans. And based on how completely enjoyable her book was, and how much I really think I fell in love with her through reading it, you can count me in, too.

Book #6: “Crash” by Lisa McMann

Just a few months after this book was released, it happened to be offered up free at our movie theater the night my girlfriend up the street and I went for a “Moms Night Out”. Always open to trying a new book, especially one that’s free, I picked up a copy and headed for my seat. Thanks to Rushdie, it would be a few months before I’d pick this up. Once I picked it up, though, I tore through it at a remarkable pace – something like 20-30+ pages per night. It’s an incredibly fast read, and that was a really nice change of pace after the slog Rushdie had been.

“Crash” is the first of four books in the “Visions” quartet McMann plans to publish. It centers on a teenager named Jules who is plagued by continuing visions of a crash that will kill her onetime love, along with eight others. Jules questions her own sanity as she tries to unravel the mystery that’s racking her brain and taking over billboards, TV screens, and any other display within range of her eyeballs. At the same time, she struggles to understand her father’s mental illness – his hoarding, the crippling depression, and his frequent inability to deal with anyone else – all while Jules, her mother, and her siblings slave away keeping the family pizza shop afloat.

This is definitely a book squarely aimed at the Young Adult (YA) crowd, and I think this is a good example of how YA doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice quality in the telling of a story. McMann’s writing is definitely targeted to a less mature audience in terms of how Jules’ voice comes across to the reader, yet the book is still appealing to adults who are interested in mysteries, things outside the normal framework of reality, and psychology.

The only area where I thought the book went slightly off the deep end was at the ending of the book. Unfortunately, there’s no way to explain what I mean without giving it all away…so I’ll just say this: it’s not that she sped things up too much at the end, it’s that the ending seemed too much like what you’d hope for, which means that it’s less realistic. Or perhaps I’m just jaded? Perhaps I’ve been reading too much George R. R. Martin recently, but when things turn out how you wanted, I get suspicious.

I would recommend both books – both of them are refreshing reads, in their own way, and both have appeal well beyond a narrow band of readers.

Book #7 is Neil Gaiman’s latest: “The Ocean at the End of the Lane”. I can’t explain how excited I am to have gotten a signed copy. Sure, it seems like Gaiman’s been accommodating enough to sign any book of his that’s set in front of him (which may make him a bit of a rarity in the literary world), but I cherish paper books and the notion that I have a signed first edition of a book that’s surely going to top the bestseller lists just makes my heart swell up (in a good way). I’ll post a review of this book shortly.

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And apropos of nothing, at least related to books, I continue to work on my weight and hope to continue my progress before I punch the ticket on the end of the first half of the year. I probably shouldn’t get greedy – as of Sunday’s weigh-in, I’m down 9lbs from where I was at the start of the year! I don’t know that I’ll get to the halfway point by my final weigh-in of June, but I still consider 9lbs to be quite the victory.

Thanks to the bat-related shenanigans, exercising lately has been nearly impossible; it’s been hard enough just sitting in meetings at work without being sent to the hospital with a suspected case of tuberculosis. Between that and other stuff going on, there just hasn’t been the time. Or the motivation. Or the energy. So, I have to work on all that too – the weight won’t come off on its own and I fully get that. Back to the drawing board again, I suppose…

Movie Review: “Monsters University 3D”

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Monsters University

  

In a time when sequels and reboots abound, Pixar decided to breathe a little new air into the “Monsters, Inc.” universe with a prequel to explore how Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) and James P. “Sulley” Sullivan (John Goodman) became friends. When we first saw Mike and Sulley in “Monsters, Inc.”, they were an unbeatable “Scare Team” at Monsters, Inc.: a company that harnessed frightened children’s screams to generate power. “Monsters University” opens with a fresh-faced Mike as an elementary school student on a field trip to Monsters, Inc. It’s on this trip that Mike falls in love with the idea of being a “Scarer”, and he’s encouraged by one of the hot-shot scarers to go to his alma mater: Monsters U.

  

Mike Wazowski arriving at MU

  

Fast-forward a few years, and Mike is now a retainer-mouthed freshman at Monsters University, majoring in Scaring. His roommate is the terribly insecure Randy (the character of Randall, reprised by the remarkable Steve Buscemi), whose chameleonic powers are exceeded only by his creepiness. As Mike attends his first scaring class, he’s introduced to the most powerful person on campus: Dean Hardscrabble (played delightfully by Helen Mirren). The Dean has a warning for all potential scarers: failure to pass the semester final exam will result in expulsion from the Scaring program.

  

Mike Wazowski vs Dean Hardscrabble

  

Mike hits the books, while classmate Sulley spends all of his time partying with the alpha fraternity, RΩR (pronounced “Roar Omega Roar”), led by BMoC Johnny Worthington (Nathan Fillion). Come the final, Mike knows all the theory forwards, backwards, sideways and down but lacks the technique to pull off a true scare. Sulley, riding the coattails of his father’s legacy, has the roar without any of the book-smarts. It’s easy to see where “Animal House” provided ample material for Pixar; there’s even an (accidental) guitar-smashing moment that’s vaguely reminiscent of Bluto’s run-in with a guitar during the Delta House’s toga party.

  

Oozma Kappa Fraternity

  

When the two are dropped from the Scaring program, Mike blames Sulley and charges out on his own to win back his shot at being scary through the “Scare Games” – an inter-fraternity scaring challenge that’s some kind of Pan-Hellenic nightmare tour. Requiring a Greek sponsor, Mike and Sulley join up with OK – Oozma Kappa – the misfit fraternity that’s clearly chronically under-recruited and undesirable. This is where the movie mines the “Revenge of the Nerds” oeuvre rather liberally, with results as satisfying as those when Lambda Lambda Lambda went up against the Alpha Betas in the Greek Games.

  

Roar Omega Roar

  

There are still challenges left for Mike and Sulley, but most of those revolve around the pair’s complex relationship: built first on mutual dislike that eventually turns into respect and true collegiality. You see the delicate machine of their Scaring Team come together brilliantly by the end of the film, and the pair really learn how to leverage each others’ strengths to win – together.

  

Scare Games

  

While Mike and Sulley’s story is satisfying from a perspective of “Ah, this explains everything“, it’s not exactly original – and that’s really the only issue I have with the film. I came out of it having definitely enjoyed myself, but it was all too easy to see where the filmmakers had taken a bit too much inspiration from teen/college/coming of age movies that came before – “Animal House”, “Revenge of the Nerds”…even “Carrie”. At least Dean Hardscrabble wasn’t the fool Dean Wormer was, but it’s impossible to imagine Helen Mirren ever playing the fool. “Monsters University” was an enjoyable and amusing film, but it lacked the originality and spark that so many prior Pixar films showed (including the original “Monsters, Inc.”).

  

From a technical perspective, I have to say that this was a delightful view in 3D. I’m sure that it’s fine in 2D, but the depth and scale of both the characters and the Monsters University campus really stand out far more with the very well-done 3D. The voicework is fantastic, with the reprising actors (including Crystal, Goodman, and Buscemi) all turning in great performances.

  

The movie is rated G – raising the natural question: “Should I take my kids to see Monsters University?” I can’t speak for all kids, but for little ones that had no trouble dealing with the scare factor in “Monsters, Inc.”, “Monsters University” should be fine. I actually found this movie less scary than the first movie in the franchise, so I’d say this movie should appeal well to little ones and grown-ups alike. “Monsters University” is preceded by a really fantastic short film – “The Blue Umbrella” – providing ample reason to make it to the seats on-time.

  

3 out of 4 stars

“Monsters University 3D” opens nationwide on June 21, 2013. This movie is rated G (General Audiences).