BEFORE: This is something of a variation on last night's film, I think - instead of a lying lawyer who is forced to tell the truth, we've got a negative banker, who chooses to say "Yes" to everything.
THE PLOT: After attending a self-help seminar, a man challenges himself to say "yes" to everything for an entire year.
AFTER: Jim Carrey plays Carl, a man who spends his days turning down loans, and his evenings turning down his friends' offers to have fun, choosing instead to stay home and watch movies (and what exactly is wrong with that, I'd like to know...way to alienate your audience!) After another friend convinces him to attend a "Yes"-themed seminar, he decides to turn his life around by agreeing to every opportunity that comes his way.
I understand the concept - two years ago, my boss gave me one of those books about "Things to Do When You Turn 40". I looked through it and decided that I had no use for the suggestions, since I'm not big on swimming with sharks, or skydiving - I'm getting kind of used to being alive, and I'd like to keep it going if I can. But at least it got me thinking about how I wanted to spend my time, and that led to the decision to watch a movie daily.
The problem here is, agreeing to always agree assumes that every situation proposed will be a positive one. And in this movie, even the negative situations turn out to have silver linings. Sure, it's easy to say yes to "Would you like to buy some girl scout cookies?" (HELLZ, yeah!) or when a cute girl says, "Would you like a ride on my scooter?" But what if someone said, "Would you do me a favor and shoot that policeman for me?"
The comic situations here give Carrey a lot of opportunities to act ridiculous and make silly faces, but this is easily the least annoying that Carrey has been all week. I think he finally figured out that instead of playing extreme morons and larger-than-life characters, his schtick has more appeal when he's playing an average guy.
The movie really picks up when Carl and his new girlfriend go on spontaneous trips to random places, like Lincoln, Nebraska. My wife and I have taken to going on random road trips, to previously driven-by towns like Mystic CT, Riverhead L.I., and Rehoboth Beach DE - and I've had splendid times in those places. Next month we head up to Saratoga and Lake George NY, and I don't know a lot about what's up there, but I think we'll make the best of it - if you're with the one you love, I guess it doesn't really matter where you go. Give us a Denny's and an outlet mall, and we'll have fun.
This one kind of won me over, I thought it would be mostly silly, but it had some heart and an interesting message.
Also starring Zooey Deschanel (last seen in "The Happening"), Bradley Cooper (last seen in "The Rocker"), Danny Masterson, Terence Stamp (last seen in "The Real McCoy"), John Michael Higgins (last seen in "Walk Hard"), with cameos from Brent Briscoe (last seen in "The Majestic"), Fionnula Flanagan, and Luis Guzman (last seen in "Q & A").
RATING: 8 out of 10 guitar lessons
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ReplyDeleteAh, yes. The film that revisits the Zen philosophy that powered the core of "Risky Business": "Sometimes, you just have to say 'what the f***?'"
ReplyDeleteI thought this one was pretty weak. It was based on a nonfiction book by Danny Wallace, which I'd read and had the same problems with:
The character is doing something that's completely insane.
It works with "Liar, Liar" because he has no choice. In "Yes, Man," he can simply decline any time he wants to. He just has to have the common sense not to say "Yes. Yes, Mr. Total Stranger. I believe I will give you $100 to inject me in the carotid artery with what you claim is a mixture of heroin and cocaine."
And I'm not a fan of the tired movie cliché where the hero who does crazy, career-ending things is called into the Very Expensive Office of a Very Serious And Stern-Looking Senior Officer Of The Company...who suddenly breaks into a smile.
"I don't know what possessed you to run two weeks' worth of ads with the slogan 'Diet Dr. Pepper: It Will Definitely Give You Incurable Herpes'," he says, clasping our hero's hand for a vigorous two-fisted handshake. "But sales are up 500% and we're taking the campaign national. That's your first task as our new VP of worldwide marketing!"
If you take away the consequences of his actions, it cheapens his experience. If he lost his job and most of his security at the end of the movie but felt as though he'd made an important improvement to his life, we would have learned a lot about this guy.
It's a solid premise, though. It's absolutely true that if your mental attitude is "what's the best thing that could happen if I do this?" will cause more good things will happen to you than if you think in the other direction. It's no lie that most of the best things that have ever happened to me were the absolutely impossible-to-foresee results of saying Yes when it would have been easier to say No.
I don't want to even tell you what I was going to put myself through to make it to a last-minute 8 AM meeting in NYC immediately after returning from a trip to Chicago. It was going to be a true Amazing Race sequence of running from an airport to a bus to a train. I had to accept that if my flight to Boston was delayed by as little as 30 minutes, none of it would work.
But that's what happens when your core programming says "It'll be a pain in the butt, but I should do this. It might be interesting."