BEFORE: My wife and I have been planning a late October getaway that would take us on a road trip from Dallas to Nashville, hitting the last day of the Texas State Fair, and as many BBQ restaurants along the way as we choose to deem acceptable. I know there's plenty of great food in Memphis and Little Rock also, thanks to all the BBQ and other food-related shows I watch. We're just a little short on ideas about fun things to do in Nashville, since neither of us care for country music, but I'm sure something will come up. By then we should be really close to Halloween, so we could just find a haunted hayride or a spooky pub crawl and be done with it.
But this does affect my plans a little bit - I've got to stay on track now so that I can take the time off. Plus when early October comes I may have to watch 2 or even 3 films per night for a while so that I can have a free week at the end of the month. I'd already stripped down my horror-movie plans to allow time off for New York Comic-Con, and I already had a few free October days at the end, so now I just have to make sure that I can clear a whole week. It should be fine.
Zach Galifianakis carries over again, this makes three in a row for him, and tomorrow I make it four before moving on to other things through another link.
THE PLOT: A suburban couple becomes embroiled in an international espionage plot when they discover that their seemingly perfect new neighbors are government spies.
AFTER: I think part of the problem with my last two films was a lack of contrast - if every character in a movie is weird or off in a similar way, it does create a constant tone, but without contrast a story can seem a little flat. In "Masterminds" every character was bumbling or eccentric, and it's a mistake sometimes in comedy to think that "more is more" when it comes to making things silly. When you have contrast, there's a greater chance for conflict, and comedy comes from that. So here we have Zach Galifianakis playing a similar character - he's well-intentioned, naive, bordering on dumb, but essentially just a regular guy with a normal wife. You put those two up against some super-spies as foil characters, now it sort of feels like we're getting somewhere. We've got someone to compare the dumb nice guy to, someone suave and slick and deceptive, and we've got a game.
Same goes for the wife, she's nice, simple, attractive but not overwhelmingly so, and you put her up against Gal Gadot, now we've got some compare and contrast, it's just more interesting. They can now set up a "fish out of water" storyline as the normals get pulled into this world of international intrigue (even though I don't think they ever leave Atlanta, somehow it's still international intrigue).
I feel like I should probably pay more attention to who directed each film I watch - most of the time I don't even bother to look up the director's name, but isn't that vitally important in the end? It seems like when I was setting up the template for the format I've used for almost 9 years now, it seems like I didn't think this would ever come up. But knowing that the director of "Masterminds" also directed "Napoleon Dynamite", and the director of today's film also directed "Superbad", "Adventureland" and "Paul" seems rather important in retrospect. You can't always tell what kind of film you're going to get by considering what that director has made before, but it couldn't hurt to think about that.
In other Jon Hamm news, I'm almost done with the sixth season (out of seven) of "Mad Men". I've grown tired of waiting for AMC on Demand to post 4 more episodes every 2 weeks - besides, they often skip episodes (the horror) or forget to make them available at all (lazy!) so I'm going to watch the rest of the episodes on Netflix, even though Netflix does that horrible thing where they start playing the next episode before the credits are done on the one I'm currently watching (very annoying!). But at least this way I can watch them without ads or audio drop-out, there was even one episode on AMC on Demand that put commercial breaks in the MIDDLE of a scene - who the heck edited that?
NITPICK POINT: What person in their right mind, even someone who specializes in Human Resources, have no idea what the company works for even does? I mean, HR is universal, if you know the rules and systems you could work for just about any company, but still, some time in the first week, you would imagine that question's going to come up. If he wants to be good at his job, and understand the issues and specific stresses that the employees of the company are going through, he's simply GOT to know what line of work they're in. For him to be this clueless about it, when he's otherwise capable at his job, just doesn't ring true.
Also starring Isla Fisher (last seen in "The Brothers Grimsby"), Jon Hamm (last heard in "Minions"), Gal Gadot (last seen in "Criminal"), Patton Oswalt (last seen in "Calendar Girls"), Matt Walsh (last seen in "The Do-Over"), Kevin Dunn (last seen in "The Bonfire of the Vanities"), Maribeth Monroe, Bobby Lee (last seen in "The Dictator"), Ming Zhao
RATING: 5 out of 10 shots of snake wine
No comments:
Post a Comment