Category: Reviews

Who Do You Love

Directed by Jerry Zaks
Starring Alessandro Nivola, Jon Abrahams, Chi McBride

Growing up in suburban southern California, I can’t say that I had the most grounded musical education. My dad loved the Beatles, but my untutored ear preferred the red greatest hits album to the blue one, and I didn’t start listening to non-top 40 stuff until it was considered cool and “edgy” to listen to Dr. Drew and the Poorman late at night on KROQ.

Much later, I was fortunate enough to meet three different guys who while romancing me, showed me that here was more to music than what gets played on the radio; now, I’m quite proud to say that I carry a pretty eclectic mix of songs on my iPod.

This is my way of saying that while I know that rock and roll was born from the blues, I don’t really know it the same way a true music aficionado does—which is why I’m glad to have seen a little part of how the rock and roll craze all started.

Who Do You Love, the story about the earliest days of seminal recording label Chess Records, debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008 but hasn’t been put into wider release until now. A large reason behind that could be that just months after the festival ended, Cadillac Records was put into wide release, a movie which also focuses on much of the same subject matter, but features a more mainstream cast. I’m not going to compare the two movies—although I really should—because I think that this one deserves to be judged on its own merits.

The movie begins at a Bo Diddley concert in Brooklyn in the 1950s, but the actual story begins in Chicago during the Great Depression where two Jewish brothers named Leonard and Phil Chess are captivated by a man pan-handling and playing the blues. It’s obvious that Leonard is more captivated by the music than his brother is, and it’s an obsession with the “Negro music” which leads them to sell the salvage yard they inherited from their father in order to open up a nightclub on the South Side.

Leonard (played by Alessandro Nivola) is presented as the more driven of the two, and much is made of his “ear” for talent. As such, he becomes our main character and Jon Abrahams as Phil gets to be the straight man. Rounding out the trio is Chi McBride as Willie Dixon, the brothers’ self-proclaimed tour guide into all things “Negro.”

Eventually, the brothers start their record label and the movie introduces its audience to legendary blues musician Muddy Waters (David Oyelowo) and someone the movie is calling Ivy Mills, but everyone knows is supposed to be Etta James (Megalyn Echikunwoke). It’s during the section that focuses on the Mills character where the movie turns from being a conventional musical biopic and strays into Lifetime TV movie territory by depicting an explicit romance between Mills and Leonard at the expense of his marriage to his long-suffering wife Revetta.

The most interesting thing about Who Do You Love is the movie’s portrayal of Leonard. All throughout the film, he is presented as being a smart, streetwise fellow, whose unusual negotiation tactics unfortunately do nothing to blow apart the stereotype that Jewish people are cheap and conniving. As the real Leonard Chess died from a heart attack in 1969, he’s allowed to have the flaws that seem to be missing from Phil’s character and were blown completely out of proportion in the James analogue’s or maybe even Muddy Waters’.

I can’t think of an actor I hated, not even Marika Dominczyk’s Revetta because I could empathize with her plight. She originally loved and married a man with a stable, quiet job and found herself married to one of the biggest names in the music industry. That’s enough to put strain on any marriage; add in the fact that the movie takes place during a time where women weren’t supposed to have any ambitions other than having a nice, stable home life, and there’s a recipe for disaster.

It’s been almost 12 hours since I’ve seen this movie, and yet as much as I liked it and as much as I laughed and bopped my head to the lushly-filmed musical interludes, for some reason I can’t scrape up a completely glowing recommendation. I suspect the largest reason why is because you can never really believe that the story is entirely true due to the creation of the Mills character.

If you really wanted to learn more about the blues, the birth of rock and roll, the music industry, and/or race relations during the 1950s, there are other better documentaries that you could watch. If you really wanted to see a compelling drama about the redemption of a workaholic, again, there are better movies you could watch. In other words, if you’re doing anything on April 16 when this movie goes into limited release, I don’t think you need to change your plans.

Who Do You Love is currently not rated, but if it were, it would get a soft R due to numerous uses of the word “motherfucker” and scenes of female nudity. No, the two things are not connected, you pervs.

Män som hatar kvinnor (“Men That Hate Women”)
aka The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Directed by Niels Arden Oplev
Starring Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Sven-Bertil Taube

Two months ago, we learned that there would be an English-language film adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which is the first in a planned trilogy of novels knows as the Millenium trilogy. At the time I said that I hadn’t read the book yet and that there was no work on when the original Swedish-language film adaptation would be released by Music Box Films.

Luckily, we now know that it will be going into wide release on March 19 and I got to see a preview of it last night. And I have to tell you perfectly honestly:

The executives at Sony Pictures are nuts for wanting to remake this film.

Why go to all the trouble of hiring someone like Steve Zaillian to write the script when there’s a perfectly decent adaptation of the novel by Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg? Why hire a new director when Niels Arden Oplev has already spent the time directing fine performances from his stars Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace?

I still haven’t read the book, but I can tell you that a friend of mine who has read it and went with me to the screening said that though parts were cut out, he could understand and see why they were in the pursuit of trimming a 572 page hardbound book into something that is a good feature length without having to switch reels too often.

Let me break it down for you, but not too thoroughly: Nyqvist plays Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist who is about to serve a six month prison sentence for libel because he’d printed something about a huge conglomerate that ended up not being true. Except, his publisher and some of his friends at the magazine/newspaper (which is called Millenium, hence the name of the trilogy) believe he’s been set up to take a fall but there’s no proof.

Meanwhile, punk-gothic hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) has been hired by rich industrialist Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) to do a thorough background check on Blomkvist because Vanger would like to hire him to look into the disappearance of his beloved niece Harriet who disappeared from the secluded family island 40 years ago. He believes that she’s been murdered and he wants to finally know for certain what happened to her.

An interesting thing about how this movie is paced is that Blomkvist and Salander don’t even meet until well after the first act of the movie is over. I am not irked at all that the movie takes its precious time getting to their first in-person meeting because of some important scenes that take place which may wind up sending those whose PTSD is easily triggered by scenes of violence and sexual abuse upon women into a severe state of shock.

Another interesting thing about how this movie and the original book is titled is that it gives away a major theme surrounding Harriet’s disappearance. However, because the English-language book title focuses more on the crime and romance novel system of similar naming in a series, it easily gets lost in the shuffle.

The third most interesting thing about this movie is that even though certain plot points were telegraphed and composer Jacob Groth did a damn fine job of making me cringe with his musical cues during scenes where I knew that there would be an unpleasant surprise, I did not care one whit about the translucency because it was just so entertaining. The audience of fellow members of the press, Academy members, and other associated film industry folk seemed to agree with me to the point of breaking out into tension-relieving laughter after such a scene close to the climax.

The fourth most interesting thing about this movie is that even though it’s most easily classified as a classic mystery, it’s also just a bit noir, just a bit revenge flick, and there are even romantic elements that made my heart go pitter-pat. I can only imagine that the book’s even better.

And though it’s not the last, the final thing I’ll mention as being so damn interesting about this movie is that even though there are some truly evil characters in the movie, I didn’t hate a single one of them. All of them were necessary to the plot, all of them added to the weight of the movie’s themes, all of the actors did a fine job portraying them.

I do have to admit that for the first 30 minutes of the movie and every now and then when something showed up in the movie that was just so non-American that it made me pause I found myself thinking of how one would translate what was happening on the screen to an American audience. I quickly gave up because not only was I drawn into the movie so deeply, I was also struck by how important it is that this movie takes place in Sweden complete with the Swedish culture.

It is supremely important to Lisbeth’s character that she has been thrown into a system where your probation officer also directly controls your finances. It is so very vital to the plot that though Blomkvist has been found guilty of libel and will be serving a prison term that he is free to travel to places that are connected to Harriet’s disappearance.

If I don’t want to undertake the mental gyrations necessary to translate that into something that the average movie-going-American-who-hasn’t-read-the-book would understand, why even try? Why does the Hollywood system underestimate its audience’s ability to empathize with people who don’t speak the same language we do? Oh, that’s right… we can’t even understand or empathize with the culture of a country whose citizens mostly speak the same language we do.

Still, if my single five-star review can get even one of you to run to the nearest town that will be showing this, then I’ll not have written these words in vain.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has not been officially rated but I’d say it will get a hard R due to language, scenes of graphic violence and female frontal and human rear nudity. And yes, some of that graphic violence involves women and sexual situations, so those who are easily triggered by that need to be warned as well.

Valentine’s Day

Directed by Garry Marshall
Starring Ashton Kutcher, Jennifer Garner, Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx and more

Despite only having been a New Yorker for six years, I think I embody some of the more stereotypical traits of one. It all started at the Valentine’s Day pre-release screening at the AMC Lincoln Square where I’d found the perfect single seat. It was located right in front of the wheelchair seating area, which is perfect for me because when you’re as short as I am, you really don’t wany anyone tall sitting in front of you. One guy was holding a seat next to him and there were open seats on either side of us. However, no matter how often we were asked, we refused to move over to put two empty spaces next to us because, hey—! If you’d wanted good seats, you should have gotten to the theater early.

When the guy’s friend returned, we started griping about the people who’d expected us to move, rude people in movie theaters who can’t stop yakking through the feature, people who leave their cell phones on ring mode—or worse, who send text messages during important scenes.

When the lights went down and the opening credits rolled, I mentally prepared myself for the kind of schmaltzy romp that often marks this kind of romantic comedy. What I saw instead was a credits sequence that immediately reminded me of L.A. Story, one of my most favorite movies of all time.

And that’s when I fell in love.

I imagine that when it came time to cast this movie, director Garry Marshall (Pretty Woman, Georgia Rule) and producers Mike Karz (Malibu’s Most Wanted, Good Luck Chuck) and Wayne Allan Rice (Suicide Kings, Chasing Liberty) just went through their Rolodex—or maybe just browsed their Contacts on their iPhones or BlackBerries—and called almost everyone they knew… and they know a lot of people.

The press packet describes the movie as having an “all-star ensemble cast” and with Academy Award winners and nominees like Jamie Foxx, Anne Hathaway, Hector Elizondo, Shirley MacLaine and Julia Robers in key roles, that’s no lie. The statue-winners are joined by other romantic comedy or small screen stars like Ashton Kutcher, Jessica Biel, Topher Grace, Jennifer Garner, Bradley Cooper in the other key roles and the pairings that result are a mix of both the expected and unexpected.

Kutcher is paired with Jessica Alba, to whom he proposes on the morning of a Valentine’s Day in contemporary Los Angeles. On the side, however, is his best friend played by Garner who wakes up in bed next to her handsome lover, a surgeon played by Patrick Dempsey. If by now you’re betting that Kutcher and Garner’s characters get smoochy by the end of the movie, well then you’d be right. Their story is a pretty conventional one and it’s one that Hollywood and romance novels try to sell all the time: it’s always best to fall in love with your best friend.

Next in line is Biel who plays a PR rep for a football star (Eric Dane, aka McSteamy from “Grey’s Anatomy”) who hates Valentine’s Day so much that she holds an annual “I Hate Valentine’s Day” party. That she gets paired up with cynical sports reporter Jamie Foxx isn’t a surprise either, but at least it’s nice to see an interracial couple amidst the sea of Caucasians in the movie.

Just one step below that in terms of predictability is the story of Hathaway and Grace, a pair who is newly dating but get gobsmacked by the ideas of love and romance on this particular Valentine’s Day. I think I liked Hathaway’s character the most out of the women because she’s the most like me, a woman at the beginning of her career, trying to do what it takes to keep afloat. When the romance turns near the climax of the movie, I actually felt so much antagonism towards Grace’s character that I flipped him the bird, right from my seat.

Being an entire generation older that the actors embodying the teen romances (Taylor Lautner with Taylor Swift and Carter Jenkins with Emma Roberts) I mostly tuned out for their scenes, but I can say that any adult who preaches chastity to their kids will be very happy that the steamiest thing that happens is that the two Taylors do a lot of on-screen smooching with their clothes on.

Elizondo and MacLaine play a long-time married couple who care for their grandson whose mother is not in the picture. The casual love they show for each other is grand to see, but then there’s a twist that almost seems like it’s forced just so Elizondo can get out of his house in time to impart some much-needed wisdom to Grace.

But I do have to say that my most favorite pairing is between Cooper and Roberts, mostly because it’s a sweet flipside of the combustible frequent flyer romance between George Clooney and Vera Farmiga’s characters in Up in the Air. I absolutely will not spoil what happens in the end, but watching it made me wish that all meetings like theirs and what happened as a result took place more often and without fuss.

There’s much to be said about the music in this movie, and not just because Taylor Swift contributes the penultimate song “Today Was a Fairytale.” Almost all of the featured songs are covers of classic songs about love, and I have versions of those songs on my iPod right now which meant that everytime a new tune popped into the film, my smile grew wider because it served to emphasize how much this film seemed to be made for me.

By now you’re probably wondering why I like this movie if I can find so many things to pick at about it—and this is just the tip of the iceberg—and I think it’s because even though the stories that are interwoven are so familiar, it’s done in such a deft way and the actors seem to be having so much fun with their parts that the theme of this movies shines through the problematic writing.

(It also doesn’t hurt at all that there seems to be a hearty “Fuck you!” aimed at Proposition 8 supporters in both the middle and towards the end of the movie, and those two scenes just made me feel so warm inside.)

If you find yourself alone on the day, there are worse things you could do than seeing Valentine’s Day which is rated PG-13 for some sexual material and brief partial nudity, oh so very partial, and opens this week on February 12.

Up in the Air

Directed by Jason Reitman
Starring George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, Jason Bateman and more

With the economy just recovering from its second most epic meltdown of the modern age, I’m sure you’ll be wondering if going to see a movie where the protagonist fires people for a living is the smartest choice for your evening’s entertainment. And that’s where you’d be right.

Directed and co-written by Jason Reitman, Up in the Air is not an easy movie to watch. It follows the story of one Ryan Bingham, a “career transition consultant” whose job is to travel all over the country and do what every frightened Human Resources department is afraid to do: fire a whole lot of people all at one time. The job requires one to be impersonal, but engaging; compassionate, but uncaring. It’s requires the finesse of a salesman and the consummate skills of an actor.

Of all the leading men in all the world, Reitman did not choose wrong when he picked George Clooney to play this role. Watching him walk over a dozen people through the stages of grief that follow when they hear they’ve lost their job is almost mesmerizing because Clooney is just so damn charming when he does it. (It’s also interesting to note that according to the San Francisco Chronicle, most of the people depicted being fired were real-life people who had been unemployed and were asked to share their stories of what they wish they could have said to the person who’d fired them.)

He’s also very charming when he picks up a woman named Alex (played by Vera Farmiga) in a hotel bar who travels just as much as he does, and just like that classic scene in Jaws (which Kevin Smith borrowed in Chasing Amy) the two bond over which frequent flier programs are the best, tossing out cards and comparing bonuses the way Quint and Banky compared their scars.

It’s because of what Bingham does for a living that Clooney has to engage the viewer right away and make him and his motivational speaker theories of how a life lived without encumberances is the best life to lead palatable—even enviable. It doesn’t hurt that Clooney’s reputation as a lifelong bachelor helps reinforce the notion that Bingham will never settle down, will never be happy with a stable life, and that’s the way he prefers it.

And that’s another problem with this movie.

This was a tough movie to watch for several reasons. The loneliness that surrounds Bingham’s life is palpable. His home is a sterile one bedroom apartment which looks more like a hotel room than a home, inviting comparisons to the Narrator in Fight Club‘s IKEA-ified home, except more Spartan. You have to wonder exactly what happened to him in his youth to make him prefer a life on the road, and while you do get some glimpses and hints, there’s never enough to paint a whole picture.

Some of the other characters in the movie also had compelling, yet incomplete pictures painted of their lives. Bingham’s sisters Juile (played by Melanie Lynskey) and Kara (Amy Morton) were real people who had accepted that their brother would never really be there for them; and yet, they still harbored the hope that he would. And Farmiga’s Alex… oh, I liked her from the start. Not just because she was a great character foil to Bingham—being the yin to his yang—but she also revealed herself in a small little scene near the end of the movie as being unapologetically and distressingly flawed.

The only really “complete” character we saw was Anna Kendrick’s Natalie and perhaps it’s because she wasn’t in the original novel by Walter Kirn that she’s the most fleshed out. As Reitman and co-writer (and producer) Sheldon Turner write her, she’s easy to hate at first because she’s bringing a young person’s impersonal twist to the very personal world of being terminated and I’m not ashamed to say that I hurt my hands applauding when Bingham delivers a hell of a zinger to her when it’s time to humanize her in the middle of the film.

In fact, there are more than a few plot points that I felt were telegraphed, but then again, I am a smartass writer who likes to guess where movies are going. It makes sense that seeing how people get fired through Natalie’s eyes or discovering that he has a kindred spirit in Alex is the catalyst for some change in Bingham’s life. It makes complete and total sense that he drops a major opportunity to chase after the girl and the life that he has never really wanted.

However, for Ryan Bingham, there is no happy ending. Not yet. Like he has told hundreds of people in the course of his career, what happens to him is the start of something new and unfamiliar. But it’s because the movie never really delves deeply into Bingham’s personality that we never can really empathize with him and his feeling of loss or get a feeling that he is going to ever take the advice that he’s been doling out for years.

That’s the major flaw of this movie. By keeping the source of Bingham’s solitude such a mystery, you’re never really too invested in seeing him re-engage with the world, which is what sealed the deal for me. Yes, I was entertained, yes, I laughed a lot, and yes, there’s a hell of a lot of fine acting going on, but because of its unsympathetic lead, I can definitely say that this is one movie I’m not going to be interested in seeing over and over again.

Up in the Air is rated R for language and some sexual content. The movie goes into limited release in the U.S. on December 4 and opens wider on December 25… which really confuses the hell out of me because do people really want to think about how other people get fired on Christmas Day?

Related Posts: Trailer Watch: Second Up in the Air trailer, Trailer Watch: Up in the Air

The Men Who Stare at Goats

Directed by Grant Heslov.Starring Ewan McGregor, George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, and Kevin Spacey.

If you are a skeptic in any way, shape or form, the I feel that I am honor-bound to tell you that you may hate The Men Who Stare at Goats.

But let me back up for a bit.

Based on the non-fiction novel by Welsh journalist and documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson, Goats tells the fictional story of a journalist named Bob Wilton (played by Ewan McGregor) who goes to Iraq in search of a story to prove to the coward within himself that he matters in the world.

But his journey really begins before he even thinks of going to Iraq when he is confronted by his own skepticism in the form of a “nutcase” named Guy Lacey (played admirably by Stephen Root) who claims that not only can he stop the beating heart of a hamster, but that he was once a part of a secret platoon of psychic warriors that operated within the U.S. army out of Fort Bragg.

What follows is a great non-linear tale full of characters and situations that you have to keep reminding yourself is based in reality, which is why being a skeptic may be detrimental towards getting any bit of enjoyment out of the film.

I give full-credit to screenwriter Peter Straughan for crafting a strong narrative against which the struggles of our everyman Wilson are compared and contrasted. I also give full-credit to director/producer Grant Heslov and rest of his team for assembling such a great team of actors who don’t just portray their roles, the actually inhabit them.

Cast against McGregor is George Clooney who plays Lyn Cassady, supposedly the greatest of the secret “Jedi Warriors” and the other character whose journey from hero to fallen hero and back again we see contrasted against Wilson’s. Cassady is a true believer, and due to how earnestly Clooney portrays him—and a little bit of practicality during the earliest scenes between Wilton and Cassady—by the time the story reaches the part seen in the trailer where he makes a goat keel over, you are completely drawn into him. Of the rest of the cast, special consideration goes to Kevin Spacey, who does a great job portraying nominal antagonist Larry Hooper as actually having emotions other than jealousy and spite. (Then again, this could be a bit of wishful thinking on my part because I enjoy seeing Spacey in morally ambiguous roles where he is neither the out-and-out villain nor the overwhelming good guy.)

If there was a part of the movie that felt flat to me, it was the scene where two teams of self-centered security contractors in Iraq shoot each other up in a case of mistaken identity and end up foisting the blame onto the locals. Even then, that scene was necessary towards getting the audience to believe in the original goal of the Jedi Warriors which was to engage the enemy in a more honorable and non-lethal form of armed combat.

And that’s what this movie is about: beliefs and convictions, the inner struggle to uphold them, what happens when negative emotions corrupt them, and how one holds onto them when almost everyone around you seems to have given up.

Wilton ruminates on this very matter in a piece of narration somewhere towards the middle of the film because by that point, he’s been almost kidnapped, shot at, lost in the desert, and weakened by dehydration as well as the firm belief that he is going to die without proving himself. He wonders why he chose to follow Cassady and even if it wasn’t explicitly stated in the voice-over, you can tell that Wilton is just hoping for something good and righteous to enter his life.

In the end, The Men Who Stare at Goats is a really funny little morality tale that one really must see—and stay through the credits for the disclaimer—to believe.

The Men Who Stare at Goats is rated R for language, some drug content and brief nudity. The film hits US and UK theaters on November 6.

Last week, I linked to Jezebel.com and one of their writers’ sarcastic reaction to a scene at the end of the red band trailer to Observe and Report, the latest Seth Rogen movie, directed by Jody Hill. The scene in question has Seth Rogen pumping away at an unconscious Anna Faris in bed, who stops but then starts having sex with her again when she says, “Did I tell you to stop, motherfucker?”

After saying that I was sure that I would never see a movie that has a scene like that in there for comedic effect, I was then challenged by Gordon to put my money where my mouth is. His point was that I shouldn’t be a dick like Joel Siegel—who famously walked out of Clerks 2 40 minutes into it during a press screening—and have prejudices against a movie I’ve never seen. I agree that having such prejudices is wrong if you want to be a movie critic or journalist, so I agreed to watch the movie and report back to you all this week.

But before I talk about the scene in question, let me talk about the whole film, and there are going to be spoilers galore. First off, I had no idea that Rogen’s character Ronnie Barnhardt is bipolar, and that had an effect on how I viewed the film. The first time I saw him taking his daily meds, I felt a frisson of uneasiness because I once drove from Baltimore to Washington DC with a bipolar person who was having a manic episode because he’d forgotten to take his meds at a certain time, and the experience made an impression on me. I understand that not all bipolar people are like this person I knew, but I can’t help but view the character through that perspective.

All throughout the film, I felt both impressed and disgusted by Ronnie. I was impressed when he shot so well at the firing range because I admire people who have that ability, but I ended up being disgusted when instead of taking his drunken mother to her bed and tucking her in, he just put a blanket over her as she lay passed out on the floor.

I was disgusted and impressed with him all at the same time in every scene where he was speaking to Nell, the cashier at the Cinnabon rip-off place because here was a sweet girl that he was kinda being dickish to without even realizing it, but she still saw something in him, and I could see that her role in the movie was purely there to serve as a foil for Anna Faris’ Brandi.

In this week’s episode of “This American Life” (for which I recorded a story; check it out here; end shameless plug) Ira Glass said that he’s most interested in stories and narratives where the people in them change. There are lots of things that happen to Ronnie Barnhardt during the movie: he semi-successfully asks out the woman of his dreams, knocks out a bunch of toughs who are about to kill him in the bad part of his town, tries and fails to complete an application into the police academy, goes on one of the most wicked and impressive drug benders I’ve seen on film, gets betrayed by his best friend, and finally catches the flasher that started the whole mess.

But do I feel as if Ronnie will be a changed person as a result of these events? Absolutely not, and that ultimately makes him a less empathetic character to me. Even at the end of the film, he is still posturing, still arrogant, still a dick, but this time he’s got everyone else around him affirming and agreeing that he should continue to be this way.

This doesn’t mean that this isn’t a funny film, because there are some genuine “LOL” moments; my favorite was when Ronnie was delivering a very overwrought monologue, stopped in the middle because he’d messed up a line, and then kept going. It was such a surprise and such a breaking of the fourth wall that it really made me chuckle. But as for me, I don’t think that those small, individual moments add up enough for me to say I really liked it as a whole.

As for the sex scene between Ronnie and Brandi and what lead up to it, I am still disgusted by it, but for reasons that are way more clear. The way he asks her out is kinda creepy because he traps her into getting into his SmartCar and won’t let her out of the car until she says yes. Don’t get me started on the “playing with her hair” thing.

When Brandi sees him taking his meds, she asks for some because she knows that it’s “the good stuff” and he ends up giving her the whole bottle because he wants to impress her. WTF? If he’s been taking this medication for as long as I suspect he has been, he knows that you should never stop taking it until your doctor says you can and you sure as hell shouldn’t be doling it out to other people or mixing it with alcohol—which she did in mass quantities.

Also, if he’s been living with his mother as an adult for most of that life and taking care of her when she’s drunk, he knows that people who are drunk aren’t really responsible for their actions and that the best thing to do is to get them to a safe place and leave them alone.

But instead, they have sex and he takes her drunken consent as actual consent.

And that, my friends, is the most dickish move of all, and again, he never gets told that it was wrong to do so, and by the end of the movie, he already plans on trying to convince his new girlfriend Nell that she should give up on her born again virginity.

I shudder to think of how that scene would get played out.

Related Posts: Link of the day: Observe and Report’s rape controversy