Confessions of a Shopaholic - Review

Every Manhattan-set movie or book aimed at women, from Sex and the City on down, has essentially been part of a fantasy world. There are few black people, or poor people, or anyone who can't pronounce Christian Louboutin, and all it takes for success is some wide eyes, a trim waistline, and a fix on the perfect guy.

But Confessions of a Shopaholic takes the whole chick lit package, the candy colored dresses and the personal chauffeurs, to a ridiculous, intolerable new level. Isla Fisher, normally an appealing and capable actress, is reduced to a fluffy pink stereotype here, and all the name-brand talent surrounding her gets shoved into one-line cameos, all to make room for more shopping montages. Setting aside the unintentionally funny moments that remind you how distant this movie is from the economic crisis we're in, Shopaholic is awful in its own right-- shallow and screechy and completely rotten at its core.

Fisher's Rebecca Bloomwood is intended as a lovable goofball sort of character, a less world-weary Carrie Bradshaw, but largely comes across as an idiot as she shops her way into $16,000 in debt, then stumbles into a job at Smart Savings magazine. The editor who hires her (Hugh Dancy) seems about as blindsided by her looks as he is impressed with her talent, and for inexplicable reasons overlooks her complete lack of financial knowledge, bizarre behavior (she's evading a debt collector, you see) and overall stupidity to keep her hired.

And of course, it turns out she's a hit-- because most Americans are as stupid as Rebecca, and we need her to explain finance in terms of shoes and handbags. She impresses the president of the publishing company (John Lithgow, wasted in a stern suit role) and even the haughty editor (Kristin Scott Thomas) of the fashion magazine she really wanted to work for to begin with.

With her life on the upswing Rebecca promises her sensible, slightly kooky roommate Suze (Krysten Ritter) that she'll get her finances in order. But there are balls to attend! And mannequins who actually come to life and coax her into stores. Of course, just when Rebecca thinks she has it all, her personal financial troubles come back to haunt her, and it's up to her to sort things out, win back her man, and give us the generic ending demanding by anyone who bothered to buy a ticket for this.

Most of the intended comedy comes from Rebecca's various pratfalls, which include hiding in a clothes rack to steal back a letter, fighting other women at a sample sale and diving across the table to answer the phone. In most movies these kinds of slips endear us to the female character, but here they only serve to make Rebecca seem like more of an idiot, devoid of all personality except a fetishistic love of shoes. In one scene, Fisher gets to cut loose and dance, showing wild moves similar to what made her notable in Wedding Crashers. But the scene doesn't fit at all with her character, and immediately after Rebecca is back to blank, cute neutral. It's as if Fisher took the reins for one moment and gave actual characterization a shot, but director P.J. Hogan stopped her before it was too late.

Everyone in the movie overacts wildly, with the exception of cool British Dancy, but especially grating are Ritter and the always-hyper Joan Cusack, both of whom bug out their eyes at least twice a scene. The mugging is almost preferable,to the blank presence from so many other actors, including Lithgow, John Goodman as Rebecca's dad, and Scott Thomas, whose customary restraint gets swallowed by the movie's frenetic pace.

There's lots to look at, between Patricia Field's gonzo costumes and Dancy's sparkling blue eyes, but nothing to feel in Shopaholic, other than a deep regret that we ever thought this kind of lifestyle was funny, much less admirable. Sophie Kinsella's books, on which the film is based, were written at the beginning of this boom decade, but feel as antiquated here as a story from the Gilded Age. A better, smarter movie could have let us forget modern troubles and lose ourselves in this candy-colored world, but Shopaholic has too many comedic dead spots and too little wit to carry anyone away.

Horton Hears a Who! - Review

Dr. Seuss’s stories are simple, and their length is not long. His stories are short, yet their message is strong. They’re also spectacularly unsuited for any Hollywood adaptation, as unsuited as I am for Dr. Seuss rhyming and alliteration. They’ve tried it before with live action, and with Horton at least they’ve finally learned that lesson and left the prosthetics abandoned. To make a Seuss story work as a film you’ve got to stuff it with filler, and there’s plenty of that to be found in this new animated attempt at filming his masterful work. It’s a success as a movie, but it still isn’t quite perfect as a Seuss adaptation.

The fact that the movie is freed from the bounds of human actors and props helps though, and Horton Hears a Who! is nearly as visually creative and fun as the Seuss drawings it’s based on. It’s the story that occasionally misses, since they’re building a 90 minute film out of a book that’s really only a few pages. The core of Seuss’s world is there though. This is still the story of an elephant named Horton who discovers a spec. On the spec is a town called Whoville, and its mayor can hear Horton when he talks. Horton vows to protect the tiny spec and its inhabitants, and finds himself harangued and ostracized by the other animals of his jungle who can’t hear the Whos’ voices and so insist he’s a dangerous kook.

Jim Carrey, who achieved dubious success doing a live action version of The Grinch a few years ago, voices Horton. It’s a strange choice really, I thought the reason we liked Jim was for his facial contortions, not his vocal veracity. But he’s capable as Horton, sort of sappy and silly, which plays into the film’s mostly cartoony vibe. Funny is the name of the game here, and Horton Hears a Who! sometimes pushes the moral center of Seuss’s story to the background in favor of being wacky. At least though, it really is funny. The visual gags are entertaining and Steve Carell, as the voice of The Mayor of Whoville is both touching and hilarious. That balances out a lot of the unnecessary pop culture references, MySpace jokes, and Jim Carrey riffing which in a lesser film, might have sent the whole thing straight to the bottom.

In the end, they hang on to enough of Seuss’s smart, sweet message about the importance of life, tolerance, and standing up for what you believe in to leave the movie something substantive to wrap all that silliness around. Horton Hears a Who is fun and enthusiastic, but also sweet and affecting in all the right moments. If you can forgive it for a momentary lapse in the last thirty seconds which turns the whole thing into a bizarre, rock opera musical number, you’ll find a lot to like in Horton Hears a Who!. Dr. Seuss will always be better in book form, but Hollywood has found a way to turn his work into a movie without falling flat.

Hot Rod - Review

Hot Rod stars the best thing modern ‘Saturday Night Live’ has going in Any Samberg, in another one of those awful Lorne Michaels produced scripts. Though it’s not directly based on any specific ‘SNL’ sketch, Hot Rod is more in the vein of The Ladies Man or Night at the Roxbury than Mean Girls, the last time Michaels did anything good.

Samberg stars as Rod, a wannabe stuntman and I suspect, Napoleon Dynamite’s older brother. Like Napoleon Dynamite, the movie is more about laughing at Rod than laughing with him, and there’s plenty to make fun of him for, even if it’s not necessarily funny. Rod’s a pretty pathetic figure, a loser who lives at home with his parents and doesn’t seem to realize he’s an adult. The guy has nothing going for him, and walks through life in a perpetual fog, failing at stunts and crashing in to things. Rod has only two dreams: The first is to become a world famous stuntman. The second is to kick his step-father’s ass. Unfortunately, his second dream is put in jeopardy when he discovers his step-father will die unless someone raises $50,000 for a heart transplant his insurance won’t cover. Rather than calling Michael Moore, Rod decides to jump over 15 buses to raise the money necessary to save his step-dad, so he can beat him to death.

Unfortunately even though the idea of a guy trying to save his father’s life so he can punch him in the face is kind of a funny, Hot Rod doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. The movie resorts to ripping off gags and jokes from other people and doesn’t seem to be able to come up with anything on its own. Rod’s failed stunts are a direct descendent of the stuff Super Dave Osborne was doing on his TV show twenty years ago, and they haven’t gotten funnier with age. The movie rips off dialogue jokes from other sources, for instance there’s a bit in which Samberg riffs with one of his friends on words that start with “wh” which I watched done on ‘Family Guy’ rerun the night before. There’s no way they came up with that on their own. It’s literally just copied from Seth MacFarlane’s show and pasted into the movie. They don’t even try to put their own spin on it.

There are a few laughs in the film, but even those are usually weird homage’s to 80s music videos or bizarre, random rehashes of techniques used in Samberg’s SNL Digital Shorts. I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky that they didn’t try to work a “Dick in a Box” remix in. Actually, scratch that. That might have helped. That song’s just funny, no matter how many times you hear it.

The supporting cast is even more lost than Samberg. Isla Fisher, who was brilliant earlier this year in The Lookout, doesn’t even seem to know that she’s in a movie. It’s never clear why her character is hanging around with a loser like Rod, and she seems just as confused on that subject as we are. Fisher mostly stands around and gives Samberg blank stares, as if she’s forgotten all of her lines and is hoping that if she’s really still no one will notice.

As a comedy, Hot Rod is a big waste of time. Most of the problem is Pam Bady’s script, which sucks and Samberg, who really doesn’t belong in this script even if it was any good. Though there’s not much to work with here, director Akiva Schaffer does a great job shooting the film and uses his camera to find occasional comedy using some great visual cues, even when there probably is nothing to laugh at. Despite his best efforts, there’s really nothing he or anyone else could have done to make Hot Rod good, except to light the whole thing on fire and put it in a paper shredder.