The Rotten Watch is coming off a stunningly terrible week and looking for a little rebound. It got ugly around here. Real depressing. Like crying naked in my bathtub, with a glass of Beaulieu Pinot Noir, listening to Damien Rice type of situation. Scary stuff. But this week we’ve got a bunch of stuff to cheer me up. Things like cancer and dead kids and Anna Farris. That ought to do it.
Just remember, I'm not reviewing these movies, but rather predicting where they'll end up on the Tomatometer. Let's take a look at what This Rotten Week has to offer.
50/50
I hate four things in this world:
Idiots
Cancer
Cancer-causing idiots
Snakes
And though I’d love to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen systematically beat everything on my list (especially the snakes), I’ll settle for them just taking on cancer. Punch Cancer in the Face is my daily mantra.
Developing a comedy with a deathly illness as the main antagonist is a risky proposition. Then again guys like Rogen and Gordon-Levitt have made their bones on comedies operating slightly left of center (read: creative). Hell, between them they’ve taken on accidentally knocking a girl up, making a porn movie to pay the rent, and a flick told non-linearly about a relationship gone bad, then good, then bad and I think good in the end but I’m not certain. Why not take on the C-word and try to get some laughs out of it? Life’s too short to sweat the crap that can slowly and painfully kill you.
Director Jonathan Levine (The Wackness-69%) and writer Will Reiser (written about his own life) by many early accounts have nailed this film, touchy subject and all. Twelve of the first thirteen reviews are glowing about the film and I bet the rest follow suit. The Rotten Watch for 50/50 is 94%.
Dream House
Ok let’s get this straight just so we are all on the same page. Daniel Craig lives in a house with his wife and girls only he doesn’t because he killed them a long time ago and really he’s been just released from a mental institution to go home to his wife and girls who he actually killed some time ago. And his neighbor is smoking hot. Got that? We all clear on the plot lines? Ready to get your mind f#$%ed?
This kind of convolution isn’t too surprising coming from a director in Jim Sheridan who started his career with an Academy Award nomination for My Left Foot, and somehow, sixteen years later found himself saying so/mething like “Excuse me Fitty, umm, I mean Mr. Cent, I need a little more angst in this next scene. Remember, it’s all about the Benjamins.” (Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (17%). (That’s what happens when old people try to stay hip, they make bad choices.) His latest, Brothers (60%) showed he’s still capable of making above average films. But this one? There’s some uh-oh factor going on. Remember my first paragraph?
Not only does the Dream House story make my head want to explode, but a little birdie tells me the mind-f#$%-ishness just turns out to make the whole thing bad. Like real bad. Like bottom of the barrel awful. A strong cast and director who’s done more good than bad doesn’t seem to be enough to even out a story that seems, well, convoluted. The Rotten Watch for Dream House is 22%.
What’s Your Number
There’s an ancient Chinese proverb about love and movies that goes like this, “A flower cannot blossom without sunshine nor a garden without love, much as another ridiculous rom-com be not be made without the main character chick realizing she’s actually just in love with the guy who started out as her friend.” Or something like that. Chinese translations are difficult for me.
And honestly, I’m still trying to figure out if this flick advances the woman’s empowerment movement or sets it back decades. On the one hand, Anna Farris’s character has decided to shut down the baby factory to newcomers in a desperate bout of virtue until she systematically rolls it back with every dude she’s ever gotten with to find out if she missed “the one” along the way. On the other hand, she’s slept with a lot of guys and seems to just be going back and looking to bang them again. I am woman hear me ROAR! Mark Mylod (The Big White-30%, Ali G Indahouse-56%) helms this retread of romantic comedy ideals (put together woman can’t find love, searches through the dregs of comedy to find it, ends up with guy she met at seventeen minutes into the movie). And though Mylod has a number of television credits worth mentioning (Entourage, Shameless, etc) I don’t see this flick covering any new, or particularly funny, ground. The Rotten Watch for What’s Your Number is 29%.
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Recapping last week
Oh boy. Like I said at the top, had a rough go of it last time around. Real, real rough. Like all time bad. Let’s just look at the list and not spend too much time here.
Abduction (Predicted: 22% Actual: 3%)
Moneyball (Predicted: 79% Actual: 94%)
Dolphin Tale (Predicted: 32% Actual: 83%)
Killer Elite (Predicted: 55% Actual: 23%)
Off by a total of 107 percentage points for four movies. Fairly grisly. But I’m a man, I own my mistakes, few and far between as they may be. Will try and do better for my fan(s) out there.
Next week George Clooney runs for office and Hugh Jackman plays Rock’em Sock’em robots. It’s going to be a Rotten Week!
