Surro-got

Surprisingly, I really did enjoy this movie.  I'm not so much into the futuristic/ robots-have-taken-over-the-world movies.  I think they are silly and a big fantastical.  

Plus, I thought the previews for this movie looked a bit silly and lame.  So much so that I planned on not seeing the movie at all.  But, as we all know, life happens and you don't always get to pick the movie you see.  Sometimes, you watch movies because other people want to watch it and you want to spend time with them.

And thus, I watched Surrogates.

I really like the premise that the movie poster sets up:  "Human perfection...what could go wrong?"  Well...everything because humans were never intended to be perfect.  In fact, we are repeatedly reminded that we are far from perfection and that we will never be perfect.  So, that, in itself, is very intriguing; however, this was not enough to pull me into the theater.  It was too predictable: of course things were going to go wrong.  You are dealing with robots AND trying to be perfect --  you're going to screw up somewhere.

Honestly, I don't recall anything too striking about the movie itself.  It was just an action flick.  I watched, I held hands with my boyfriend, I drank some soda, and that's about it.  There was no WOW factor to make it stand out in my mind.



The only thing I really liked was the ending, when everyone is forced to become human again.  Disconnected from their surrogates, people are forced to actually live again.  They are forced to remember that they have limits and that life does suck sometimes, but you don't get to check out completely.  Bruce Willis' wife, for example, refuses to live without her surrogate because she would be forced to deal with her depression and face the fact that her son is dead.  Yes, life can hurt, but you don't stop living.

In the end, I side with the villain.  The surrogates needed to be destroyed.  Did EVERYONE need to be destroyed because they used the surrogates?  No.  But he realized that his creation was completely out of control and it needed to be stopped.  People need to live, not sit in a chair and live vicariously through some sort of synthetic being.

The Truth is Sometimes... Well... Ugly

When this film originally came out, I was unsure of what to think.  Yes, the previews made it look funny, however, I got very mixed reviews from people who went and saw the movie before I did.  A lady I worked with at the time said it was hilarious, but you had to have a twisted sense of humor to enjoy it; it did, however, make a good date movie.  A friend of mine went to see it with her grandmother and was a bit embarrassed after wards.  Apparently, it was not one of those movies you take your grandmother too.  The one that beats them all, however, was when my mom went to see it.  She brought my 13-year-old sister, a good friend of the family, and my 20-year-old brother.  They couldn't even finish the movie.  They walked out with ketchup-splattered faces, especially my brother.  Apparently, he hid his face completely and asked that no one look at him for a while, so he could regain his composure or something. 

So, essentially, that equals 1 yes; 1 maybe, depending on your company; and 1 so offended that they left the movie and promised to never see it again.  This of course made me deadly curious to see this movie.  I mean, how bad could it be that my mom, brother, sister, and friend walked out of?  How bad was it that this friend in particular was a bit embarrassed?

So, when the opportunity arose for me to watch it, I of course said yes for two reasons: the company was good and I HAD to know what made my mom leave. 

Well, lets start with the characters.

I loved Katherine Heigl.  She was hysterical, especially when trying to confront Gerard Butler about supposed lack of respect for women.  And, when she is around Collin, her supposed dream guy, her facial expressions were wonderful.  It was like "get me out of here" pretty much the whole time.

As much as I loved Heigl, I loved Gerard Butler's character so much more.  Sure, he was offensive and a bit of a womanizer, but he was honest.  Whatever he thought, he flat out said it, hence the title "The Ugly Truth."  I appreciated his lack of tact and general smoothness in dealing with people.  And, as much as I hate to admit it, some of the things he said were completely true, whether I wanted them to be.  It also helped that I know a guy who could easily have played Butler's character without even trying because that's just how he is.

My favorite scene was definitely when he took her shopping for the "look" to get the guy.  It was funny in it's own right, but at the same time, I could see myself in Heigl's position.  I would be completely lost.  It would have been nice to have someone show me what I need to know to get the guy.  And the friend I'm thinking of probably wouldn't have had an issue helping me find that "look".


In the end, I will say this.  Yes, the movie is quite a bit uncouth, however, it is not any worse than Made of Honor.  Just saying.  And it was pretty predictable.  There was nothing special about this romantic comedy to make it stand out from any other one.  Except for maybe the end...

She asks "Why do you like me?"  His response is classic: "Beats the [heck] our of me."  I love it. So perfect.

Stuck on Stick It.

I've never been athletic.  I've never been close to being a gymnast; my body just doesn't move that way.  I cannot, however, help but want to be of those girls and the way they can bend their bodies and move.  They defy gravity.  And I am supremely jealous of that ability.  I wish my body were that flexible and I could handspring through every room for the rest of my life.

This fact, alone, makes me love this movie.

I think the reason I love this movie is Haley Graham.  I love movies with sarcastic teenagers that are out to defy everyone and every convention set against them.  Other examples would be Kat Stratford from 10 Things I Hate About You, Missy from Bring It On, or Juno from Juno.  

What makes Haley special, however, is that the movie goes deeper into her character.  She's not just some angry, authority-hating, angsty teenager.  It goes into the reason as to why she is angry at everyone and everything.






I love it when movies go into the reason WHY a person is the way they are.  The reason WHY something happened.   I think it gives the audience a better and deeper understanding of the character and movie.  Most viewers, I believe, would appreciate that deeper connection.

Also, this movie is extremely visually appealing.  

Take the In House Championship: it was a kaleidoscope of girls in colorful leotards flipping, hand-springing, practically flying and some how managing to avoid one another.


Also, there is the scene when Haley first enters the VGA gymnasium.  The distinct colors white and red really make the characters stand out.  It's especially fun when Vickerman and Joanne are brought up.  The actors spin while their data is displayed to their left.  It's funny as it is amazing.

Another reason to love the movie is a dialogue.  Like Juno, this movie is full of sarcastic, conversational gems:

"I'm so sure I'm practically deodorant."

"Gymnastics tells you no all day long.
It mocks you over and over again.
Telling you you're an idiot. that you're crazy
 If you like running full speed towards a
stationary object,vaults for you.
If you like pealing pieces of skin the size
of  quarters off your hands... bars is for you.
Because the only thing more fun then rips,
is when your rips get rips. It's super sexy.
And floor, are you serious, I mean who doesn't want to
parade around in a leotard getting wedgies
and doing dorky choreography? It's delicious.
If you like falling, then gymnastics is the sport for you!
You get to fall on
y  o u r     f a c e ,
y o u r     a s s  ,
y o u r     b a c k  ,
 y  o u r     k n e e s  ,
& y  o u r   p r i d e   !
It's a good thing I didn't like falling
  I loved it."

and my personal favorite:

"There are things you wish for before big moments. I wish my friends were here. I wish my parents were different. I wish there was someone who got what was happening, and could just look at me and tell me we weren't crazy, that we weren't being stupid. Someone to say "I'm proud of you, and I got your back... no matter what."  

The final thing that makes this movie so great is the soundtrack.  Every note played is intended to induce a feeling in the audience, whether it be suspense, laughter, or tensions.  The scene that comes to mind the most was the part where Haley was on the breams during the Classics.  You see her straining and trying to do the routine through her tears and the audience feels that. You can't help, but cry a bit with her because you know her pain and what she's going through.  This doesn't happen because of the visual, it's the music that does it.

And, in the end, the title "Stick It" is not just about sticking the landing. It's about sticking it to the judges.  It's about sticking to who you are, despite the fact that the world is completely against you.  I'm good with that message.

"Geez, Banana! Shut your freakin' gob! Britt's trying to write an honest to blog review!"

Okay.  This movie definitely deserves a preamble-like clause of sorts.  The first time I watched this movie, I was a little concerned.  Several people I talked to at the time could not stop talking about how much they hated it, but I wanted to see it anyway.  I rented it with my mom for a sort of Mother/Daughter Mother's Day Date Night ... which sounds kind of awkward, but it totally wasn't.

Anyways, we put this movie in, not quite sure to expect.  I mean, it was up for several Academy Awards, but then again, so was Knocked Up (tried to watch that movie --  couldn't do it: way too raunchy).  

From the first chair through the closing chair, I don't think my mom or I stopped laughing.  It was just so funny ... much funnier than it should have been (I think we were both stressed out).  Either way, I think, when the movie was over, neither of us knew what happened or what to think of the movie.  I think we decided that it was absolutely silly, but mostly stupid.  


This of course didn't stop me from buying it the next time I was at Wal-Mart.  It brought me too much joy to not own.  


Okay.  Now to "shut my gob" and start actually reviewing the movie because *drop random race car* "THUNDER CATS ARE GGGOOOOOOOOO!!"

Where to begin?


This movie just has so many good things going for it.  We'll make a list of everything I love about this movie.

1. Ellen Page

What is there not to love about this girl?   She is absolutely adorable and perfect for the role of Juno.  I mean, seriously, you could not have picked a better person for this role.  And who knew she could really act?

I "honest to blog" didn't.

The last time I had seen her in a movie was X-3: The Last Stand, where she played the third Kitty Pryde/Shadowcat (there was a different actress each movie).  So, I already loved her.  I mean, Kitty Pryde played a big part in my life.  I mean, way back when the first X-Men movie came out, shortly followed by X-Men Evolution, I changed my whole image.  You ever see my bangs?  They look like that thanks to Miss Kitty Pryde.  Coincidentally, I also set a trend for girls in both 8th and 9th grade, earning me the nickname "Trendy," but this is all besides the point. 

The point is that Ellen Page is awesome.

2. The Dialogue/Script

In a word: BRILLIANT.  This movie would be so much less enjoyable without the quirky dialogue and way of describing things.   In fact, I would even say that this movie would not be a success without the dialogue.  It was a) funny and b) perfectly quotable.  

 Diablo Cody did a beautiful thing with this script.

To make my point, I will now insert several of my favorite quotes. "Honest to blog?"; "I'm going to go to Women Now because they help women ... now."; "Thanks a heap, Coyote Ugly.  These cactus grams stink worse than your abandonment." (I have a special connection to that one);  "Woah! Dream big!" "Oh! Go fly a kite!"; "I still have your underwear." "I still have your virginity."; "I'm a planet."; and "He is the cheese to my macaroni.".

And, my personal favorite: "I don't know what kind of girl I am."  In that one sentence, Juno captured exactly how I feel -- how I've felt for a long time. I'm not a typical girl.  I'm just me, but I don't know how to categorize me.  Sometimes, I don't even know who me is.  

Anyway, moving on.

3. Close up camera angles

There are three instances I can think of where I absolutely thought the camera angles were fantastic.

First, at the beginning, when "the sex" was happening, there was an extreme close up of Michael Cera's mouth.  He popped a TicTac in as Ellen Page's lips got closer to his.  It was just a very intimate shot. 

Second, the fingernails.  I like that the camera shifted to everyone's fingernails in that room.  Not only that, you also heard the sound the nails made tapping or scratching across various surfaces.  By the time Ellen Page runs from the building, you're ready to do so also.  You're panicking and you just need out of that building.

Third, watching Jennifer Garner clean while Juno is driving to her house.  You see close ups of her hands adjusting frames, arranging magazines, and dusting stair rails.  I don't really know why, but I just really liked seeing her prepare. 

4. The Chair

  

I love that the movie began and ended with a chair.  Not only did it create balance and tied the story up nicely.  Plus, by beginning with the chair, the audience is brought into the story through a memory rather than dropped into a natural beginning. 

Finally,  I like that after watching the movie several times, I changed my opinion.  It makes me think and I like that.

For example, the first time I watched the movie, I totally sided with Jason Bateman's character.  For a marriage to work, you can't shove your partner into a corner and make them conform to what you think they should be.  It is unfair.  And I definitely felt the pain he was in.  Did this excuse him from the divorce?  No, but it made sense.

 

The more times I watch this movie, however, all I think is "Bateman, you're such a jerk."  Even if Jennifer Garner shoved you in a corner, you don't ditch just because you feel like a kid and think you can be a rock and roll star again, especially when you have a child on the way.  That is completely unfair and uncalled for.  So, screw you Bateman! Jennifer Garner all the way!!

Blindness Leads to Insight

I wrote this review at least a year ago, but I wanted to post it anyway.  It was that epic of a movie.

The previews make this movie look like a horror flick about a woman with sight surrounded by blind people. However, this movie has both thematic depth and genuinely distressing scenes.

After one man goes blind in urban rush hour traffic, everyone who he comes in contact with gets infected with the “white sickness.”  The infected people spread the disease to people they come in contact, except the wife, Julianne Moore (Children of Men), of an ophthalmologist, Mark Ruffalo (13 Going on 30).

When the epidemic first begins, the government quarantines the infected.  Unwilling to leave her husband, Moore’s character accompanies him to the quarantine.  Soon the quarantined building is so full that people began to panic. The system of organization that worked at first is no longer functioning. 

The middle portion of the movie is probably one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen in my life. Think Holocaust prison camp made for the recently blind, i.e. human nature at its worst. People divided themselves among wards, and Gael García Bernal (The Science of Sleep, Motorcycle Diaries) declares himself dictator over all the wards in order to control access to food. With few valuables to collect, the dictator soon starts demanding more primal forms of “payment.”

This experience, accompanied by the inadvertent death of a woman, causes Moore’s character to rebel. She stabs the king of ward three in the neck with a pair of scissors and war breaks out among the wards. Soon, someone lights the food on fire, and the whole building is on fire. Forced outside, the survivors discover that their guards are gone.  They make it back into the city only to discover it in a post-apocalyptic state (starving people, trash everywhere, dogs eating corpses, people scavenging for food) where everyone is blind.  The “white sickness” could not be stopped.

At the end of the movie, however, there is hope.  The guy who originally got sick regained his eyesight.  This could mean everyone else could regain their eyesight as well, but the movie closes in ambiguity.

Now for the subtext of an already difficult movie. 

The title can be interpreted on different levels besides actual blindness. It very well may refer to the government’s “out of sight, out of mind” approach to the health issue.

The title also could refer to how people are blind to their own racism. Ruffalo’s character talks about how the king must be black because of the way he’s acting. The man in front of Ruffalo’s character, who actually is black, asks how he knows. Ruffalo says it’s because he just knows (for the record, the dictator  isn’t black). When people are blind, race really shouldn’t matter, especially when confined in a building with a bunch of other blind people, yet racism stayed unaltered by blindness. 

Finally, the title could refer to the fact that people are generally blind to what is important.  Blind women in the movie are still concerned about their looks. In one conversation between a man and a woman, the man asks the woman: who are you? The woman responds by telling him what she looks like. The man replies, no, who are you? This poses the question, how do we define ourselves?

So why can one woman see when the world around her has gone blind? The movie never explicitly says, but the news reports that panic led to blindness, blindness to panic. During the entire movie, Moore’s character stays relatively calm and unafraid, though emotional at times. She voluntarily put herself in a position where she was very likely to go blind, but what mattered was being with her husband.

With a difficult movie inflated with subtext, the director has to make some tough choices: what is relevant and what is distracting. One of these artistic choices is the lack of names in the movie. Unfortunately, there are so many characters that the audience could miss the movie’s point by trying to keep people straight. Also, not much is offered concerning the government structure, leaving some confusion as to the plausibility of events.

This movie is very harsh image wise. There is nudity all around, the rooms are trashed, the hallway has been turned into a bathroom, and there are some sexually explicit moments. Yet all these images are critical to the disturbing tone of the movie. There are some redeeming images too. When the radio still works, they find a music station, and as the camera sweeps across the people in the room to show how much they are enjoying it.

In the end, I am reluctant to say I liked this movie. I didn’t like it in the same way I like movies such as Finding Neverland or Mean Girls, yet at the same time I appreciated it for what it was. I don’t ever want to see it again, but there are images and ideas that will stay with my forever.