Decoding Movie Reviews
“A triumph!” = biopic set against a horse-related backdrop
“Dark, edgy” = someone inexplicably huffs chemicals
“Impeccably acted” = British person with good American accent/American person with good British accent
“High-octane thrill ride” = contains cars that go fast and blow up
“…gives a brave performance” = gained weight for the role/wore prosthesis
“Sure to leave you on the edge of your seat” = ladies in underwear will be covered in blood
“…tugs at the heartstrings” = cancer*
“A worthy addition to the (whatever) canon” = another movie about dukes
“Surprisingly heartfelt” = comic actor playing dramatic for the first time
“Fun for the whole family!” = painfully, impossibly boring
“…power of the human spirit” = someone goes from poor to rich/sports team wins a thing
“A sobering look” = narrated by Morgan Freeman
“Smart and snappy” = people talk in ways that no normal human beings would ever talk
“An intimate portrait” = moves at a glacial pace
"Depicts an earnest longing" = get ready to see a lot of Keira Knightley’s neck-acting
“A charming romantic comedy” = at some point multiple dogs are walked together
“…of substance” = confusing and unpopular
“…gorgeous, lush setting” = insanely violent and about a small Asian country
“Highly anticipated” = based on a YA novel
“A classic all-American story” = Tom Hanks’ eyes twinkle a whole bunch
“…if a little lackluster” = no one gets married
“The Number One Comedy of the Year!” = stars Adam Sandler as Adam Sandler
“Tour de force” = someone runs and cries at the same time
“Not your typical ‘boy meets girl’” = your typical ‘boy meets girl’
* true and acceptable in the case of Stepmom
Previously: "Looks almost like Vaseline."
Emily Weiss practices her wistful looks on rainy window panes, and Katie Heaney walks two dogs all the time and nothing ever happens.
PONY!
@amusedgirl: Pony booty!
Is this an appropriate place to say that I cannot understand why Atonement won anything at all ever? Did I miss something?
@sox Can we also complain about the novel? Because I'm in.
@sox It's an appropriate place to discuss why, in addition to neck acting, Keira Knightley appears to talk without ever moving her tongue.
@Lucienne I am still rolling my eyes about how overrated that novel is.
@Lucienne Can we talk about why my mom is constantly insisting I read Ian McEwan and Coetzee? I respect them a lot of word-assemblers, but THEY ARE SO DAMNED DEPRESSING MAKING. My mother, bless her poetry-writing heart, does not seem to understand that I do not want to read books about grown, white-collar white men making professional/callous/sexual mistakes, and then having HORRIBLE THINGS HAPPEN.
I think she's trying to warn me because she is upset I am forever single (in her eyes, because I don't bring women to meet her unless we're very serious) and have become the boy in the final verse of "Cat's in the Cradle".
@Lucienne man I hate that book.
@Lucienne I spent 18 months trying to read that novel and all i can remember is that there was a war involved. I can't even remember if I eventually finished it or "lost" it somewhere.
@leon.saintjean Give her a Jodi Picault book about some passive woman who loses her husband, baby, and best friend in some unspeakable (and implausible) series of tragic accidents, and see what she says.
@Lucienne Can I join this party? Because UGH BRIONY UGH EVERYONE
@Bebe She'd remind me that I promised her I would start reading Cather and I'm still fuckin' around with Whitman.
(btw, we discovered a week ago that an AMAZINGLY fun saturday night is putting on Girl Talk records and passing around Leaves of Grass and shouting lines at each other. I don't know why, but this is the best thing ever).
@Anna Marquardt: Also? It made no @#$% sense.
@sox I have a "no Keira Knightley ever (except Love Actually, which, shut up, was good)" rule, and judging from all the running and crying in the trailer, i didn't see a need to break that rule for atonement. A little girl sees people kissing and tells on them and, i don't know, everyone dies? is that the gist?
maybe we can also use this thread to talk about why Stepmom probably should've been bad (see @applestoapples comment about "feel-good movies" appealing to least-likeable people) but was actually really great?
@sox McAvoy is crazy hot, but I don't think there's an award for that so I agree with you.
@leon.saintjean I totally want to hang out with you and your mom. If I hide my ring and pretend to be your girlfriend, can I come? I do a really good YAWP.
@Anna Marquardt This is a bunch of stuff that happened.
NO WAIT IT WAS REALLY DIFFERENT. EVERYTHING ACTUALLY REALLY SUCKED.
There, cliffnoted motherfuckers.
@Bebe No. I mentioned to my mom that a female coworker liked the calendar she sent me. Then my mom posted something about it on my FB wall. Female coworker responded.
Three days later my mom told me she had a dream about me falling in love with a lady who looked like (and proceeded to describe coworker's FB picture). "Is that your type?" "Do you know any girls like that?" "Are you secretly in love with someone and not telling me?" She is so crazy for details about women in my life that if I mentioned a friend named George she would ask me "As in Eliot or Bernard Shaw". In hopes it was Eliot. And I was in love with her. And making grandkids.
@leon.saintjean I've had to stop mentioning males in coversation with my mom for similar reason.
@leon.saintjean
Wait but you should totally start reading Cather! It is not all so depressing! I love Cather!
@you're a kitty! Yeah Um… I think that is the only reason why I would watch that movie again.
@rebecca@twitter I had fantasies of taking the book and attaching it to a brick and throwing it through the window of the author's home. Maybe I'd write, "TRY AGAIN" across the cover.
@sox What about Bend it Like Beckham?
I actually kind of like Keira Knightley in spite of myself, but I basically am never interested in the movies she's in or the characters she plays. So, ya know.
@candybeans Does anyone else think Love Actually was horrible and dreaaaad the time of year (approx. 2 weeks from right now) when everyone starts saying, Hooray! It's Love Actually season again!
@klibberfish YES. I hate hate hate Love Actually, and I feel so alone when I say that.
@klibberfish yes yes yes hateful, misogynist POS
@leon.saintjean Can I also say that Coetzee in particular can BITE ME. "Waiting for the Barbarians" hit the wall the most times of anything I ever had on a mandatory reading list, plus the political guilt for feeling that way on top of the bonecrushing boredom and annoyance, and that's not even STARTING with "Disgrace."
This whole anti-Atonement/Keira thread just made me so sad.
@backstagebethy (whispers) I loved the novel. A lot. Haven't yet watched the movie. Also like Keira Knightley ok (not love, but not hate at all).
@candybeans I have the same no Keira Knightley rule. I would've actually been ok w/ Love Actually if not for her prancing and fawning and look at me, I'm acting that I'm pretty, complete with total lack of chemistry with the dude she married.
Also, Obvious McObvious here: TOO skinny. I get uncomfortable just looking at her.
@leon.saintjean Can you read the Whitman lines in funny voices?
@rocknrollunicorn – Co-sign, on both points.
That said, "Keira Knightley’s neck-acting" would be a good bad band name.
wait… but is she walking the dogs or are the DOGS WALKING HER? Right? Because of how they pull on the leash? You know? Big dogs?
@insouciantlover AH! This is why, when my (very small) dog pulls me hither and thither, I keep thinking I'm about to meet THE ONE. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
Perfection — four stars!
* * * *
You forgot
"a feel-good movie" = the people you dislike most will enjoy this movie
ref. The Blind Side.
@applestoapples Love, Actually.
@bashe Nooooooooo. Love, Actually is exactly the kind of movie I wouldn't like, except I did. And now I have to watch it every Christmas season.
@bashe YES I DETEST THAT MOVIE SO. MUCH!!! I love British movies, british comedies, british miniseries, etc., so I thought I would LOVE that movie (having completely forgotten that it was by the same ppl who made Notting Hill blerg) but I actually almost walked out of the theater. Manipulative, cotton-candy, pretending-to-be-British-but-actually-Disney-in-disguise shite. ok, I'm done now.
@applestoapples MARLEY AND ME.
@sox Yes, I once made the mistake of watching that with my sister, post christmas, the day before I was flying to China for a year. THE TEARS. THE AIRPORTS. It's one of my 'I know this is awful but I don't care' movies, along with While You Were Sleeping and The First Wives Club.
SHUT UP. Bill Pullman is dreamy, ok?
I can agree with The Blind Side and Marley and Me. But you guys cannot take away my unabashed love of Bill Nighy singing "Christmas Is All Around" on the Ant and Dec show.
Besides, Love Actually would fit in the Keira Knightley Neck Acting subgenre.
@applestoapples Okay, I have an "actual reason" for disliking Love, Actually, and now I have to share it with anyone who will listen. I'm definitely guilty of enjoying the occasional really cheesy romcom (and was even more so at the time in my life when this came out), so when everyone I knew was being all, "OMG, so cuuuuute," I had high hopes. I finished it, and sat there, discontent and unsure why.
Then I realized: of the main plotlines the "happy endings" were all given to couples with really, really big male-skewed power gaps. PM Hugh Grant falls in love with his secretary. Important Writer Colin Firth falls in love with his maid – and not for her conversation skills. The only "main" plotline where both woman and man are portrayed as having relatively equal professional success is, of course, the one where he decides to go for his hot secretary. And that's before we get to "woman, you can be a family nurturer or you can have sex with the hot guy, but you definitely can't have both" plotline.
@ThatWench Oh. Huh. That's a good point.
Otherwise, the things I like about Love, Actually, weirdly enough, are the disappointing and bittersweet parts.
@Craftastrophies But… Bill Pullman isn't in Love, Actually. Is he? I checked imdb and he wasn't there.
he is awesome in Igby Goes Down, though.
@ThatWench For me, it's one of those movies I can only continue to love if I don't pay too much attention to it. Anytime I let myself get past the superficial, I get really squicked out. It's not actually a romantic movie so much as a horror story for the modern woman.
@applestoapples Yeah, me too. I particularly liked the porn stand-in couple, and the relationship with the little boy and the stepdad.
@ThatWench I also hate the part where Laura Linney blows off the hot guy she likes to go rescue/mope about her dysfunctional brother. It seemed like manufactured martyrdom to me.
@tortietabbie Yeah, I basically ignore the Hugh Grant plot line. I have lots of practice ignoring Hugh Grant in movies. For me, it's basically a movie about Emma Thompson (GOD I love her) with a sub plot about a kid in love and his bereaved stepfather.
I really genuinely love Emma Thompson's plotline. I love that it DOESN'T have a happy ending, that he fucked up and it isn't magically fixed, but they are getting on with it and hopefully will work it out. He doesn't get off the hook, and neither is magically 'fixed' by anything. And that scene where she goes and has a little cry and then pulls herself together and puts on a show for her kids never fails to leave me a wreck. GOD I love her.
@Hooplehead I also hate that part. But as someone with intimacy issues, I totally get it. Getting what you've been lusting after is SCARY. Sometimes you want to just dream about it. Unfortunately, you don't get much hot sex that way. I hate it mostly because he's so sad about it.
@Teffodee no, he's in While You Were Sleeping. Sorry, confusing! I have never finished Sleepless in Seatle because I can't get over the fact that she's ditching Bill Pullman.
You missed "Psychosexual thriller" = girl's crazy and gets it on with another girl…or did she?
So, can we talk about the Footloose remake here? Because it wasn't that bad. It was actually … highly enjoyable.
@heb That's what I've heard! I feel so conflicted. I don't want Kevin Bacon to be disappointed in me if I see it.
@heb NO. LALALALAICAN'THEARYOULALALALA.
(I haven't seen the remake – the original is sacred. It would be like meeting a clone of my mother or something. Kind of cool, maybe, but mostly creepy and depressing).
@Bebe Don't be afraaaiidd! It's not like meeting a clone of your mother, it's like meeting a … new … version … of her? This is getting away from me. It's like having two equally wonderful moms to love.
@heb You're not my mommy!!!!
OK, I admit, I will probably end up watching this on cable and thinking it's pretty good, but I will feel dirty and ashamed about it.
@heb But it was so LOOOONG! And there was too much "story" and not enough dancing! Which is not to say that I didn't have a lovely afternoon alone yesterday at the theatre, with my popcorn and Coffee Crisp.
"a crowd-pleaser" = coming to your cross-country flight this holiday season (for a mere $6)
@Tuna Surprise I just watched the first half of whichever friends with bennies movie was with Ashton and Natalie (free! on AirCanada! and it stayed on right up until we were hitched to the terminal thing!) but my was it uncomfortable when they start gettin it on all sexylike on the screen right in front of me and there is some older guy who was coming back from the same conference who I will ostensibly have business ties with RIGHT BESIDE ME.
@sox I think that movie was made by somehow infiltrating my brain, figuring out which actors and plotlines would be most annoying to me, and writing a script about it.
@Sox Agree! It's also really uncomfortable when you think you're putting on a children's movie that will just sort of pass the time (ugh 24 hour flights from Australia to ANYWHERE!), but you pick Bridge to Terabithia which starts like a lovely imaginative film and then turns into this horrible, depressing movie and you're sitting in a plane next to strangers bawling your eyes out. (May or may not be true for Finding Neverland as well; on the same flight…..i was possibly a bit tired
)
@LJ No, Finding Neverland is a ridiculous tearjerker. I did not want to cry, but the tears were jerked straight out of my head!
@LJ – oh god, I have totally done this. Picked a movie I thought, hmmm, finally have time to watch- and then did an embarrassing public sob-fest because the movie was so fucking sad. (Best Time I Ever Main-lined Andrew Garfield Movies in Public).
"ladies in underwear will be covered in blood" is actually the tagline of my latest movie, Period Drama (it's set in Victorian England).
@Vivien Smith-Smythe-Smith: Please make this.
@Vivien Smith-Smythe-Smith I'm both horrified & intrigued.
@Vivien Smith-Smythe-Smith OMG, this would be HYSTERICALLY funny
@Vivien Smith-Smythe-Smith I signed in just to give this a thumbs-up.
I am giving this post all my thumbs up.
I would invite the entire world to have a "sobering look" at my life if it meant that Morgan Freeman would narrate it.
*<3 you, Morgie*
@wee_ramekin Recently, on a podcast I listen to, they were discussing that dolphin movie he was just in, and one guy did an impression of Freeman voicing the dolphin, and it was one of the best things that has happened to me in quite some time.
@wee_ramekin gird your loins, are you ready?? : there exists a youtube clip of Morgan Freeman and Stephen Fry having a conversation. IN THE SAME ROOM. ON THE SAME TAPE. My brain couldn't handle that much awesome voiceness.
@SarcasticFringehead Which podcast? I feel my podcast list has veered too far into the Serious again and it boring. I need new things to hear in my ears!
@Craftastrophies That one was NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour. Extra Hot Great is also very good – the same kind of pop-culture analysis, but less family-friendly.
@SarcasticFringehead Wicked, thanks
I really want more comedy type ones, but most of the actual comedy podcasts are WAY too blokey for me. I mean, they're fine, but clearly not for me, and I end up unsubscribing sadly.
"A feast for the senses…" – Lots of close-ups of exotic food, panoramic shots of rainforests, and/or gauzily-filmed nudity.
@ejcsanfran Or it's in Smell-O-Vision.
"Modern Day Love Story" = nerdy girl/boy gets a makeover and the rich guy/girl.
(I love the everloving cuss out of this post)
@karion: I actually fucked that up.
"Modern Day Coming of Age" – nerdy girl/boy gets makeover and then the rich guy/girl.
"Modern Day Love Story" – people using computers to fall in love.
(I still love the cuss out of this post and somehow missed the sly Stepmom reference note the first time.
@karion People using computers to fall in love! An oft-overlooked genre. My favorite is the Hilary Duff one where she pretends to be a man and makes her own mom fall in love with her and then has to confess, but then, surprise, the actual man whose photo she used DOES fall in love with her mom.
@klibberfish Oh god I don't want to believe that that exists.
"Mind Bending, High-Tech Thrill Ride!" = the filmmakers didn't know what it was about either.
"triumph of the human spirit" = we spent 2 bucks on the script
"visually stunning" = 10 million on locations, 2 bucks on script
"Tugs at the heartstrings"=beloved childhood pet's tragic death coincides with protagonist's coming-of-age
@KatPruska
Sometimes the tragic death is that of a human friend, but mostly yes, it's a pet.
"Courageous." = Straight male actor portrays gay man
Can we talk for a minute about how Stepmom was marketed as a feel good family comedy? My mom, aunt and grandmother took my aunt who had advanced ovarian cancer to see that and were completely blindsided.
"Ironic" = sarcastic.
"erotic thriller" – scene where a woman is depicted as enjoying sex
Tangentally related. While waiting to see Bridesmaids, I heard two Bright Young Things talking outside. Thing 1: So, like… What's this movie about? Thing 2: Uh, it's… it's like a modern day Bridget Jones' Diary… only funny!
I laughed. And then I realised that BJD was 10 years ago and I felt OLD. And then I heard them complaining on the way out that they didn't like it and it 'wasn't what they expected'.
BAHAHAHAHAHA Seriously laughing out loud by how dead-on this is. "A film for all" = dumbed down to the common denominator (and the funniest parts are in the trailer).
"Based on actual events" = Stay home and watch Zombies on AMC.
"Hypnotic…enchanting…" = has magicians and/or puppets.
“A charming romantic comedy” = at some point multiple dogs are walked together
I had to finally create a Hairpin account so I could post that I too, absolutely loathed 'Atonement'. I normally take impeccable care of my books, but threw that one on the floor upon finishing it.