Movie Moment: Horrible Bosses

It's no secret that popular culture likes to poke fun at bosses. But it's not often that we hear a tale in which disgruntled employees turn to murder.

In Horrible Bosses, three friends have been pushed to just such limits. Nick (Jason Bateman) battles his boss's (Kevin Spacey) sadistic mind games as he doggedly pursues VP status; newly engaged dental hygienist Dale (Charlie Day) has a hard time saying no means no to his sexually aggressive supervisor (Jennifer Aniston); and chemical plant accountant Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) loses the best boss ever (Donald Sutherland) to a heart attack only to answer to his cokehead son (a comb-over-sporting Colin Farrell). At first, the three consider quitting their jobs. But then they run into an old friend who graduated from Yale only to become a permanent unemployed fixture on his mother's couch. Presented with this walking cautionary tale, they conclude that quitting isn't for them. Then Kurt jokes that they should just kill their bosses, and everyone laughs. But the germ has been planted, and before long the trio is trolling unsavory bars in search of a hit man.

This is where things get a little dark. Which came as a surprise to me. I know, I know. What did I expect from a movie about murder? Frankly, silly high jinks. Slapstick. Failed attempts at poisoning coffee. You know. Someone slips rat poisoning into a mug and waits for the fatal sip only to have the intended victim get coffee somewhere else that day, or, better yet, spill it down the front of his/her shirt. Or maybe car/elevator/even mail tampering gone hilariously awry. Or doom-destined limos that somehow end up at vacation hot spots. (I'm reaching, but you get the idea.) Then after so many failed attempts the would-be killers would realize that the murders weren't meant to be and walk away, finding some other means of solving their professional problems.

But none of that happened. There's no string of murder attempts, amusing or otherwise. There are several surveillance scenes, some of them funny, some of them seeming like dead air. An unlikely connection links Nick's and Kurt's bosses, creating an unexpected but not-so-light twist. Yet even so, the story wraps up in the way you'd expect it to - it just takes a strange route to get there.

Although the plot is questionable, the characters make up for it. Playing his typical cold fish self, Kevin Spacey makes an ideal tyrant. Farrell and Aniston step outside of their comfort zones to become power-hungry bullies. As for the three musketeers, it's hard to say whether Bateman or Sudeikis plays the lead. Bateman's job situation is probably the most dire, and the story begins and ends with him. Yet it's Sudeikis who spearheads the murder operation - and drives the getaway car (which, by the way, is equipped with some weird, omniscient OnStar type navigation system that goes by the name of Geoffrey). Still, I found Day's character to be the most likable. Reprising his go-to lovable moron role, he lends an endearing quality to this dark comedy.

Movie Moment: Hall Pass

This weekend the bf and I saw Hall Pass. It'd already been dropped from one theater and shunted to a small screening room in another, so I knew we had to act before it disappeared into the land of On Demand. Is it me, or do movies seem to move on at warp speed these days?

Anyway, I've set forth a nice little challenge for myself for this review. I'm not going to spoil the ending! I'll say here and now that this decision may mess with my formula, resulting in an unbalanced and lackluster write-up. But I'm willing to risk that if you're still willing to read it.

So, Hall Pass. We've got two couples: Rick and Maggie (Owen Wilson and Jenna Fischer) and Fred and Grace (Jason Sudeikis and Christina Applegate). As I'm sure you know, the wives are sick of their husbands gawking at other women, so they follow the advice of their psychologist friend (Joy Behar) and issue them hall passes - one week off from marriage, no questions asked. Even in light of this questionable proposition, Rick and Maggie are established early on as the moral compass, whereas Fred and Grace represent more of the "what if?" factor. The men inaugurate their week of freedom with a pig-out dinner at Applebee's, slowly working their way up to a golf course, a coffee house, and a gym, attempting the bar scene only on the last night when their notorious bachelor buddy (a really scary-looking Richard Jenkins) rolls back into town. Maggie and Grace, on the other hand, spend the week at Maggie's parents' beach house, where they are hit on by a college baseball coach and player, respectively, without so much as batting an eyelash, proving, of course, what most of us already know - that it's much easier for a woman, married or otherwise, to find a date than it is for man (regardless of how lecherous that man may be).

That having been said, Hall Pass offers a few plot twists and some sweet surprises. That's not to say that it doesn't serve up its share of gratuitous gross-outs. (It doesn't come from the Farrelly Brothers for nothing.) As for the characters, Wilson is unexpectedly and endearingly nerdy as family man/realtor Rick, and Fischer slips comfortably into the nice girl role that made her famous as Pam on "The Office." Sudeikis's Fred is the typical tries-to-get-away-with-as-much-as-he-can best bud, albeit not exactly lovable. At one point he tells Rick that women in general and their wives in particular get to live their dreams, whereas men don't, phrasing it something like this: "Maggie used to play house as a kid, right? So, you bought her a house. She used to play kitchen; you bought her a Viking (stove). She wanted to be a mommy, and you made her one. But what about us? You don't see me hosting "The Price is Right" do you?" Yep, Fred. Women have clearly won because that's all we want out of life: houses and babies. Thankfully, Applegate's feisty Grace is more than up to the challenge of tangling with him.

Overall, Hall Pass was more fun than I'd expected. Stay tuned for the next spoil-free movie recap. :)

Movie Moment: (Kicking Off the Fall Movie Line-up With) Going the Distance

It was a beautiful, sunny Labor Day weekend Sunday - which meant, of course, that I wanted to go to the movies. I hadn't been for the last couple of weekends and was feeling the void. So, on our way home from my sister's apartment (the bf and I had stayed there last night after attending our friend's [her best friend's] wedding), we stopped off to see Going the Distance, which had opened Friday. Undoubtedly, you've seen the commercials. Distance stars real-life couple Drew Barrymore and Justin Long. (They're an on-again/off-again kind of duo, but according to my most recent Google update, they're currently "on.") Drew Barrymore plays Erin, a Stanford journalism student spending the summer in New York doing a newspaper internship, and Justin Long plays Garrett, a New Yorker working for a soulless record label. Garrett has a history of misunderstanding women and has never been in love, and Erin once dropped out of grad school for a guy who broke her heart (this explains why she's a 31-year-old intern). They meet at a bar (where Flight of the Conchords stalker Kristen Schaal pours the drinks) and get together for a fling. Six weeks later, when it's time for Erin to return to San Francisco, they realize they're in love. So, they try the long distance thing. Heartache peppered with raunchiness ensues, with Garrett's buddies (Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis) trying to drown his sorrows in pitchers of beer and Erin's sister (Christina Applegate) unabashedly dispensing tough love advice.

So, was it what I expected? Not really. It was more serious than the trailers let on, and not a little wrenching. But I liked that about it, appreciating its commitment to keeping things real. I could especially identify with Erin, a writer looking for a job in a world where print journalism is dying. She tries to get a permanent position at the New York newspaper where she interned to no avail and meets with the same rejection at every other publication in the city. Finally, she's offered a job with a San Francisco paper. Garrett is less than pleased, they fight, and he ends up asking her to move in with him, in New York. Touched, she accepts, planning to continue waitressing until a writing job opens up. Her brother-in-law (Jim Gaffigan) suggests she start a blog. (She doesn't).

At the last minute, Garrett steps in and tells her she can't throw her life away and needs to take the job. She does. At the risk of sounding like a cliché, their breakup is very sad, a classic case of two people wanting different things. They each go on with their lives, but of course it's not the same. Then Erin receives tickets to see the band that she and Garrett first saw together. She goes, and of course he's there. He's ditched his dreaded job, become the band's manager, and now lives in Los Angeles, which is only an hour's plane ride away.

For a minute there, I thought it might be one of those movies where they don't get back together. Kind of like The Break-Up, or 500 Days of Summer. So, I was relieved that that wasn't the case. But I was also left thinking that San Francisco and Los Angeles are still kind of far away for maintaining a healthy relationship. (That's the cynic in me showing its colors). Anyway, at least it was a more realistic ending than if Garrett had, say, landed a job in San Francisco. I gave myself more closure by deciding that the ending was trying to say that successful relationships thrive on never-ending compromise. (Although the movie delivered the message in a much less cheesy way than I just did.)

Overall, I think Going the Distance was good and undeserving of its bad reviews. But that's just this humble viewer's opinion.