Movie Moment: This is 40

This isn't forty, but a random Brigantine sunset that I've decided to use in lieu of a movie poster because, as a reformed blogger, I no longer post purloined pictures.  (That having been said, I'm still not a reformed moviegoer, having smuggled Christmas-gifted chocolate-covered potato chips into the theater last night.)  Besides being beautiful, this sunset has that contemplative aura that accompanies all such photographs of natural phenomena.  Which makes it the perfect entree to a post about movie musing.

Judd Apatow's self-proclaimed "sort of sequel" to Knocked Up, This is 40 is the story of Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann), the always-caustic but once upwardly mobile couple with whom we first became acquainted in the background of Ben and Alison's baby drama.  A far cry from the affluent family that once sheltered Alison in its guest house, the troubled twosome and their two daughters weather financial problems complicated by relationship problems complicated by parent problems complicated by parenting problems complicated by the problems that come with the big 40.  The results are often more cutting than comic, straddling the murky middle ground between Apatow's raucous Knocked Up and his bleak Funny People. Even so, This is 40 emerges as the more satisfying and multi-faceted movie.

Debbie runs a clothing boutique from which she suspects her employees are stealing, and Pete has left the safe world of Sony to start his own (struggling) retro rock label.  But unlike the authors of idealistic destinies that run rampant in other kinds of movies, Pete and Debbie pay the price for their entrepreneurial existence and are so maxed out that they're in danger of losing their house.  It is this conflict, as well as finding time to be a couple in addition to parents, that is at the heart of this dark comedy, not the lure of infidelity, as in similarly genred but far less trenchant flicks such as The Change-Up and Hall Pass.          

As a thirty-year-old, not-quite-yet-married woman without kids, I won't pretend to be on intimate terms with Debbie's issues.  But I can say that they seemed real and disturbing and that despite my discomfort in witnessing them, I appreciated being exposed to a love story that was not sugar-coated.  Unlike your garden variety romantic comedy, This is 40 is about all the stuff that happens - and keeps happening - after the dust clears from the fairy tale wedding.  

Now that I've gotten all the serious stuff out of the way, I'd like to give a shout-out to Paul Rudd's hair.  It looks better than ever, even if his dad (a reprehensible mooch played by Albert Brooks) tells him to cut it.      

Movie Moment: The Change-Up

If ever there was a movie made up of equal parts sleaze and schmaltz, then it's The Change-Up. A weird way to begin a post I know, but that's what comes to mind. Although the identity switching comedy is as old as the hills (Freaky Friday, anyone?), it remains intriguing. After all, who wouldn't want to trade places with someone else for a while, if only to find out what that person's life is like? It was this thinking (along with my love of stupid comedies, which, incidentally, requires almost no thinking) that lured me into the theater.

The Change-Up centers around best buds Dave (Jason Bateman), a family man on the fast track to law partner, and Mitch (Ryan Reynolds), a playboy out-of-work actor. Their moment of reckoning comes when they pee in a public fountain one drunken night while confessing jealousy for each other's lives. The lightning crashes, the lights go out, and before they know it, they've swapped bodies.

Workaholic Dave realizes how much he misses having the time and privacy to do things like Rollerblade and use the bathroom uninterrupted. But he also learns that Mitch's life isn't all fun and games, eventually appreciating just how good he has it and how much he's been neglecting his family. Likewise, Mitch laps up the full-time attention of "people who care about his day," and the perks of an always-full fridge. Still, balancing work and family is tough for this perpetual slacker, and he longs for his freedom.

Ground-breaking it's not. But it is interesting in an introspective, "what does it all mean?" kind of way. Not that I imagine that that's the movie's message, or that it even has a message. I caught an interview in which Reynolds and Bateman were quipping that The Change-Up has lots of levels, and that you have to look deep - real deep - to get them all. To be sure, the gratuitous nudity, F-bombs, and just plain gross-out bathroom shenanigans lent the story a B-movie quality that undercut its discordant and often desperate sappiness (and made me look away - far, far away). But then, like most moviegoers, I know that the quality of movies takes a nosedive come August, the glitter of the June and July blockbusters already in the dustpan to be resurrected into DVDs and the winter holiday features still months away.

All criticism aside, it was entertaining to watch Bateman and Reynolds be catapulted into caricatures of the respectively priggish and wise-guy types they typically play only to be reeled back in to portray polar opposites. I wasn't laughing hysterically along with my fellow theater-goers, but I didn't long for my $10.00 back either.