He's Just Not That Into You

For those who want to try Yuna (Hedy Burress) spotting, she's playing one of Jennifer Aniston's sisters.

I've already introduced this movie in a few other posts, so I won't bother repeating myself here. A film with eight or nine main characters was a little hard to follow, for a start. Gigi (Ginnifer Goodwin) goes on a date with Conor (Kevin Connolly) who is in love with Anna (Scarlet Johanssen), who is having an affair with married man Ben (Bradley Cooper), who is married to Janine (Jennifer Connelly), who works with Gigi and Beth (Jennifer Aniston), who is not-married to Neil (Ben Affleck). Conor is also working with advertising executive Mary (Drew Barrymore) to increase his real estate business while Gigi is relying on Alex (Justin Long) to remind her to ignore the "signs". If a guy is that into you, he'll be asking you out. End of.

Did I miss anyone? Probably.

The film's not a huge, fantastic drama. It's a sweet chick-flick with far too many famous faces (I spotted Hedy Burress by narrowing it down to the three people with speaking parts whose faces I didn't recognise). It's a little hard to keep track of who isn't returning whose phone-calls, but it's still generally quite enjoyable in spite of that.

The film is rated 12a in the UK or PG13 in the US. You probably could take teenagers to see it, but they most likely wouldn't get as much out of it as twenty to thirty-something women, who would seem to be the film's main audience.

It was fun. It was two hours long but didn't feel like it. And the buzzword thing wasn't nearly as irritating as it might have been, since only one character really did it, and she was barely on screen.

This isn't the best movie any of these actors have made, but it's nice. Just not really special.

I am very suspicious

New film He's Just Not That Into You has no less than nine famous actors shown in the trailer; Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore, Scarlett Johansson, Justin Long, Jennifer Connelly, Ginnifer Goodwin, Kevin Connolly, and Bradley Cooper (I couldn't find the actual trailer I've seen at the cinema - the link is just the first one I found on youtube).

This makes me very suspicious, and I can see only two explanations. Firstly, that the script is so good that all of these big names agreed to accept a lower fee than normal to appear. Secondly, that they blew their entire budget on the cast.

The film is based on the self-help book of the same name by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo. Turning a self-help book into a film has worked before, in Mean Girls (ignoring all those weird tribal sequences), which was based on the book Queen Bees and Wannabes, by Rosalind Wiseman.

He's Just Not That Into You (the book) came, in turn from an episode of Sex and the City, as discussed on Wiki.

Honestly, at first glance, it looks like an non-christmassy version of Love, Actually (which, to be fair, I haven't seen). And that whole myspace/facebook/text/buzzword/buzzword/buzzword thing? N00bs. I hate that thing, where people on TV inhabit either an entirely fictional version of the internet, or the glossy surface - as opposed to the gritty underbelly. Where everybody writes 'you' with one letter (that's in media world, not the real one).

I'm a bit of a purist. Like one of the original punks seeing a fifteen-year-old stick a pin through his ear, because that's what one does, these days, to be rebellious, don't you know.

Anyway, back to the film. I'll probably see it out of curiosity. Cynical as I may be, I hope that it will actually be an interesting film, not just a glittering one.

Klaatu barada nikto

I spent part of the morning reading the new year issue of New Scientist - and, honestly, it's rather depressing. Following the lack of success of the Kyoto protocol, the threat of global warming is now more than merely a threat, and the talks in Poznan are not optimistic. Except for the politicians, of course, who fervently believe that dangerous climate change can be avoided if we stop the average global temperatures rising by 2°C - and that this can be achieved by halving CO₂ emissions by 2050. However, it would be more accurate to say that we need an 80% cut by 2050 - and that still only gives us a 70% chance of avoiding the 2°C rise.

Long story short, after our long and strenuous efforts to kill it, the Earth is beginning to die. Well done.

So, following that kind of morning, it made a curious sort of sense to watch The Day the Earth Stood Still this afternoon. A requel of the infamous 1951 sci-fi film, The Day the Earth Stood Still seems more poignant today than it probably did back then, what with the focus being shifted from nuclear war to environmental damage. Or perhaps not. Think of the phrase "Jesus wept", from the Biblical event of Jesus weeping tears of blood. This is said to be because he could see the future, and see what humanity would do. Children - and adults - have accepted this without question. Before World War I. After World War I. Before the Holocaust and afterwards. As David Sosnowski pointed out in Vamped, isn't it funny how we keep moving the bar on that?

Of course, the original dealt with the space race, and humanity's first ventures into space. It criticised our violent natures, and basically said that we couldn't be trusted to play nice with other races. This film says something similar, only it's more personal. We cannot be trusted to get along with other races on this planet, not on others.

The film focuses on astro-biologist, Dr Helen Benson, played by Jennifer Connelly, her young stepson Jacob (Jaden Smith), and the strange invader, Klaatu (Keanu Reeves), who claims to be a "Friend to the Earth".

...now what could that mean? I wonder.

The film's gripping and absorbing, and yes, suitable for twelve-year-olds. The special effects are fantastic - they're not too flashy or showy, which, after the many years of lasers we've suffered, is a good thing. They're such good quality that, without concentrating, you're unlikely to pay attention to the fact that they are special effects. Good use is made of light - after all, since the audience is sitting in a darkened cinema, blinding them with light is a very dramatic way to bring them into a film where the characters are suffering from the same affliction.

A lot of critics have given this film bad reviews, and I honestly suspect that they were watching a completely different film altogether. The main criticism levied is against the plot, which some say is slow-moving, or against Keanu Reeve's infamous stone-face. Perhaps these critics have seen the original 1951 film, and already had some idea of where the plot was going? Coming to the film fresh, I really enjoyed it. And I also think that Keanu's deadpan was very effective.