There is a world of difference between a movie that is both funny and vulgar, such as "Bridesmaids" or "The Hangover," and a movie that thinks it is funny because it is vulgar, such as this weekend's flop "Wanderlust." There are some clever ideas and even a few chuckles in this Jennifer Aniston-Paul Rudd vehicle about failed Manhattanites who find themselves (and then find themselves) at a free-loving, clothing-optional commune 30 miles from the nearest Red Roof Inn. Unfortunately, both the clever ideas and the many more insipid ones are repeated five, six, twenty times, until all the charm is suffocated out of the picture and what could have been a genial sleeper engenders surprising antipathy. The screenwriters have been told they're funny all their lives. Their response is to assume if you like the joke the first time, then by the tenth time, you'll love it.
The weekend's other bomb is the straight-to-video-worthy "Gone," with Amanda Seyfried as Jill, a Portland waitress who claims she was kidnapped and left to die in a deep hole in Forest Park by a serial killer, known only as Digger, who she says is responsible for a wave of missing young women, and who she believes has now taken her sister. One minor problem: The cops don't believe her about any of it - she was involuntarily committed not so long ago - and she's forced to go after Digger herself.
The poignant, high-spirited football documentary "Undefeated" rounds out an excellent complement of Oscar nominees in the Documentary Feature category. So long as anything but "Pina" wins, I'll be happy, if for no other reason than I won't have to suffer through two hours of choreographed performance art. (Wim Wenders spoke after "Pina" screened at DocuDay last night, and you couldn't pry him off the stage with a hook.)
Eight years after his auspicious feature debut, the compelling Colombian drug-mule saga "Maria Full of Grace," director Joshua Marston returns with another potent, immersive look at a world culture, the fascinating "The Forgiveness of Blood," about the Albanian tradition of blood feuds, an extralegal form of homegrown justice in which the family of a murdered man has the right to avenge his honor by killing the murderer or another man in his family. Because the family home is considered sacrosanct, however, there are hundreds of Albanian families living in virtual house arrest, the sins of the fathers visited mercilessly on the sons, their lives on indefinite hold until, years later if ever, the feuds are resolved through a ritualized process of mediation.
One of the nominees for tomorrow night's Documentary Feature Oscar, "Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory" completes a 15-year, three-picture odyssey by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky chronicling the case of the West Memphis 3, then-teenagers convicted of the brutal 1993 murder of three eight-year old boys in Arkansas. The alleged ringleader, Damien Echols, seems to have had no connection to the crime, but wore black clothes and dyed his hair black and was wrongly identified as a satanist at a time of rampant hysteria. His constant-shadow best friend Jason Baldwin was seemingly found guilty by association, while a third friend, the mildly retarded Jessie Misskelley, gave a wildly implausible and shifting confession that implicated the three after twelve unbroken hours of repetitive police questioning.
"This Means War" belongs to that infinite pool of movies that take place entirely in Movieland, where everything everybody says and does rings totally false - and they talk non-stop, because the screenwriter wrongly believes he's witty or clever. This movie's conception of the workings of a CIA field office must be seen to be believed - it's staggeringly absurd - and the alternatingly unctuous and puppyish Chris Pine is no more plausible as a top operative than I am as a runway model. (His character's name is FDR, and nobody in this movie's universe seems to find that at all unusual.) Somewhat more masculine and appealing is Tom Hardy as the almost-as-ridiculously named Tuck, FDR's partner and bromantic rival for the affections of the cloying Reese Witherspoon (who has the everyday Movieland job of consumer product tester). This is the sort of picture where two people can engage in a brutal gunfight in one shot and not have a scratch on them in the next. It was slapped together so hurriedly nobody cared about getting it right, from continuity to anything resembling actual human emotion or experience. Chelsea Handler as Witherspoon's vulgar, keeping-it-real best friend provides the movie's only lightness and laughter; she's a bracing tonic to its wearying, leaden formula.
One of the Oscar nominees for Best Foreign Film - and indubitably the strangest - is the character study "Bullhead," about a steroid-popping man-child in the bizarre demimonde of the Flemish bovine hormone mafia. The movie runs to 140 plot-heavy minutes, with a convoluted, kitchen-sink storyline that careens from gay police informants to perfume-shop samples to a literal ballbusting. It's frequently unpleasant to watch, but mostly it's boring and goes nowhere.
