Movie Review - Two Night Stand

Two Night Stand (2014)

Starring Miles Teller and Analeigh Tipton

Directed by Max Nichols

Watched only because I have some weird fascination with Analeigh Tipton ever since Crazy, Stupid, Love and because I'm still attempting to find out how I feel about Miles Teller, Two Night Stand is a generic sex comedy that isn't bad, but certainly isn't anything worth seeing.  Tipton and Teller are Megan and Alec -- two lovelorn souls who meet on a hook-up site for a one-night stand.  Purely looking for sex, Megan gets up to leave the next morning only to find herself snowed in with a Snowpocalypse wreaking havoc on New York City.  Of course Megan and Alec find each other repulsive at first, but as they're forced to spend another night together, their hatred turns to humorous adoration as it should in every single romantic comedy ever written.

Fortunately, Tipton and Teller work well together and exude a believable chemistry which is important considering that this is pretty much a two-person film.  Unfortunately, the film feels long (even at eighty minutes) and too often finds itself resorting to the typical tropes that found me rolling my eyes -- let's get high together (ugh), let's have something really silly happen to the woman in that Meg Ryan-y kind of way that will make the guy and the audience find her all the more charming (double ugh).  It's not that Two Night Stand is offensive in anything it presents, it's just that it isn't original in the slightest.  It's one of those movies that as it ends you simply say to yourself, "Why was this even made?"  And that's perhaps the most damning criticism of all.

The RyMickey Rating:  C-

Movie Review - Lucy

Lucy (2014)

Starring Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Min-Sik Choi, Analeigh Tipton, and Amr Waked

Directed by Luc Besson

My biggest problem with director-screenwriter Luc Besson's Lucy is that I found it difficult to suspend belief and imagine a reality in which there was some feasibility with the title character's superheroic abilities she gains after being given a drug that strengthens her mental capabilities to fully utilize all 100% of her brain's power.  I realize there's a slight whiff of hypocrisy when I can watch something like Jurassic Park and believe that dinosaurs roam the Earth again or a film like Skyfall and buy into the notion that James Bond can run atop a speeding train.  However, something about Lucy didn't ring true and because of that, I found myself removed from the proceedings.

Scarlett Johansson is the title character -- a gal who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and finds her life completely turned upside down.  In Taiwan, she finds that her boyfriend (or perhaps one-night-stand partner) forces her to deliver a package to an evil drug kingpin (Min-Sik Choi) who in turn implants a package of a newfangled drug in Lucy's stomach forcing her to become a drug mule and carry the supply back to America with her.  However, on her way back home, Lucy is abducted, beaten up quite badly, and, after a powerful kick to her abdomen, finds that the package of drugs is leaking into her body.

As Lucy's story unfolds, we have interspersed scenes of Morgan Freeman as Professor Samuel Norman giving a lecture on how human beings only use 7% of their brain capacity.  Were we to utilize even 20%, we'd see marked differences in how we interact with others.  Thanks to this experimental drug, Lucy is finding out just what a 20% utilization will do and as the drugs seep further into her system, she finds that she is able to do things no human could imagine.

I could deal with Lucy reading lips and becoming quite adept at punching people, but when she starts being able to manipulate matter (both inhuman and human), I admit that I threw in the towel.  Johansson is fine here -- I think she's actually a decent "action" star -- but as Lucy's brain capacity increases, her emotions become nonexistent.  Her character's sassy (and, quite frankly, humorously enjoyable) demeanor at the film's outset becomes a blank slate by the film's end and it just makes for a bland ride.

Lucy is by no means a bad film -- its quick running time of under ninety minutes certainly speeds things along -- but I just couldn't accept the concept perhaps because it was a little too much in human "reality."

The RyMickey Rating:  C

Movie Review - Warm Bodies

Warm Bodies (2013)

Starring Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, Rob Corddry, Dave Franco, Analeigh Tipton, and John Malkovich

Directed by Jonathan Levine

Romeo and Juliet with zombies is the overarching theme of Warm Bodies, director and screenwriter Jonathan Levine's comedy about a United States that, in the near future, is overpopulated with zombies, forcing the remaining humans to live behind giant manmade walls in order to protect themselves.  Having stepped out of those walls one night in search of supplies, Julie (Teresa Palmer), her boyfriend Perry (Dave Franco), and her best friend Nora (Annaleigh Tipton) have a run in with a pack of the walking dead, one of whom -- a teenage zombie named R (Nicholas Hault) -- kills Perry and eats his brain which gives R all of Perry's thoughts and immediately has him fall in love with Julie.  When another zombie tries to kill Julie, R whisks her away to safety where the two find themselves realizing that they're not so different after all despite what others may have them believe.

Warm Bodies starts off rather ingeniously.  Mostly through humorous voiceover, R tells us his feelings about his new life as a zombie -- something we don't usually ever bear witness to in zombie films.  Nicholas Hault does a nice job of comedically countering a vivacious voiceover with a catatonic physical state.  The juxtaposition creates more than a few laughs.  Unfortunately, after the initial set-up detailed above, the film sort of wallows in nothingness.  The love story aspect of Warm Bodies just isn't as creative as the concept of finding out what zombies are really thinking behind their empty, human-hunting eyes.  (This makes sense, I guess, seeing as how we've had umpteen adaptations of Romeo and Juliet grace the silver screen.)

Across the board, the acting is above the level we typically see in teenage love stories with Teresa Palmer and Analeigh Tipton making the most of their underwritten characters and Rob Corddry managing laughs as R's best zombie friend.  Unfortunately for everyone other than the character of R, I found myself not really caring about their story lines.  Perhaps it's because the R's voiceovers throughout the film endear him to us more than the other characters, but these other character's plights just didn't register with me.

That said, Warm Bodies is decent.  It certainly is much more grown-up than most teenage romances and the rather ingenious take of making us privy to a zombie's inner thoughts creates an incredibly amusing first act.  I just wish the remainder of the film could've lived up to the opening's promise.

The RyMickey Rating:  C+ 

Movie Review - Damsels in Distress

Damsels in Distress (2012)

Starring Greta Gerwig, Analeigh Tipton, Megalyn Echikunwoke, Carrie MacLemore, and Adam Brody

Directed by Whit Stillman

Perhaps I formulated my Worst of 2012 list prematurely.  Quite frankly, I'm a little lost as to what Damsels in Distress is and what it's trying to be and that confusion is the only thing that's actually saving it from a bottom of the rung grade because it's at least made me think a tiny bit.  Greta Gerwig is Violet, a college student at the fictional Seven Oaks University, who is the head of the Suicide Prevention Center along with her buddies and roommates Heather (Carrie MacLemore) and Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke).  Violet's suicide prevention method: dance.  Get the depressed kids together to dance and euphoria will spread into their psyches.  As the school year begins, they meet incoming sophomore Lily (Analeigh Tipton) who ends up becoming their roommate, but who also questions the odd nature of these three gals who are disliked around much of the campus for their quirkiness.

And it's the "quirkiness" that fails Damsels in Distress.  There's not a single frame of this movie that rings true.  Dialog (and there is tons and tons of dialog) is forced and grating, oftentimes trying to be super-cutesy while seconds later trying to be deep (or at least that "college deep" where young adults think they're saying something important but are really just full of hot air).  Any story is essentially nonexistent.  The film even sets itself up into mini-vignettes that don't amount to much of anything by the film's end.

The only thing remotely saving this is that the cast was at least attempting to make this watchable.  Analeigh Tipton who I liked in Crazy Stupid Love is fine here as is Adam Brody (as a love interest for Violet and Lily), Carrie MacLemore, and Megalyn Echikunwoke.  Greta Gerwig was unfortunately tasked with an impossible role.  Violet from the outset is obnoxious and tediously boring and as a lead character she has no charisma.  There was little that Gerwig could do to help things along.

The RyMickey Rating:  D