The Thing About Pam

 The Thing About Pam (2022)

Starring Renee Zellweger, Josh Duhamel, Judy Greer, Gideon Adlon, Sean Bridgers, Glenn Fleshler, and Katy Mixon

Directed by Scott Winant, Logan Kibens, and Adam Kane

Click here for my Letterboxd review

The RyMickey Rating:  D+

New Year's Eve

 New Year's Eve (2011)

Starring Halle Berry, Jessica Biel, Jon Bon Jovi, Abigail Breslin, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, Robert De Niro, Josh Duhamel, Zac Efron, Hector Elizondo, Katherine Heigl, Ashton Kutcher, Seth Meyers, Lea Michele, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sarah Paulson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Til Schweiger, Hilary Swank, and Sofia Vergara

Along with James Belushi, Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Matthew Broderick, Cary Elwes, Carla Gugino, Cherry Jones, John Lithgow, Ryan Seacrest, and Nat Wolff

Directed by Garry Marshall

Written by Katherine Fugate

Click here for my Letterboxd review

The RyMickey Rating: F

Love, Simon

Love, Simon (2018)

Starring Nick Robinson, Katherine Langford, Alexandra Shipp, Josh Duhamel, Logan Miller, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Tony Hale, Natasha Rothwell, Miles Heizer, and Jennifer Garner

Directed by Greg Berlanti

Written by Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger

Click here for my Letterboxd review

The RyMickey Rating:  B+

Movie Review - Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)

Starring Shia LaBoeuf, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, and Patrick Dempsey

Directed by Michael Bay

I felt this incredible sense of promise during the first ten minutes of Transformers: Dark of the Moon.  The year is 1969 and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin having just landed on the moon are given a top secret mission to explore some unknown object that had landed there eight years prior.  They uncover some weird humongous spacecraft that ends up belonging to the Autobot "race" of Transformers.  

And then the movie jumps to modern times...and the movie falls apart and turns into just as awful a piece of junk as the second movie in this heinously bad series.  You don't need to know anything other than the fact that the good Autobots are trying to save the Earth from the bad Decepticons.  Nothing else matters because nothing happens.  And it still clocks in at over two-and-a-half hours.

The second flick of the series got the rather dubious honor of being one of the worst movies I saw in 2009 and I would venture to guess that Dark of the Moon will fall into that same category.  There's just nothing good here.  Subpar acting, ridiculously inane battle sequences, and a visual color palette that is nothing but metallic gray.  

God...I could go on and on, but I despise this series and I think that in the future, I won't subject myself to any more of them.

The RyMickey Rating:  D-

Movie Review - Life as We Know It

Life as We Know It (2010)

Starring Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel

Directed by Greg Berlanti

So, sue me, but I have a soft spot for a good romantic comedy.  While Life as We Know It may not bring anything new to the table, it was a thoroughly enjoyable little flick that provided more than enough laughs to make this a worthwhile watch.

When one-year old Sophie's parents die in a car crash, their will specifies that guardianship of Sophie falls to their best friends Holly and Messer (Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel).  Needless to say, Holly and Messer had never gotten along, but now they must come together in order to raise this cute-as-a-button little girl.  It's probably not difficult to see where this story is gonna go (although, for a while, I foolishly thought the movie may veer onto a different route, but I was mistaken).

Despite the fact that this flick follows many of the standard romantic comedy clichés, it works mainly because of kid.  Triplets Alexis, Brynn, and Brooke Clagett are the stars of this picture and anytime one of the trio is on the screen as Sophie, you can't help but smile.  Both Heigl and Duhamel really come alive in any scene with Sophie and I found them both surprisingly warm and charming.  I really was expecting neither of them to be able to carry this film, but they proved to be quite successful in winning me over.

Unfortunately, where the film lags a bit is in the scenes where Heigl and Duhamel's Holly and Messer explore their relationship with one another.  The second half of the film which focuses much more on the adults rather than the kid isn't nearly as interesting or enjoyable as the first half.  And let me put a moratorium on scenes in which older people smoke pot (or in this case bake it in brownies) in order to relive their youth.  Like last year's It's Complicated in which Meryl Streep and Steve Martin lit up a joint, smoking pot to comedic effect irritates me immensely for some reason.  I'm no prude, but this is just a little movie-going quirk that I have that angers me.  Funny drunks I'm okay with, but funny druggies just doesn't make me happy.  And the thing is this was a plot point that was 100% unnecessary.  It didn't add a darn thing to the movie.

Still, I've got to say that I enjoyed Life as We Know It.  Yes, I know it's nothing groundbreaking, but I laughed a lot more here than in any movie I've recently watched.

The RyMickey Rating:  B