Four Christmases

 Four Christmases (2008)

Starring Vince Vaughn, Reese Witherspoon, Robert Duvall, Jon Favreau, Mary Steenburgen, Dwight Yoakum, Tim McGraw, Kristin Chenoweth, Jon Voight, and Sissy Spacek

Directed by Seth Gordon

Written by Matt R. Allen, Caleb Wilson, Jon Lucas, and Scott Moore

Click here for my Letterboxd review

The RyMickey Rating:  C

TV Review - Big Little Lies

Big Little Lies (2017)

Starring Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley, Laura Dern, Zoë Kravitz, Alexander Skarsgård, Adam Scott, James Tupper, Jeffrey Nordling, and Iain Armitage

Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

***This show is currently available via HBO Now/Go***

I don't usually delve into television all that much here on the blog, but the star wattage of HBO's Big Little Lies was undeniably calling for me to at least check out the first installment of this seven episode limited series.  Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and Shailene Woodley headline this intriguing mystery series set in the beachfront community of Monterey, California -- a town where the wealthy adult inhabitants trash-talk one another behind their backs as if they were petty high school gossipers.  As the series opens, someone has died at a hugely popular fundraising event for the town's public elementary school.  We don't know who is dead, but we know that the police are investigating the scene as if something malicious occurred.  As the various residents of the community talk about the backstabbing, strong-willed moms and dads who attended the event, we flashback a few weeks to the start of the school year and that's where all the fun begins.

Single mom Jane Chapman (Woodley) has just moved to Monterey with her first-grade son Ziggy (Iain Armitage) who is quiet, subdued, and perhaps a bit of a pushover -- traits Jane carries as well which don't particularly fit in with the uppity community of Monterey.  After the first day of school, Ziggy is called out in public by classmate Annabella as having tried to choke her during class.  Annabella's mother is Renata Klein (Laura Dern), a strong-willed executive whose guilt about returning to the workforce makes her virulently appalled anytime her daughter is wronged.  Ziggy denies hurting Annabella and the wealthy Madeline Martha Mckenzie (Reese Witherspoon) immediately comes to Jane and Ziggy's aid, in large part because Madeline and Renata are seemingly the two den mothers of distinct large packs of Monterey elite with neither caring for one another in the slightest.  Madeline is also good friends with Celeste Wright (Nicole Kidman), a retired lawyer and mom of twin boys, and while Celeste is a little more hesitant to simply believe Ziggy's innocence, she's frankly got more personal things to be worried about -- she's in the midst of a horribly abusive relationship with her husband Perry (Alexander Skarsgård) that she can't get out of...or perhaps doesn't want to remove herself from.

Yes, I realize the brief summary may create some confusion, but that's not even half of the web of interpersonal relationships that play a role in Big Little Lies and despite the tangled web, it's all incredibly crystal clear where and when allegiances are forged and tensions are raised.  David E. Kelley's script is pitch perfect at creating an uppity liberal atmosphere where wealth and bitchiness equals power.  Yes, the women presented are all strong, but they're all battling with the fact that they feel they have to exhibit nastiness in order to get their way in their town.  This inner conflict in all of them -- they so obviously don't want to act the way they do -- is a pivotal aspect of the character development here and Kelley nails it.

Not only does Kelley succeed, the actresses in this piece are all stellar.  Shailene Woodley is an actress I hadn't yet loved, but here she's spot-on as the beleaguered mother who desperately wants to believe her child's innocence, but begins to question it as the community begins to rally against her.  Reese Witherspoon is perhaps the best she's ever been (dramatically speaking) as Madeline whose past indiscretions begin to rear their ugly heads as the series progresses.  For the first several episodes, I thought she was going to be the MVP here, but then along comes a tour de force performance from Nicole Kidman in the final three episodes and I had to concede the MVP title to her.  As a bruised and battered wife who feels unworthy of love and affection, her Celeste is heartbreakingly numb to her surroundings and her pain is palpable throughout.

Director Jean-Marc Vallee (whose previous films Wild and Dallas Buyers Club failed to impress me) not only gets great performances from his trio of leading ladies, but from his entire cast including Laura Dern, Zoë Kravitz, and the young Iain Armitage.  Along with a heavy dark, muted color palette that morosely paints most of the visuals, Vallee's camera often lingers in scenes, making us as viewers sometimes feel uncomfortable as we impede on the lives of these strong-willed, flawed women.  In the end, though, we don't want to leave.  At seven episodes, Big Little Lies was much too short.

Movie Review - Hot Pursuit

Hot Pursuit (2015)

Starring Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara

Directed by Anne Fletcher

Reaching levels very close to the abysmal bar set by last year's wreck The Other Woman, Hot Pursuit is another heinously unfunny comedy featuring two actresses who are forced to try and act their way through one of the most poorly-written scripts I've seen in a long time.  The horridness should've been evident from the get-go when Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara signed on to this one, but for some reason, the two ladies decided to tack on producer credits for themselves which makes them equally responsible for the end result.

Witherspoon is Officer Rose Cooper, a hickish Texas cop who despite having had a well-respected cop father who died in the line of duty finds herself relegated to manning the evidence lockers in the police station.  One afternoon she's called to her superior's office where she is told that she is going to be the police escort to drug cartel informant Felipe Riva and his wife Daniella (Sofia Vergara) who is testifying against his recently arrested boss.  Upon arrival at the Riva residence, Felipe and Daniella are attacked with Felipe being killed and Daniella managing to escape with Cooper.  The remainder of the film follows the two ladies as they move from place to place meeting a variety of men who come into the picture for a five minute dalliance only to have them be dismissed without doing a thing to advance the plot.  Bland, unfunny vignette followed by bland, unfunny vignette leads to very little actual plot development and makes the 87-minute runtime feel exorbitantly long.

Unlike The Other Woman which featured some disappointing performances, the ONLY compelling thing about Hot Pursuit is that I felt a genuine chemistry between Witherspoon and Vergara.  That isn't to say that their roles were well-conceived or even that their acting wasn't anything better than a stereotypical caricature, but the two actresses admittedly played well off one another.  And that's the single thing Hot Pursuit has going for it.  Beyond that, the script is filled with way too many ludicrous plot holes, the humor is nonexistent, and the direction ill-conceived at best.  It's a bit shocking how truly awful this is.

The RyMickey Rating:  D-

Movie Review - Devil's Knot

Devil's Knot (2014)

Starring Reese Witherspoon, Colin Firth, Alessandro Nivola, James Hamrick, Seth Meriwether, Kris Higgins, Dane DeHaan, Mireille Enos, Bruce Greenwood, and Amy Ryan

Directed by Atom Egoyan

***This film is currently streaming on Netflix***

On May 5, 1993, three young boys went missing in West Memphis, Arkansas, after riding their bikes one evening.  A few days later, their bodies were found naked and bound in a small river.  Nearly a month later, three teens were arrested for the crime after the police force and the town in general found the youths' love for heavy metal and penchant for learning the Wiccan religion to be red flags.  This is the true story behind Devil's Knot, a flick by Atom Egoyan that I found engaging, though a bit too "surface" to really have much of an impact.

Reese Witherspoon as the mother of one of the murdered boys is solid, bringing the requisite amount of emotion to her character (and actually probably faring a little better than even her Oscar-nominated work in Wild which I felt was a tad overrated).  As the heart of the movie, she pulls the viewer in, although her character's constant doubts concerning the guilt of the three teens plays much too obvious.  There is reason for doubt which I won't delve into here, but because of the time constraints of the movie, once the film shifts to the trial of the three teens, things feel rushed and forced.

This whole true saga has apparently been played out in three well-regarded documentaries which I can only assume allow for a little more thoroughness.  That said, Devil's Knot is better than the disappointing reviews it received and it certainly piqued my interest in this case as a whole which definitely isn't a bad thing.

The RyMickey Rating:  C

Movie Review - Inherent Vice

Inherent Vice (2014)

Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Katherine Waterston, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Joanna Newsom, Jena Malone, Eric Roberts, Maya Rudolph, and Martin Short 

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

What in the hell was in the critics' water when they deemed Inherent Vice worthy of a 73% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes?  Just because a film is directed by an esteemed director doesn't make it worthy of such a ranking.  Just because a film is well acted doesn't make it worthy of such a ranking.  Just because a film looks good and has better than average production values doesn't make it worthy of such a ranking.  A film still has to be enjoyable in a sense that the viewer must remain captivated by any of those aforementioned criteria mentioned or by its story.  Unfortunately, the directing, acting, and production values aren't enough to keep Inherent Vice afloat and, boy, is its story one of the worst and least captivating tales I've seen woven in a film in 2014.

There was talk of the story here being incoherent and frustrating, but I found the general gist of the plot fairly easy to comprehend.  A drug-addled private eye named Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) is drafted by his former lover Shasta Fay (Katherine Waterston) to determine the seriousness of Shasta's current lover's wife and her lover's desire to put her husband (and, remember, Shasta's current lover) into a loony bin and take all of his money.  It should be noted that if the previous sentence has thrown you for a loop, Inherent Vice probably isn't for you.  Then again, Inherent Vice really isn't for anyone.  The biggest issue with director and screenwriter Paul Thomas Anderson's flick is that it takes an already convoluted premise and branches off on so many tangents that admittedly are related, but fail to resonate or prove meaningful in the slightest.  Characters come in for single scenes, drop some other name for Doc to investigate, and then leave and never come back.  This pattern gets repetitive and old rather quickly and makes the nearly 150-minute run time feels like an eternity.

What saves Inherent Vice from the very bottom dregs of the RyMickey Rating system is that fact that the film looks good and contains acting that is certainly above average.  Unfortunately, I still found myself twiddling my thumbs, waiting for this never-ending story to conclude.  Unable to latch on to any of the film's characters or their plights, I found myself adrift here and completely unimpressed.

The RyMickey Rating:  D

Movie Review - The Good Lie

The Good Lie (2014)

Starring Reese Witherspoon, Arnold Oceng, Ger Duany, Emmanuel Jay, Kuoth Wiel, and Corey Stall

Directed by Philippe Falardeau

In 1983, a civil war broke out in Sudan over religion and various natural resources, leaving many southern villages ravaged by northern armies.  Orphaned children fled on foot as many as one thousand miles to Ethiopia and Kenya in hopes of finding a safe refuge.  More than a decade later, 3600 Sudanese refugees relocated to the United States.  The Good Lie is the story of four of them and their incredible journey is uplifting and inspirational.  

While Reese Witherspoon gets top billing here, this "based on true events" amalgamation isn't her tale at all which I actually found oddly refreshing.  Eschewing the typical Blind Side savior aspect, The Good Lie places its focus squarely on the Sudanese refugees themselves -- Mamere (Arnold Oceng), Jeremiah (Ger Duany), Paul (Emmanuel Jay), and Abital (Kuoth Wiel).  The quartet of siblings (though not all necessarily through blood, but rather through spirit) win a lottery to travel to the US and find support from Carrie (Reese Witherspoon), a job placement specialist in Kansas City, Missouri.  Although they slowly but surely begin to grow accustomed to American social cues, the three brothers long to be reunited with their sister Abital who was sent to Boston to live with a family there.

As mentioned, The Good Lie is the refugees' tale -- Witherspoon doesn't even come into the picture until close to 35 minutes in.  Rather, we get a detailed story of the quartet of refugees as youths as they make their incredibly long and dangerous trek through Sudan to safe harbor in Kenya.  By connecting with them as kids, we grow to understand the familial bonds they form despite the fact that only Mamere and Abital are actually related.  The film unfortunately falters a bit when it initially makes it to the US as it falls into the stereotypical fish out of water moments that we've seen before -- "What's this 'McDonald's'?", mistaking a telephone for an alarm clock, how do you use a straw -- but this lighthearted overused element shifts rather quickly back to the bigger story at hand.

While Witherspoon is certainly solid in her portrayal, The Good Lie belongs to the Sudanese quartet. Thankfully, the actors portraying them -- three of whom are actual Sudanese refugees themselves -- are more powerful than I could've expected.  The feelings depicted by the quartet all feel genuine and we never get the sense that this is one of the first acting gigs for most of them.  This is by far the most impressive aspect of the film and director Philippe Falardeau deserves kudos as much as the fresh-faced actors for being able to believably deliver and elicit the wide range of emotions needed for these refugees' stories to spring to life.

The RyMickey Rating:  B+

Movie Review - Wild

Wild (2014)

Starring Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Gaby Hoffmann, and Thomas Sadoski

Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

To begin this review of Wild, I'm going to quote a line from my review of Dallas Buyers Club, a film also directed by Jean-Marc Vallée which went on to win several Academy Awards last year:

"Dallas Buyers Club doesn't have the emotional arcs I want in a film like this.  The film doesn't drive its story forward in such a way that feels exciting or impacting."

Unfortunately, that's the same way I feel about Wild, the true story of Cheryl Strayed, a young woman who, after the death of her mother steered her down a path of alcohol, drugs, and promiscuous sex hurting her caring husband in the process, decides to hike solo the 1,100 mile  Pacific Crest Trail in order to find peace within herself.  Vallée's two recent works simply fail to elicit the emotional impact that their hefty stories should deliver.  Something's missing from Vallée's work and despite his more than adequate visual style, Wild left me feeling empty.

Part of the issue with Wild is its desire to tell a huge chunk of its emotional core in flashback.  The film opens with Cheryl beginning her trek across the West Coast, only allowing us brief puzzle piece-like flashbacks of what got Cheryl to this point in her life.  As the viewers piece together the flashbacks, I found myself frustrated by two things.  First, the flashbacks are very fragmented seemingly in an attempt to not clue the viewer in on everything right away.  Yes, I know the screenwriter may say they're fragmented because Cheryl's mind was wandering as she wandered the trail, but the disjointed nature of the flashbacks proved frustrating to me in part because I felt like they were trying to "hide" key aspects of Cheryl's life until pivotal moments in the hiking portion of her story.  Piggybacking off of that, the second issue is that although they attempted to keep portions of her past secret, it was incredibly easy to infer what had happened, so if any of these hidden aspects of her past were supposed to be a surprise emotionally, they weren't in the slightest.

Ultimately, the biggest problem with these flashbacks and the way they were set up is that they failed to create an emotional arc for the character.  Tossing scenes in seemingly willy-nilly didn't allow for the audience to latch on to Cheryl's admittedly painful early twenties during which she found herself in much turmoil.  Adding to this, Cheryl is a smart cookie.  She's well educated and quite knowledgeable about literature and the arts.  This causes her, in the film's pivotal moments, to speak almost too poetically for her own good.  I will admit, this is more a fault of mine than the film's, but I found myself zoning out whenever she waxed eloquently about a poet or an author.

Reese Witherspoon is good, appearing in every scene of the film, but as I said, I didn't find myself connecting with her character.  I don't think that's a fault of hers, but rather the script and the directing, but I found myself wishing I could've liked her role more.

Despite my qualms, Wild isn't a bad film -- neither was Dallas Buyers Club, for that matter.  Both are just missing that emotional connection that quite frankly should come without question in films like these.

The RyMickey Rating:  C+

Movie Review - Mud

Mud (2013)

Starring Tye Sheridan, Matthew McConaughey, Jacob Lofland, Sam Shepard, Ray McKinnon, Sarah Paulson, Michael Shannon, and Reese Witherspoon

Directed by Jeff Nichols

Mud is a tale of two movies for me.  One film details the coming-of-age story of a kid named Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and his buddy Neckbone (Jacob Lofland).  The fourteen year-olds are struggling to deal with their strive for independence from their families as well as attempting to navigate the choppy waters of teenage love.  The other film deals with these two teens meeting a mysterious man named Mud (Matthew McConaughey) who befriends them, but seems to be hiding more than a few secrets.

The first film focusing on the kids which takes place during the first hour works...and works incredibly well.  I found the normalcy of the everyday trials of these Southern teens oddly riveting despite the fact that there was perhaps a mundane aspect to it.  Part of the reason for this half's success are the great performances from Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland.  Together, these two young talents more than held their own and their relationship and repartee with one another was wonderfully natural and believable.

Unfortunately, the second half of the film shifts much of its focus to the character of Mud and despite McConaughey's charm and charisma (coupled with a fine performance), I just found myself not caring about his plight of trying to win back his girl Juniper (Reese Witherspoon) and the chaos that surrounds his shady character's secrets.  Rather oddly, whenever Mud places its attention on its title character, it becomes much more bland.  The film's final moments (including a very oddly staged "action" sequence) prove to be more laughable than anything else and stand in stark contrast to the "reality" that the script provides for its two teen characters.

This is the second film I've seen from writer-director Jeff Nichols (after Take Shelter) and I appreciate his development of characters.  He's also quite adept at culling nice performances from his actors who, considering the aforementioned development of characters, have a nice script to sink their teeth into.  However, I do think that as Nichols grows as a filmmaker, he needs to get a bit more of a discerning eye when it comes to his work as I found Mud a bit meandering and unfocused especially in its flawed second half.

The RyMickey Rating:  B-

Movie Review - This Means War

This Means War (2012)

Starring Chris Pine, Tom Hardy, Reese Witherspoon, Chelsea Handler, Til Schweiger, and Angela Bassett 

Directed by McG

There's something innately appealing about the trio of Chris Pine, Reese Witherspoon, and Tom Hardy, but the charming nature of all three actors is utterly wasted in the horrendous action-"comedy" This Means War.  With some of the shoddiest writing of 2012 and direction by McG that's just plain sloppy, there's simply no reason to subject yourself to this paint-by-numbers flick.

Hardy and Pine are Tuck and FDR (yep, FDR), covert CIA agents who just completed a mission in which they succeeded in preventing "international criminal" Heinrich (Til Schweiger) from getting his hands on a weapon of mass destruction.  However, in the midst of the mission, they kill Heinrich's brother which sends the supervillain on a mission of his own to hunt down and kill the CIA duo.  

Of course, this story doesn't really matter.  While the film opens and ends with its focus on Heinrich, the middle 85 minutes barely mention his name.  Instead, we're treated to a purportedly hilarious love triangle in which Tuck and FDR try and woo Lauren (Witherspoon), a beautiful gal who, like all beautiful gals in movies, has given up on love.  Instead, she dances around her apartment singing late 80s/early 90s rap songs and chats it up with her obnoxious best friend Trish (Chelsea Handler playing herself) who wants nothing more than to live vicariously through any sexcapade into which Lauren can venture.  Through a series of fateful events, Lauren finds herself dating both Tuck and FDR at the same time, and while Lauren has no idea her two beaus know each other, the CIA duo employ all the technology at their disposal to make sure the other fails at succeeding [while at the same time not using that same state-of-art gadgetry to make sure Heinrich doesn't make good on his vow to enact revenge on them.]

Perhaps there's something here in terms of a story, but with dialog so horrible this blogger could have done better and direction so odd that at moments I wondered if I was watching an edited-for-tv version of a film, This Means War is a chore to watch.  It's a shame because Chris Pine and Reese Witherspoon really do give this everything they have and there are some moments where their charming natures almost make certain scenes work, but they're really never given a chance with this dead on arrival junk. Tom Hardy is fine, but he's fared better in the past (and unfortunately I feel like I've been saying that a bit more than I'd like as of late) -- I'm simply not sure romantic comedy is a genre that suits him despite his effort here.

Quite simply, there's nothing about this movie that works.  The comedic moments never made me laugh.  The action scenes never provided a moment of tension.  The romance aspects never created steaminess.  When you fail in all three of the genres you're trying to place your movie into, you've got a mess on your hands and This Means War is a one of the biggest mishandled botches of 2012.

The RyMickey Rating:  D

Movie Review - Monsters Vs. Aliens 3D (2009)

featuring the voice talents of Reese Witherspoon, Seth Rogen, Will Arnett, Hugh Laurie, Kiefer Sutherland, Rainn Wilson, and Stephen Colbert
directed by Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon
written by a bunch of people

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge Disney fan. Anyone who knows me knows that I typically despise Dreamworks films. They lack heart, they lack soul, and they get all their humor from pop culture references. Last year's Kung Fu Panda was moderately successful (review), but it still fell apart at the end. With Monsters vs. Aliens, Dreamworks is continuing to improve...although they definitely haven't reached Pixar's quality level yet.

When a meteorite with special unearthly powers lands on Susan (voiced by Witherspoon) on her wedding day causing her to grow to gigantic proportions, she is seized by the government and placed in a holding tank with four other monsters -- a blob named Bob (Rogen), a man/cockroach (Laurie), a Creature from the Deep (Arnett), and a giant furry insect. A friendship develops between them all, and, this being a kid's film and all, they come together despite their differences and fight the evil alien invader Gallaxhar (Wilson) who desires to destroy Earth.

There is very little story here. In fact, the whole story is in that paragraph above. And while the film tried to develop the characters (especially Susan), it fell flat...although Witherspoon's vocals were engaging.

There is definitely humor in this one that does not stem from the pop culture variety (although there are a few of those jokes here and there). I am utterly sick of Seth Rogen as a one-note actor, but he was hilarious here (well, his voice was hilarious). Kiefer Sutherland's General W.R. Monger also provided quite a few laughs. I guess the problem is that even though I laughed quite a bit (a lot, really, when comparing it to other Dreamworks films), there's not enough story to connect those laughs. It's like watching a stand-up comedian and only laughing at every third joke. You feel like it's good when you're watching it, but when you really think about it, you realize that you feel like you didn't quite get your money's worth.

Still, the film is Dreamworks' best effort ever and is certainly worth a look.

But...it's certainly NOT WORTH A LOOK in 3D. There is no reason to shell out the extra bucks and see this in the 3D format. There is an incredibly corny 3D effect at the beginning that I literally rolled my eyes at, but after that, there is very minimal 3D-ness to this film. Unlike other films I've seen in 3D, there's very little depth to this one either. If you decide to see this in a theater, there's no reason to see it in 3D. I can't imagine this 3D "fad" lasts if companies keep putting out films with lackluster effects.

The RyMickey Rating: C+