For Your Fix on L.A.

WARNING: Ultra violence, gore and “nudity” in the above trailer.

I’ll keep this short. This movie sucks. Sure, seeing it in 3D was pretty cool but that novelty wore off pretty fast during that first scene in the mead hall where Danes were getting their limbs torn off and flung about by Grendel. Blech! Mind the falling torso! Apart from that interesting bit of technology? Boooring. Lonnnng and boring.

By the time you get to that part they keep showing in the trailer where Beowulf is yelling something about how this is Sparta, I mean, how he. Is. Beowulf. you just don’t care. He’s a bad ass. So what?

And maybe you think, “Well at least there’s Angelina Jolie to look forward to,” but you’d be wrong. Even she’s not enough to keep things interesting. She’s naked in 3D and dripping in gold and speaks with an oddly placed Russian accent, but meh. I’m sure even the young men who had flocked to the show we went to at the Bridge were disappointed.

From Salon.com:

Beowulf is ambitious, overbearing and hollow; it goes overboard to impress, yet it never feels truly inventive or imaginative.

Dotsara and I had a couple of cocktails at 12 Lounge before we went to see this movie and then worried that maybe watching it in 3D while buzzed wasn’t such a good idea. But in the end we decided that drinking more could have helped…immensely.

Anyway, her review was, “If you want to see a pretty cool 3D movie with crappy pacing and an even worse story: go see Beowulf.”

However, if you just want to take in a good movie, period, check out No Country for Old Men instead. Now THAT’s a movie I can’t stop thinking about. And it just seems to get better the more I think about it.

Beowulf, on the other hand, has the opposite effect. It just makes me angry and annoyed. What a gloriously, visually stunning waste of time.

“Was that just as bad for you as it was for me?”

My friend Bee had access to a preview copy of Match Point so we did a movie night in with hors d’oeuvres and key lime pie martinis. Thing is we shouldn’t have picked a Woody Allen movie turned thriller for our Friday night of mindless fun. Especially a Woody Allen movie that I hated just from its trailer alone.

And, wow, did I hate this movie after actually sitting through it. But I stuck through it to its incredulously uninteresting end. First off, are you kidding me with a fay Jonathan Rhys-Myers as the rakish tennis player? He and Scarlett Johansson had no chemistry whatsoever. “Why’s the gay guy having sex with that lady?” we kept asking the TV screen through the various “love” scenes. When they hooked up for the first time? Not. Hot. At. All. Watching them hook up the second, third, etc. time? Just plain weird. “Come on! He’s sooo gay!”

And Emily Mortimer as Jonathan’s beard, er, wife was just damn irritating. Always with the whining about wanting a baby and shouting out his name in her effort to locate him in her parents’ ginormous mansion. “CHRIS! CHRIS! WHERE ARE YOU? I don’t understand, he was just here. CHRIS? CHRIS!” If he isn’t answering you, he doesn’t want to be found! Her character was supposed to be sweet and innocent but rather she just came across as incredibly dumb.

Scarlett Johansson was annoying as fuck, too. What happened to her since Lost in Translation? I LOVED her in that movie and she was even pretty good in Girl With the Pearl Earring.

But, here? When her character first meets Chris, she overdoes the “I’m so sexy, you find me sexy don’t you?” with her slightly parted lips and batting eyelashes. Get over yourself! “She probably found one expression she did well and now just sticks with it,” Bee hypothesized.

Scarlett uses that parted lips expression EVERYWHERE–in that Eternity perfume commercial, on the red carpet, and even in sci-fi movie posters! We get it, you have really thick lips and like to breathe through your mouth.

Yeah, I just didn’t like anybody in this movie and I especially despise Woody Allen for bringing out the true annoyingness of his actors. No one was likable and I wasn’t rooting for anybody. Did Allen mean for it to be like that? I don’t see what purpose that would serve since by the time we got to the twist in the story, we just didn’t care all that much. And speaking of said twist, I won’t give anything away but Chris’ solution to his problem just came out of nowhere. Where’s the psychological buildup?

Oh! And the soundtrack sucked ass, too! I love opera as much as the next girl, especially vintage opera songs, but their use throughout this movie was distractingly alien to the action on the screen making it seem really pretentious.

I just don’t understand how this movie scored a 78% on Rottentomatoes.com. I DO, however, agree with Salon.com when they said, “… from the casting to the dialogue, Match Point just feels pickled in artificiality.”

People applaud Woody Allen for finally getting out of New York and making a movie that so goes against his oeuvre, but after watching this I’m thinking, “Maybe you should just stick with what you know. Neurotic comedies based in Manhattan.”