Real Estate - Days
(October, 2011)
After recently seeing both Drive and Ides of March, I can’t help but feel like an instant Ryan Gosling fan-boy. Gosling plays the typical dreamboat that he is, albeit a bloody confident one. I had seen the trailer for Crazy, Stupid Love a few times last year and did not know what to make of it. Seeing Steve Carrell as the main character I was somewhat turned off - Great in few, dire in more. This film proved to be the former. At each exchange between characters I could see where the mind-numbing humour so familiar with Carrell could fit in, but rather it was thrown out for Crazy, Stupid Love. It’s like this film is a smarter, slicker, funnier version of Hitch. I must say here though, as I rarely get to make this rant; Kevin Bacon - what a foul man. I cannot stand him. Something so sinister and unsettling about him. He reminds of the snake, Kaa, in The Jungle Book. Regardless of Bacon, the film really stands out as quality, something that rom-com sees rarely. A highly entertaining watch, with deceptive writing, which pays off in the final sequences.
For this project, I am really trying to watch movies without any background knowledge before I watch them. Midnight in Paris proved to be rewarding for my lack of storyline knowledge - only having the title to go on. We see Owen Wilson playing a role that I believe is not 100% fitting for him, I still see him as a Wedding Crasher, which can either be a good or bad thing. Overall though, a film that is a rom-com at heart, distanced itself from crummy sex jokes, predictable characters and crap lines. Owen Wilson essentially timetravelling was a welcomed “twist”, if you could say that, maybe “spin” would be better(?). I enjoyed seeing Hemingway, Picasso, Fitzgerald, Dali and many other artistic greats. Happy ending to boot, which I understand is a bit of a rarity for a Woody Allen - normally going with a depressing outlook, although I have never seen any of his other works.
