At the Cinema - March 2014

3 Days to Kill – 6

You’ll like this movie if you:

a.  Have 117 minutes to kill

b.  Like Kevin Costner

c.  Appreciate Cliches

Kevin Costner takes a piece of pulp and elevates it to a watchable level in this sometimes tepid, sometimes exciting action piece.

He’s a CIA hit man closing in on retirement when he discovers that he’s terminally ill.  So, he decides it’s time to reconnect with his neglected daughter, who of course wants no part of such sentiment, because well, she’s a teenager and that’s reason enough.

Along comes a CIA operative, played by Amber Heard, offering an experimental drug that could extend his life if he’ll just do one last job, because of course, extortion can be fun.  Especially if it’s offered to you in a car racing around Paris streets for no apparent reason.

Who is Amber Heard you ask?  I had to look her up.  She’s apparently the beautiful girlfriend of Johnny Depp, which qualifies her to play one of the most clichéd spies ever in the cinema.  She’s a CIA agent who for some reason  is dressed in various wigs and flashy clothes, wearing enough bright red lipstick to stop three lanes of traffic, and always smoking a cigarette like she’s some kind of Marlena Dietrich clone following Kevin around and driving real fast.  You can tell she’s driving real fast because the camera keeps cutting to her foot stomping on the clutch and her hand shifting gears.  Is this for real?  Did director McG do this caricature as a joke?  Was she meant to be so offensive to women, or am I the only one that noticed?

What’s the result of all this?  A movie you’ll probably watch over and over again once it hits HBO.  The credit for that goes to Costner.

Tim’s Vermeer – 9
The documentary revolution continues with this Penn & Teller production.  Documentaries are getting better and better in direct proportion to action movies getting more and more ridiculous with every lick of CGI.  If you’re not watching some documentaries you’re missing some incredible stories.

Let’s start with who is Vermeer?  He was a dutch painter who was once obscure, but is now renowned for his incredibly detailed paintings.  His work inspires Tim.

Who is Tim?  He’s Tim Jenison, an inventor with a theory.  His theory is that Vermeer’s paintings are so good that they couldn’t have been done by a painter just walking up to a canvas and going to town.  He thinks Vermeer had a mechanical assist and he seeks to first unlock the mystery and then recreate it.  This film chronicles Tim’s journey to duplicate a Vermeer painting by hand.  This journey of several years is documented here in glorious and fascinating detail.

This movie actually got me wanting to see a Vermeer in person.  Me.  Go see a painting.  That tells you something right there.  

The Long Con was Legendary, and We Waited For It

I get it.  You’re upset because you fell for the longest con in the history of television.  You thought the ending would be perfect and Ted and the mother would live happily ever after.  That’s what you wanted.  That’s what Ted wanted.  Then real life, or in this case fictional brilliance, got in the way.

As the final season wore on, and I do mean “wore”, the internet rumors that the mother was dead became plausible.  Think about it, where was the mother during all this story-telling?  Would you sit down and tell your kids 208 stories about your significant other without said other poking their head in at some point and saying, “hey, what’s going on here.”  (Yea, I think I saw all 208 episodes.  I want to thank my DVR, because the thing that I found most excruciating about the last episode was actually watching it live and having to endure those commercials in real time.  I don’t have time for real time anymore.)

No, for 9 seasons, we had our head in the sand, and then in the last 10 minutes the kids (in one of many beautifully written scenes in the series) basically said the obvious, “Snap out of it.”  This is BS, Ted has not been telling the story about the mother all this time, and we should have known it.

This was a wonderful examination of two very real types of relationships.  Maybe you got to experience what Ted did, that moment you dream of – love at first sight.  Maybe you even create it when it isn’t really there.  Maybe it even happens under a magical yellow umbrella.  Maybe it even happens simultaneously for both of you.  That’s even rarer.  And then…does it last forever?  Wow, that would be cool.  Or does it only happen in the movies?  You be the judge.  How many couples do you know like that?  And Ted, in the end seemed more than thrilled that he got 10 or so years of apparent perfection.  We don’t know – we got only a few glimpses.  Was it really perfect?  Or is he just telling the kids that?  They were there.  They probably know, but we can’t ask them.

Much more common is the Ted-Robin dynamic.  It’s what we call “falling in love.”  It’s not perfection, it’s that long slow painful burn, where one person feels more strongly than the other, and their feelings never seem to be in sync with their life’s vision.  Then there comes a time when they arrive in the same place, ready to try to “do this” knowing it isn’t going to be perfect, but it’s going to be good and they’re all they’ve got.  This is the 9 year story of that relationship.  It was never about the mother.  Thank goodness the kids figured that out.  Wish they’d told us sooner.  Then I wouldn't have written in my yearly Christmas newsletter, “let’s meet the bleeping mother already.”

I have to mention that only one thing bothered me about the final show.  It was that Ted, finally having met Tracy, is in no hurry to tie the knot.  They have two kids first, and then eventually get married.  The writers are brilliant in accurately assessing our cultural direction and the decline of the importance of marriage, but it made me just a little sad.  Like it or not that’s where we’re headed.  Wonder how her family felt about that.  Wait, we never saw them.  The fact is, we know very little about her.

As the last season wore on, it also became obvious that the Barney-Robin thing was like a high school romance.  Intense chemistry, most of it physical, and destined for a short shelf-life.  As they got drunk, tried to climb out windows, and had various contrived crisis throughout the season it just did not appear to be built to last.  Oh, well.  Sometimes those relationships last forever, but usually they don’t.  Robin, wonderfully portrayed by Cobie Smulders, had always made it clear that her career came first.  The chemistry with Barney was a temporary sidetracking of what she wanted first out of life.  She liked the attention of her relationships, but family wasn’t her goal.  With the family (Ted’s aspiration, not hers) out of the way, success achieved, coming full circle back to Ted would be easy and comfortable, and probably a great life for both of them.  We can all relax.  They’ll be fine.

So, we got conned.  Along the way, we actually did get to see a great relationship built to last.  The real story of love was in Marshall and Lily.  Their fights were few, they were short, and even the last one was resolved quickly.  You see, in a relationship you can often judge it by the length of the “mad.”  One day “mads” happen.  One week “mads” should be rare.  When you start having one month, and year-long “mads,” watch out.  As portrayed by Jason Segel, who easily could have left for his movie career 5 years in, but admirably didn’t, Marshall was the guy who was really living the dream, and he never wavered.  As portrayed by Alyson Hannigan, Lily was really the dream girl.  Smart, pretty, fun, with only occasional insanities, she’s what every guy wants.  Allyson has grown up before our eyes, never less than real and believable, even though she’ll always be Willow to me.  What she has become is one of those low key comedic treasures.  She may not be able to carry a show, but sure can carry a story.

Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick-Harris) was often perceived to be the centerpiece, because he provided most of the comedy, and much of it was classic.  I mean Legendary.  I suspect whether or not this series achieves “classic” status will be based on how well his shtick holds up.  Let’s get together in 2030 and discuss.  What made this a gem of a show is that it centered around five likeable but flawed people, the kind of people you’d enjoy being around night after night in the local watering hole, talking about life, love, and various pursuits. 

So, no, it wasn’t happily ever after, at least not in the way we were expecting it.  But then we really weren’t paying attention.  It was a con with anticipation as the distraction.  They got us, and it was brilliant.