April 9, 2010, - 7:27 pm
Weekend Box Office: “Date Night,” “Runaways,” “Girl w/ Dragon Tattoo”
It’s another weekend o’ crap at the box office. I can’t recommend any of the new releases highly. Two of them had the makings of what could have been good movies but degraded into the vile and/or stupid. One was just vile trash to begin with.
* “Date Night“: At first, I was enjoying this mistaken identity story line. But it got real stupid, real fast. And since when does a movie with jokes about and references to anal sex get a PG-13 rating? That’s not to mention F- and other four letter words and stuff about stripping and orgies? Should have been “R.”
Steve Carell and Tina Fey play a bored married couple who are always tired out, seem to have lost the romance in their marriage, and go on their weekly date night out to a fancy new restaurant in New York City, where they are mistaken for a couple who are blackmailing an Italian mafia figure who owns strip clubs. In a novel acting career move, Ray Liotta plays the mobster. Trying to show his range, I guess. Wow, next, they’ll be casting Joe Pesci as a mafioso. For the rest of the movie, we see Carell and Fey trying to escape two corrupt cops who moonlight for the mobster and meeting up with various characters who help them in their escape plan.
One of those is real-life thug and convicted criminal Mark Wahlberg, who walks around shirtless showing his abs for the duration of the movie. Calvin Klein and the ’90s called. They want their underwear commercial back. In a stupid couple of scenes, he and his Israeli girlfriend speak in Hebrew about having multiple sex partners and an orgy with Carell and Fey. Yup, since there’s never an opportunity to speak Hebrew in a movie, the dumb lines about sexual swinging created the most appropriate opportunity. Thanks, self-hating Hollywood Jews. Your gratuitous manner knows no nadir.
The rest of the movie is equally dumb and the ending is predictable. Like I said, what started out promising lived up to the Hollywood promise of being complete garbage . . . and not really funny at all for what is supposed to be a comedy. I laughed only a handful of times. But the funniest thing of all is that some people will actually pay ten bucks plus to see this. Haha, funny. About as funny as Jack and Chrissy being mistaken for another couple on “Three’s Company.” Come on, Hollywood think of something new.
Save your own date night and skip this. It’s “entertainment” for morons.
TWO MARXES
* “The Runaways“: The saddest thing about this incredibly vile, horrid film is that it stars popular teen actors Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart. And young girls who idolize them will want to see this disgusting, pointless trash, which glamorizes teen sex, drug addiction, lesbianism, and a sea of C-words, P-word, F-words. Nauseating. Dakota Fanning’s parents–who allowed her to make this movie and simulate this behavior when she was barely 15–should be charged with child abuse. I guess engaging in this excrement is how you show you’ve “grown up as an actress.”
It’s the story of “The Runaways,” a loser girl band in the ’70s punk movement, which featured Joan Jett and Cherie Currie. But the band never made it big, and the main character, Currie, became–at age 15–a drug addict and slut who never grew up. That’s the second saddest thing about this garbage. I interviewed the 50-year-old Currie, on Thursday, and, while she declared the night before that she was “not ashamed of a thing” and so “proud” of her sleazy life, she couldn’t handle my polite, challenging questions about the movie and her book, “Neon Angel,” on which the movie is based. Her toady book publicist demanded my videotape because he didn’t want the world to see this 50-year-old vessel o’skank act embody the angry, left-wing New Age psychobabble queen that she is.
I’ll be writing more about my “experience” with this destructive, nutty woman who glamorizes teen orgies, lesbianism, and heavy drug use. She says she “paved” the way for women in rock. If this is “paving the way,” the dirt road was highly under-rated. We didn’t need her “paving.” We needed her act to be paved under. Sorry, hag, er . . . chick, your story simply isn’t as interesting and definitely not a crumb as important as you’ve deluded yourself into thinking. Irrelevant, and who cares? But, hey, to make a buck, she’ll pimp out America on it.
Even Elvis is turning over in his grave that his granddaughter (Riley Keough) participated in this manure. Grrlpower is over-rated.
Don’t let your teen daughters see this movie . . . even if accompanied by an adult. With crap like this, it’s no wonder we’ve lost the culture war and continue to decline as a country.
FOUR MARXES PLUS-A-PIMP-AND-A-BIN-LADEN
* “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo“: The title of this is misleading since the major character of this Swedish language film (with English subtitles) is really a Swedish investigative reporter who is hired by the only moral elder of a wealthy family of Swiss mostly former Nazis to find a missing niece, who was apparently murdered. The woman with the dragon tattoo is a goth woman in her 20s who is an ex-con on parole. The movie is based on the thriller by Stieg Larsson.
This otherwise riveting movie would have been great, but it degrades beyond reclamation with gratuitous lesbian scenes, and–far worse–sickening, graphic rape and torture scenes, including a parole officer who rapes the tattooed goth and then her rape of him using a sex toy and rope. Truly disgusting. Yes, the country of IKEA is depraved far beyond crummy furniture. Completely warped. And the “happy ending” simply isn’t worth it all. Not only is it too slow and about an hour too long, but the conclusion is unsatisfying and the movie, overall, was truly disturbing.
Should have been rated “X.” Take your subtitled piece of trash and shove it.
FOUR MARXES PLUS
Tags: Cherie Currie, Dakota Fanning, Date Night, Elvis, Hebrew, Joan Jett, Kristen Stewart, Mark Wahlberg, Movie Reviews, Neon Angel, Ray Liotta, Riley Keough, Steve Carell, Stieg Larsson, Sweden, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Runaways, Tina Fey
The ads for “Date Night” reminded me of Neil Simon’s “The Out of Towners”-original and remake are both good.
“Date Night”-is it too much to hope that someday writers/filmmakers will try to do original work instead of regurgitating formulas as stale as vaudeville routines?
Douglas Q on April 10, 2010 at 12:22 am