December 18, 2009, - 2:33 pm
Weekend Box Office: You Don’t Want to Hear About “The Morgans” or “Avatar” (& Probably Not “Invictus,” Either)
This weekend at the box office sounds like a bad sequel to a movie, Lame & Lamer.
* “Avatar”: Read my complete review from yesterday. This movie is yet another lame remake of the same storyline: evil White American males destroy the planet, the environment, and indigenous peoples who are way superior to us all. Again, read my complete review.
FOUR MARXES PLUS AN OBAMA
* “Did You Hear About the Morgans?“: Yuck. Another lame romantic comedy starring Sarah Jess-Equine Parker, er . . . Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant, who have as much chemistry as Tiger Woods and fidelity.
Like “Avatar,” you’ve seen this movie a million times before, too. Big city people who are oh so sophisticated and “classy” get stuck in “miserable,” “boring,” “backward” small town (Red State) America. And it’s a culture clash, of the elitist Hollywood variety. Shocker of shockers . . . except that many sophisticated wealthy types actually spend time in Wyoming, these days. I guess the makers of this on-screen exercise in annoying never heard of Jackson Hole. But, like I said, you’ve seen it before, including in “New in Town” (read my review), an equally awful rom-com from earlier this year, starring Renee Zellweger.
Parker and Grant play prominent, wealthy New York married socialites who are separated because he cheated on her. After an attempted reconciliation dinner, they see a man being murdered and thrown from a balcony. And the killer, discovering who they are, tries to kill them, to eliminate all witnesses. So, the couple of fighting ex-lovebirds are shuffled off to the Witness Protection program and Ray, Wyoming, where they are kept at a safehouse operated by Federal Marshal Sam Elliott and his wife, Deputy Marshal Mary Steenburgen. Parker and Grant hate being out in the country with such “backward” regular folk. But, soon, it causes them to–predictably–fall back in love and to come to appreciate small town wisdom.
But, believe me, I’m making this silly movie, filled with annoying cliches and stock characters, sound way better than it is. It’s dumb. The jokes are stupid. And it isn’t funny. Wow, a blonde chick playing an airhead receptionist at a country doctor’s office–that’s original. As in, not.
Oh, and by the way, if the characters in the inane movie were real-life characters they’d all have serious trouble. The New York lawyer Grant practices law without a license in Wyoming, just as New York real estate agent Parker sells a home in Wyoming, where she isn’t license. And Federal Marshals Elliott and Steenburgen need to be fired–not just for bad Southern accents in . . . Wyoming? and stereotypically sacharin country talk and Western clothing–but because they abandon their protectees in the Witness Protection program, in order to go to a rodeo. Hellooo . . .?
Skipworthy to the max. You don’t want to hear about the Morgans, nor spend ten bucks to see ’em.
FOUR MARXES
* “Invictus“: Matt Damon plays Francois Pienaar, the captain of the South African rugby team, and Morgan Freeman plays then-South African President Nelson Mandela in this sappy, heavy-handed, cloying Clint Eastwood film about racism-cum-racial harmony in South Africa.
Damon does a fairly good job at a South African accent, while Freeman is less convincing but does resemble the far-left Mandela. But in this movie, you’d hardly know the real, radical Mandela, who today, marches in support of HAMASniks in Gaza and, yesterday, allied with Arafat and P.L.O. terrorists.
Nope, this movie presents Mandela as some sort of saint and peacemaker who brought South African Whites and Blacks together in support of a mostly-White rugby team, rallying it to win the Rugby World Cup. Sadly, the racial unity and respect for inclusion of Whites shown in this movie is hardly an accurate portrait of the country, today, where racism against Whites is rampant and anti-Semitic thuggery on the part of Black South Africans continues to be the impetus for more South African Jewish emigration from the country to Israel.
The movie is set at the beginning of Mandela’s presidency. He lectures his fellow ANC Black activists, who’ve just taken over the government, that they must be inclusive of Whites. The Blacks hate the White rugby team, the Sprinkboks, which are a symbol of apartheid and racism to them. But he convinces them to cheer them on, through tactics like painting the face of the only Black member of the team, Chester, on South African Airlines planes, holding rugby clinics for Blacks in poor neighborhoods, etc. You know–the usual affirmative action stuff they do here.
Suddenly, White and Black Presidential bodyguards are smiling at each other, privileged Whites and their Black servants are going together to rugby matches in stadiums, and the world is a sea of lollipops and rainbows . . . all because of the goodwill and generosity of South Africa’s Blacks toward their fellow Whites, under Saint Mandela Messiah. The end.
Yes, it’s a true story that Mandela and the captain of the team, Pienaar, were allies and that Mandela cheered on the rugby team, which–against all odds–won the world cup. But it’s long, boring, and predictable, not to mention, revisionist history.
South Africa isn’t as rosy, race relations-wise, as the movie pretends. And that’s in no small part to the disharmony and Communist-backed racial tensions and thuggery led by Mandela and his proteges to date. That they don’t mention the necklacing murders (gasoline filled tires lit afire while around the necks of “the enemy”) his gang committed and the rightfully long memories of those and other ANC violence is just one of the stark lies by omission throughout this rose-colored flick.
TWO-AND-A-HALF MARXES
Tags: ANC, apartheid, Avatar, Clint Eastwood, Did You Hear About the Morgans?, elitism, elitist, Francois Pienaar, Hugh Grant, Invictus, Mary Steenburgen, Matt Damon, Morgan Freeman, Movie Reviews, rugby, Rugby World Cup, Sam Elliot, Sam Elliott, Sarah Jess-equine Parker, Sarah Jessica Parker, South Africa
sigh, another bunch of movies I won’t be seeing. BTW did you ever review Clive Cussler’s Sahara?
Ed on December 18, 2009 at 6:11 pm