The Merchant of “Eclipse”

“If you prick us, do we not bleed?… If you wrong us do we not seek revenge?” –Shylock, The merchant of Venice.

Yes, most of “Eclipse” revolves around the love triangle between the vampire, the werewolf and the talking Eeyore doll, but like most things in this series, the interesting things are in the peripheries. One of the things I always found missing from the Twilight series was a good, central villain. Harry Potter had Voldemort, Star Wars had Darth Vader and Twilight has… Ron Howard’s daughter?

In the first book/movie, the main villain was a vampire named James, who only (gasp) wanted to drink the blood of the heroine. In the sequel, Victoria, the girlfriend of that vampire stalks main character Edward and the rest of the Cullens, the family of “vegetarian” vampires who offed her BF. In the third book, “Eclipse,” she gets her head twisted off.

There is no threat established at the beginning of the first book and resolved at the end of the fourth.

The closest thing to a central villain is the Michael Sheen character, who popped up in the second movie during a visit to the vampire Vatican. He’s absent in this one, but we do see the introduction of a new, cooler looking vampire named Riley who is busy changing half of Seattle’s Abercrombie and Fitch clientele into a bloodsucking super-army.

An army, that’s inevitably defeated by the limp-fanged Cullens. While any traditional vampire can be destroyed by a simple stake to the heart, in the Twilight universe, you can also dispatch one by punching it really hard, an effect that must be what looks like if Superman had his way with Michalangelo’s David. Still, it’s a bit unsettling how quickly and effortlessly the Cullens destroy a group of what they call “newborns.” Hmm… they murder a couple of their own kind and then dispatch a couple dozen newborns. They’re the good guys, right?

Victoria’s end isn’t the noblest of end for a creature of the night, much less for seeking nothing more than avenging a wrong. It’s not her fault that she and her love were killed for just being vampires, much less from an “enlightened” one who goes against his own nature by refusing the blood of humans.

Every new vampire book, movie or TV show alters the mythology in some way, but they all keep that blood-drinking trait in common. Because this invariable nature sometimes involves the occasional dead body, vampires in this world are labeled evil, unless of course, they live in the Pacific Northwest and won’t stop talking about their “evolved” eating habits. There used to be a word for people like this: hippies.

What’s a vegetarian vampire? Instead of drinking human blood, they find some defenseless forest creature to drain. Afterward they make ad nausea arguments how that vegetarian diet is, in fact, better for you. Imagine if vegans hung around the meat section of the grocery store, punching anyone who asked for a nice rib-eye. We are continually told how the Cullens’ non-human-eating policy is done with the maximum amount of restraint; as any human faced with a plate of tofu and a plate of filet mignon must feel. But would you fault a lion for chasing down a gazelle?

Let’s flip the scales and say it was Edward who was seeking revenge for Victoria’s killing of Edward’s love Bella. Would the audience feel any sympathy for Edward now? Of course they would; it’s entirely reasonable to side with a protagonist who has been wronged. But what if that protagonist was the one doing the wrong?

I doubt author Stephanie Meyer set out to be subversive by writing a series of books written from the point of view of the antagonist, but when you consider all the trouble Bella started once she snagged Edward’s unblinking stare, it’s hard not to think that maybe she is the bad guy.

While Shylock has gone from being viewed as the villous Jew in Shakespeare’s time to a wronged Jew in a more modern viewing, maybe in a few hundred years it will be Bella and Edward that audiences interpret as the villains. After all, the bad guy is in the eye of the beholder.

Watching “The Truth About Love” in Amman

You learn a lot about movies when you see how other people approach them. It isn’t out of the ordinary that I would watch something like the Jennifer Love Hewitt vehicle The Truth About Love, what is out of the ordinary was where I was: in an apartment in Amman, Jordan.

The plot is a standard one for the romantic comedy: Guy loves his best friend’s wife, sends anonymous Valentine’s card, wife thinks card is from husband, decides to pose as anonymous admirer to husband, comeuppance is given, best friend and wife get together.

The Saudi Arabian cable channel MBC 2 broadcast across the Middle East and runs non-stop movies, mostly from Hollywood. This being a television station from a very conservative country, the films are heavily edited any trace of sex, drugs or foul language out of them so that an R rated movie here could easily get a PG rating for the censor’s-cut. It may seem strange that MBC 2 would broadcast a movie whose central conceit is adultery. But here’s the real strange thing: the edits actually improve the movie.

In one scene, Hewitt makes only the slightest move forward before the scene and the music jumps forward to Hewitt walking down the hall. What did the couple do? What did they say to each other? In the theatrical version I’m sure we see all this, but add a few insinuations and the interpretation deepens. When movies get lazy and spell everything out, the audience gets lazy.

I’m reminded of a technique used in the fourth Harry Potter movie. When Harry must steal something from a dragon, we get a few requisite shots of how hard this might be. As Harry flies towards it in a last-minute attempt to steal a magic egg, we see the dragon, Harry’s face, a gasping crowd and then… the next scene. Harry is safe again in Hogwarts, holding the egg aloft to the joy of his classmates. A lesser film would’ve given us at least a five minute CGI battle with the dragon, but since this is gone, we are left to wonder just how the boy wizard did it.

Had these censor edits been made in earnest, maybe the movie would be regarded as a quaint cult classic where the aspiring, but inexperienced, filmmakers were just learning about the jump cut and ended up making something better than they intended.

Jaws launched the career of Spielberg in part because it wasn’t just a movie about a giant shark, but a movie that famously didn’t show a giant shark when it could have. This is due in part to the fact that the mechanical shark used for shooting kept breaking down, so Spielberg was coming up with ways to shoot around the shark while still showing what the shark can do. Hitchcock knew this too. Watch the shower scene in Psycho; you never see the knife actually stab. We get quick glimpses of what’s happening, we can hear what’s happening, but we can’t see it. The brain fills in the rest and most times, a person’s imagination will be worse than anything they will see on a screen.

Though The Truth About Love is neither of these movies, it’s interesting to see how it benefits from the “less is more” presentation. We see romantic leads kissing so often that it’s never given a second thought until it doesn’t happen.

The most striking example of this is the ending. We expect to see the requisite true love’s kiss and we do… in the American version. But when Saudi TV audiences watch Hewitt and Dougray Scott move in to smooch, the credits immediately begin. It’s an ending I didn’t expect and had it been made intentionally it could’ve been regarded as one of the most subversive endings in the last decade; sure to be inspire a few abruptly ended imitators.

As it stands, The Truth About Love is conventional. Conventional in the way that I dislike most romantic comedies because there’s nothing I haven’t seen before. But when some television executive orders anything remotely offensive to a largely Muslim audience to be removed; there’s something new.

I’d imagine that somewhere in the MBC studios is a collection of all the clips exorcized from the movies, similar to the final scenes of Cinema Paradiso, waiting to be found and strung together of montage of kissing, cursing and everything else that most audiences are far to dulled to appreciate anymore.

Why don’t you see movies like “Ever After” anymore?

In the mid to late 90s, it wasn’t uncommon to see a movie like Ever After: A Cinderella Story or The Man in the Iron Mask do moderately well in theaters; costume dramas for people who don’t normally watch costume dramas. While this is a far cry from anything Merchant and Ivory, it’s a bit disappointing that you don’t see much of these movies anymore now that every other movie is not only animated, but also in 3-D. Though the movie came out only 12 years ago it seems strange that anyone would ever go to a movie that wasn’t loaded with pop culture references and celebrity cameos. Now the genre is split, you either get fluffy romances or self-important historical epics. The only way for a movie like this to gain any attention today would be to call it Jane Austen’s Cinderella.

Ever After bills itself as a kind of historical Cinderella and dispenses with nearly all the tropes of fairy tale: fairy godmothers, transpomorphic pumpkins, or talking rodents. Of all the adaptations I can think of (Disney’s Cinderella, Cinderfella, Cinderella and the Half-Blood Prince) all contain some sort of glass footwear, Ever After at least acknowledges the presence of a fur slipper like one in the Grimm version. But a rat-skinned shoe, though more historically accurate, doesn’t conjure a pleasant or altogether romantic image. The glass slipper stays.

Our story begins, as if to add legitimacy, as an old woman corrects the brothers Grim in their telling of Cinderella. That not only was she a real person named Danielle, but a direct descendent was now speaking to them from her home a post-Revolution castle.

This being an American-made movie set in France, all the characters speak in British accents. So a line like this one: “You wish me to go to a mosque?” threw me initially when  I realized she was saying probably saying “mask.” Apparently in Acting 101, they teach you get a new accent by switching the vowels in certain words. Beyond this, the only indication we get that we are in France is the bad guy is named Pierre Le Pieu. Not that location is important to a story like this, though it keeps getting brought up that the ultimate punishment would be being sent to America, though it’s ironic that to many Red Staters today, the opposite would be just as big of threat.

This remains though, the only live-action fairy tale to feature Leonardo Da Vinci as comic relief.  To get an idea how strange this is, imagine a 20^th century adaptation of Snow White with Andy Worhol helping the two leads find love by showing them a 12-hour movie about a apple.

I am joint owner of this movie thanks to one of those cheapy boxed sets containing three or four movies linked only by a common actor. The other two movies in The Drew Barrymore collection are Never Been Kissed and Fever Pitch, both movies involving annoying characters, improbable miscommunications and baseball. Ever After only has one of these; and if you think it’s baseball, then you’re in for a long two hours.

One of the things that always bothered me about the Prince Charming character is he does next to nothing to get the girl. While the Prince Henry (just a shade more macho of a name than Charming) does do a little more than launching a kingdom-wide foot hunt, we also see him whining about marrying various foreign princesses and complaining about getting grounded in his gigantic castle. On second thought, maybe Prince Charming is a bit manlier. When the king orders him to take a bride, he must either find one in five days or one will be chosen for him. It seems even 16th century France isn’t immune to the How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days plotline.

“The A-Team” is about a team

It may seem strange that my wife was the one to want to see an action movie but then again, she was the target age to watch a German-dubbed Mr. T deliver his lines when shows like MacGyver and The A-Team made their way to broadcast television in her native Austria.

I didn’t watch The A-Team growing up, but you have to appreciate a show that remains just as watchable the after using the same plot in dozens of episodes. Is it stupid: yes. Do things happen that could not happen in the real world: yes. Does it take itself seriously: no. And how could it? It had three characters break the fourth out of an insane asylum each week with excuses more outrageous than the last and any local bully, thug, or motorcycle gang could be easily outwitted by one scene of retrofitting a GMC van with whatever items happened to be in the local barn or warehouse.

Still, you only need a few elements to successfully adapt the story of an elite military unit sent to prison for a crime they didn’t commit to any medium: stuff blowing up, plans coming together and use of the word “fool.” Yes, even if you wanted to make A-Team: The Woodcut Engraving, it would be OK so long as the word “fool” is directly preceded by the phrase “I pity the.”

Special effects weren’t the only thing that was updated since the show ran in early eighties, which had a cast rounded out by that guy from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the guy who was on the cereal box of Pee Wee Herman’s breakfast. Now, we’ve got big-name actors like that guy who was in Schindler’s List, that dude from The Hangover, the alien in District 9, and some person who looks like Mr. T.

We next see our hero’s at a military base in the “last days of the pullout of the Iraq war,” meaning the movie takes place sometime around the year 2045. The team that “specializes in the ridiculous” is enlisted for one last job: steal back printing plates of U.S. currency stolen during the Iran-Iraq war. Anyone who has a passing knowledge of the show knows that this is “the crime they didn’t commit” that is used to frame the team. At this point in the movie, if you’re trying to wrap you head around the plausibility of all this, there’s still time to catch the Shrek movie.

Though it was full of guns, high-speed chases and explosions, in its five years on air The A-Team had about as many on-screen deaths as the average person has fingers on their left hand. Though the movie makes up for this, I would’ve liked to see a jeep or two flip over and explode only to have the two occupants get up from the wreckage, signaling that they’re OK. Supposedly this gag was used so much in the show that the writers used more and more elaborate situations for people to improbably walk unscathed from.

One set-piece involves the foursome parachuting in a tank whist shooting attacking drones down with a machine gun. When one too many parachutes get shot up, they use the tank’s cannon to actually steer themselves.  Any eight-year-old with G.I. Joes can totally show you how this could actually happen.

I realize that the same reason ridiculous action movies like this appeal to me is also the same reason my wife can sit though the same romantic comedy plot over and over again. Maybe I’ll reconsider re-watching Must Love Dogs once they add a tank falling from the sky.

Giving “The Namesake” the “Memento” treatment

Like most movies The Namesake is intended to watch from start to finish. My wife was already an hour into it by the time I sat down, but by the time I came into the movie, the first of two generations of Indian immigrants may not have existed. Wanting to know the back story of why Ashoke Ganguli wanted to move from India to New York, I re-watched from the beginning. In other words, I gave it the Memento treatment. For me Ashoke had only been a couple scenes, so his sudden death didn’t really register with me the way it would have to someone watching from the beginning.

The namesake in question comes from Nicolai Gogol, author of The Overcoat, which, I’m guessing it has to do something with an overcoat (I checked, it does). Gogol is Ashoke’s favorite author and The Overcoat was the book he was reading the night of a train accident. He eventually gives his newborn son the nickname shortly after he is born, but because of small mistake birth certificate, Gogol the younger never gets around to officially changing it (though he does eventually adopt the name Nikhil to avoid the alliterative Gogol Ganguli, a name that wouldn’t survive any schoolyard). It’s these smaller details, like his apprehension to his name (Freudian analysis: identity) that are given larger play thanks to the way I rearranged the scenes that may not be that big of deal if you prefer to watch movies from beginning to end, i.e. the “traditional” way.

Near the end of the movie, Ashoke repeats to his son Dostoyevsky’s quote, “We all come out from Gogol’s Overcoat.” Had I read the namesake of this movie (a book coincidentally titled The Namesake), this might’ve made sense as novels usually contain some degree of subtle metaphor. (Most movies on the other hand usually beat you over the head when it comes to this, and no, I’m not thinking of the part in The Muppet Movie where they pass an actual fork in the road.)

The average audience’s knowledge of Russian literature probably begins and ends with War and Peace, but just that it’s a doorstop of a novel that contains both war and, to a lesser extent, peace. No doubt the character of Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin and the significance of the overcoat itself are about as familiar to the average movie-going public as the general geography of India, which is to say, not very.

But this brings up a point that I’d rather not admit: I like watching the movie first. Sure, if you’ve spent hours reading a novel and enjoyed it enough to plop an arm or a leg or whatever they charge for movies these days, you’re almost assured to be disappointed when the filmmakers cut your favorite scene or recast the romantic leading man with Abe Vigoda.

Not so with me. I prefer watch the movie first so that when I eventually get around to the source material, it’s filled with better dialogue, lasts longer and    Sure, I’m at the casting directors mercy when it comes to imagining what the characters look like, but that’s a small price to pay for getting a bunch of (if imagined) scenes on the cutting room floor.

And in some ways this has influenced the book queue; The Namesake jumped up a few hundred places simply because I wanted to find out what sort of connection Gogol’s book had to do with Gogol the character. Putting subtle symbolism in a movie usually works about as well as having a sled named Rosebud stand in for the lost innocence of childhood.

Then again, sometimes a coat is just a coat.

Jim Halpert’s “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”

Why you’d think a movie adaptation of any of David Foster Wallace’s work is a good idea is a bit of a mystery, especially considering post McArthur Fellowship Genius Grant-winning work contains several brief interviews with, uh, hideous men.

I’m sure you could make a light comedy revolving around Wallace’s misadventures aboard a cruise ship he documented in the essay, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again,” but you’d have to break out the Lord of the Rings treatment for his 1,104-page opus, “Infinite Jest.” But moving from page to screen with this type of writing is a bit like replacing a cello in a string quartet with glockenspiel you still hear the same tones, but something’s a little different.

But no doubt the thing that drew my wife to Brief Interviews with Hideous Men wasn’t Wallace’s writing, but the prospect of getting lost in John Krasinski’s eyes.

These “hideous men” range from Law and Order: SVU’s Chris Meloni telling an anecdote about a brokenhearted woman at an airport to  Death Cab for Cutie singer Ben Gibbard talking about his reservations at the moment at he brings a woman to climax The Wire’s Frankie Faison explaining his mixed feelings about his father’s job as a bathroom attendant.

These interviews don’t come in the form of single-voiced monologues as they do in the book. We do get about half-a-dozen scenes in a stark room with a microphone, but most of the subjects drift in and out of the framing device used to avoid an hour and 20 minutes of one person at a time talking. Conducting these interviews is a grad student trying to make sense of a breakup by trying to find out what men want. She encounters these men in scenes that may or may not be her subconscious, as it may seem a little out of place if her academic advisor starts a soliloquy about concerns he has about if he will still be attracted to his wife as she gets older.

In the end, my wife dubbed the movie “too emo” and “not as funny as I thought it would be.” Though I wanted to begin a five-minute lecture on the source material, this got me thinking about what makes a good adaptation and how we see things if the context is unknown.

I re-watched the trailer after finishing the movie and yes, it did make it out to be more of a comedy than an 80-minute introspection on what makes men tick. So did it try to sell itself as something other than it was, and is this necessarily a bad thing? If my wife drags me to a movie with Sarah Jessica Parker in it and it turns out to have car chases, explosions and not one mention of Matthew McConaughey, that’s a good thing right?

In this case, the movie was selling something slightly different from the book. Admittedly, the reason I had heard of the movie in the first place was John Krasinski’s involvement (he adapted, acted and directed). David Foster Wallace didn’t need to reinvent himself when he wrote Brief Interviews, but it seems like the movie version was more Krasinski saying, “Look at me! I can do more than stare at a camera with the Jim Halpert face.”

Still, if Krasinski can persuade the rest of his Office-co-stars to stage a 12-hour adaptation of Infinite Jest, I’d probably sit through it.

Plenty of Parisians in “Paris”

When someone asked me what the plot of Paris was, the first thing that popped into my head was the Homer Simpson quote, “It was just a bunch of stuff that happened.”

Long-running ensemble shows like Lost or The Wire feature lots of characters doing lots of different things that happen to intersect lots of different times with each other. But while where are no drug lords or smoke monsters in Paris, we trade multi-episode story arcs for vignettes that resemble more short films than plot points in a movie.

This being a movie about Paris, we see the requisite shots of the Eiffel Tower and the Notre Dame cathedral, as well as a character named Pierre.

I’ve only seen three of Cedric Klapisch’s movies and they all seem to share a common theme: the connections different people have with each other. Roman Duris, who has partnered with Klapisch on numerous occasions, doesn’t so much star in the movie as act as its center. Near the beginning, we learn that his character (the aforementioned Pierre) has a heart condition that is only treatable through a transplant. From there we tangent off of Pierre to another person, which tangents back to someone else which tangents again back to some characters we’ve already seen and tangents again so that we’re about ready to scream if we have to read the word “tangent” one more time.

For example, a Sorbonne professor who is worried about becoming a bore in the latter days of his career is attracted to his student who lives across the street from Pierre who has just had his social worker sister move in with him who is trying to help the family of a Cameroon emigrant who… well you get the idea.

Woody Allen once said that he had to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey three times before he decided he liked it. While I don’t have to watch Paris three times to enjoy it, it is one of those movies that benefits from multiple re-watching’s. I’m of the belief that for a movie to be truly understood, it’s best seen three times: first, as an introduction; second, to understand what the characters are doing at the beginning; and third, to let all the information gel from the first two viewings.

Not every movie fits this model, especially movies on this list. Must Love Dogs, for example, I don’t need to see that a second time.

Though everything is connected in Paris, we don’t get the sense that everything can be thrown out of balance by one single action, like in Babel. When one character abruptly dies, it sends a ripple no more than two degrees along this human web. Four out of five existentialists think this is funny.

Because Pierre may have a limited amount of time left, he is left to contemplate these connections, going so far as to call up a girl he once danced with in grade school. In several scenes, he’s looking out from his apartment balcony, resigned, at many of the people we meet thorough the course of the movie. In the final scene, he’s seeing the same people from the window of a cab, on his way to his transplant operation, but this time he’s smiling. Therefore the moral of the story is either the reassurance that comes with accepting the human condition or if you have a degenerative heart disease, it’s best to ride around in a car. I think it’s the former.

“In a Day” and why I hate long movies

Romantic comedies often tolerate obsessive, creepy or restraining-order-inducing behavior which is only justified when the couple gets together in the end. In a Day, satisfies both these requirements (odd behavior, happy ending) and does so in such a normal way that just adds a hint of disquiet.

That disquiet stems from a simple, time-honored plot: Girl gets hit in head with coffee cup. Boy is exceedingly nice to girl, gives her “perfect day.” Boy gets Girl.

The combination of unknown actors and the phrase “whimsical romantic indie drama” didn’t do much to attract me to the movie, but two things did hold my interest: It was 80 minutes and it was British.

I’m a firm believer that different types of movies should strive for a set running time. Comedies should aim for the 90-minute mark. Epics are permitted no less than two, but no more than three hours. Sports movies should range from an hour and 45 minutes to 2 hours max. Thrillers should try to come in below 2 hours, anything beyond that and you’re really pushing it. Musicals (and this runs against common practice) should never, ever exceed 2 hours. One of the issues I have with movies like West Side Story and The Music Man isn’t the songs themselves but the running time. There’s only so much time dancing street rumbles can fill and 152 minutes is far too much time to watch a Romeo and Juliet story that can be told effectively in a 20 minute episode of Animaniacs.

It’s not that I wish to impose Draconian measures for directors to hit an optimal film time, there just should be guidelines based on how hard it is to sustain interest within a given genre. There are exceptions, of course, but the fact is, 90 percent of movies can be made better by telling a tighter story, while only 10 percent actually benefit from the various “directors cuts” and “extended editions” that are pushed upon us.

Granted, directors can do what they want to, especially if the running time itself figures into what they are trying to say, even if it detracts from the viewing experience. For example, Andy Worhol’s 12-hour Empire features a static, real-time shot of the Empire State Building. That’s it. While we could easily get the same effect through a 3-minute time-lapse video posted to YouTube, but this would go against Worhol’s goal of making all his movies unwatchable.

But I digress. I bring this up because another five minutes added to In a Day would’ve been fatal.

One of the things the movie does right is it refrains from telling us everything about our characters right up front; things are allowed to unfold. We find out that The Girl (Ashley) has a passion for playing jazz piano, which doesn’t surface until the middle of the second act. Had this been a more conventional movie, the script would’ve had her say an awkwardly placed “Gee, I wish I was playing jazz piano right about now,” sometime in the first five minutes.

Obviously, though, you can’t reveal The Boy’s (Michael) motivations up front, because it’s this one and only thing that keeps the viewer’s interest. So the entire time you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, or more descriptively, the other hand to get strangle-y.

Our mysterious stranger encourages our heroine to keep drinking Champaign, visits her in her sandwich shop daily, asks her to go clothes shopping with him and leads her to a secluded park. In any other movie, this would signal a one way ticket to Serial Killer Central, but since we are assured that this is a “whimsical romantic indie drama,” we know that the big reveal at the end isn’t getting to see Michael’s collection of sharp kitchen utensils. Though he keeps dropping hints that there is a benefactor who wishes her to have a good day, it seems like it’s time to cue the staccato strings.

He, disappointingly, reveals that he is a schoolyard tormentor who is so remorseful that he must track Ashley down years later in order to tell her he’s sorry (belated spoiler alert). One wonders if “In a Day” serves as a bit of catharsis on the part of the filmmakers who could’ve drawn on their own experiences as an apologetic bully.

Now that’s creepy.

“Food Inc.” made me throw away 11 mostly-good smoked sausages

Food Inc. is about the business of food. To paraphrase Brad Pitt’s character in Inglourious Basterds, “Cousin, business is a-boomin’.”

The movie places much of the blame of America’s rapidly expanding waistline on the mass-processed, mass-produced industry that has given us the McNugget, the hundred-cow beef patty and now the breadless KFC Double Down sandwich.  In other words, the same sort of things Dr. Frankenstein might build had he been in the business of fast food.

We see pigs running wherever they please around a farm. This is contrasted with a bunch of factory-farm pigs being hustled into a Smash-o-matic 3000. Chickens are slaughtered on a friendlier farm by being loaded into a giant funnel before their throats are slit. Then we get the view of what mechanically separated chickens look like. While this isn’t the spaghetti-and-meatballs you normally see in a PETA video, it does make you chew that Whopper all the slower.

The documentary’s point boils down to this: Because most of the food we eat is mass-produced, we don’t know where it comes from or if it’s even good for us to eat. This is bad.

My main problem with the movie is that, if only bought organic, food producers would take notice, change their ways and all our problems would be solved. At root is the problem that the cheapest food is almost never the best for you. The movie shows us a family who, while in the produce section, sees that buying a pound of pears isn’t as cheap or as filling as going to Burger King. Heck, even a salad at McDonalds is more expensive than a Big Mac.

Food Inc. wants you to change. Who Killed The Electric Car, another let’s-make-life-better-minded documentary, lists the culprits at the end of the documentary, which turns out to be just about everybody who didn’t buy the General Motors EV-1 (Formula: Everyone – 2,234). And like An Inconvenient Truth, the end of Food Inc. lists a number of things you can do to better your carbon-loving food-loving lifestyle.

Here’s how long I was guilted off fast food after consuming the following products: Fast Food Nation (book): 3 months, Supersize Me: 2 weeks, Fast Food Nation (movie): an hour.

How did Food Inc. affect my eating habits?

A week before watching it, I was in the mood for smoked sausages. Luckily for me, a family pack of Bar-S Smoked Sausages was on sale for $5. The Homer Simpson maxim “I’d be stupid not to buy it” played through my head. When I got home I discovered I accidentally bought the kind filled with cheese.

These hardly can be classified as sausages in the first place, more of a fat hot dog with little cheese pustules poking through the surface. Last time I checked, the Sausage Qualification Standards ended at anything that could also be cooked in a microwave. No matter, they tasted good enough.

It wasn’t long after the movie when I checked the ingredient list, which included parts from three different species of animal and enough sodium content to last me a week. These “sausages” were no longer welcome in my house.

With a sickening plop in the trash can, my beef-heart-infused Bar-S Smoked Sausage with Cheese Family Pack days were over. The remaining 11 sausages stared back up at me from the can as if to say, “Beef hearts aren’t all bad. It’s kinda like meat. You like meat right?”

I closed the lid.

“Something’s Gotta Give”… my patience

Whenever Something’s Gotta Give comes up in conversation, my wife always mentions how great of a pair of actors Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton are. True, Nicholson built his career on role after iconic role and Keaton has been in her share of iconic movies, but now it seems they both are content to play what I like to call “The Old Person” role.

The two are paired up in the sort of romantic comedy that comes around every couple years or so that is marketed exclusively to the AARP set. While it is nice to see people old enough to run for president in a movie like this, my primary attraction to every seeing it revolved around all the awards it seemed to be getting nominated for during awards season. The DVD box touts Keaton’s Golden Globe and National Board of Review (now there’s a game changer) awards as well as her best actress Oscar nomination.

But what sort of character did she create to earn her accolades. Understandably, when I compared her to Tom Cruise, it launched an argument that my wife and I have had many times before about ‘What is acting?’ and, more specifically, ‘Is Tom Cruise and actor?’. I continually defend him; I think he’s good enough in any movie that requires the Tom Cruise persona (exception: Valkyrie, where a competent Cruise appeared without his persona).

But is there a Diane Keaton persona? If there is, it’s on display here as her confident-but-still-attractive-older-woman-type character crosses paths with Nicholson’s a freewheeling bachelor who likes his women like he likes his chickens: white meat, full breasts and nothing older than 25 years.

When dating Keaton’s daughter, Nicholson suffers a pre-sex heart attack and has to be rushed to the emergency room. Once there, two things are shown that I didn’t think I’d ever see: Jack Nicholson’s butt and Keanu Reeves as a doctor. What’s more, Reeves recognizes Keaton’s character as a famous playwright, begging the question, which is more implausible: Keanu Reeves the cardiologist or Keanu Reeves the theatre buff?

In typical movie-logic, Keaton is forced to care for Nicholson, who eventually changes from dirty old man to charming old man in 90 easy minutes, all from dating someone born during the Truman Administration.

One thing that is admirable about Something is it shows a main character actually doing their job. Keaton is pressured on getting pages written for a new play and what better way to ease writing block than to feature an all singing, all dancing  chorus of Nicholson stand-ins wearing backless hospital gowns. More so than other movie featuring a writerly-type, Keaton’s character does log a substantial amount of screen time (i.e. more than a minute) in front of her laptop. Most movies have their characters state their profession outright (I’m a playwright! I’m a particle physicist! I’m a bearded lady at the sideshow!)

Most of the pleasure from Something comes from seeing two actors behave naturally enough that by the end you walk away not knowing the character’s names or what they do for a living, just that they fell in love at the end. Though, with the better part of a century’s worth of acting experience between the two of them, it’s not that much of a stretch to ask them to act a convincing conversation.

Decades from now, though, I’m sure that I’ll remember that Something’s Gotta Give was the Jack Nicholson movie featuring Amanda Peet in a black bikini.

Now there’s something the National Review Board missed.

Whenever Something’s Gotta Give comes up in conversation, my wife always mentions how great of a pair of actors Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton are. True, Nicholson built his career on role after iconic role and Keaton has been in her share of iconic movies, but now it seems they both are content to play what I like to call “The Old Person” role.

The two are paired up in the sort of romantic comedy that comes around every couple years or so that is marketed exclusively to the AARP set. While it is nice to see people old enough to run for president in a movie like this, my primary attraction to every seeing it revolved around all the awards it seemed to be getting nominated for during awards season. The DVD box touts Keaton’s Golden Globe and National Board of Review (now there’s a game changer) awards as well as her best actress Oscar nomination.

But what sort of character did she create to earn her accolades. Understandably, when I compared her to Tom Cruise, it launched an argument that my wife and I have had many times before about ‘What is acting?’ and, more specifically, ‘Is Tom Cruise and actor?’. I continually defend him; I think he’s good enough in any movie that requires the Tom Cruise persona (exception: Valkyrie, where a competent Cruise appeared without his persona).

But is there a Diane Keaton persona? If there is, it’s on display here as her confident-but-still-attractive-older-woman-type character crosses paths with Nicholson’s a freewheeling bachelor who likes his women like he likes his chickens: white meat, full breasts and nothing older than 25 years.

When dating Keaton’s daughter, Nicholson suffers a pre-sex heart attack and has to be rushed to the emergency room. Once there, two things are shown that I didn’t think I’d ever see: Jack Nicholson’s butt and Keanu Reeves as a doctor. What’s more, Reeves recognizes Keaton’s character as a famous playwright, begging the question, which is more implausible: Keanu Reeves the cardiologist or Keanu Reeves the theatre buff?

In typical movie-logic, Keaton is forced to care for Nicholson, who eventually changes from dirty old man to charming old man in 90 easy minutes, all from dating someone born during the Truman Administration.

One thing that is admirable about Something is it shows a main character actually doing their job. Keaton is pressured on getting pages written for a new play and what better way to ease writing block than to feature an all singing, all dancing  chorus of Nicholson stand-ins wearing backless hospital gowns. More so than other movie featuring a writerly-type, Keaton’s character does log a substantial amount of screen time (i.e. more than a minute) in front of her laptop. Most movies have their characters state their profession outright (I’m a playwright! I’m a particle physicist! I’m a bearded lady at the sideshow!)

Most of the pleasure from Something comes from seeing two actors behave naturally enough that by the end you walk away not knowing the character’s names or what they do for a living, just that they fell in love at the end. Though, with the better part of a century’s worth of acting experience between the two of them, it’s not that much of a stretch to ask them to act a convincing conversation.

Decades from now, though, I’m sure that I’ll remember that Something’s Gotta Give was the Jack Nicholson movie featuring Amanda Peet in a black bikini.

Now there’s something the National Review Board missed.