Horrible Bosses = Horrible Movie.
(Shortest movie review ever? It’s really all you need to know, trust me!)
[Prequeue at Netflix | View trailer]
Genre: Comedy, Crap
Cast: Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis, Jennifer Aniston, Colin Farrell, Kevin Spacey, Jamie Foxx, Julie Bowen, Donald Sutherland, Lindsay Sloane
It’s here, it’s here, it’s here! The new Boyfriend of the Week is up! Hurrah, hurrah! (Whew.)
And man, if you thought Nathan Fillion had a great nose, just take a look at this guy! Lick, slurp, mmm!
Enjoy!
I was pretty excited to see this film when I found out it was written and directed by Jacob Tierney, the same guy who made last year’s oddball comedy The Trotsky, one of my Top Ten Favorite Movies of 2010. Unfortunately, the oddballness that made The Trotsky so much fun is completely missing from this extremely amateurish mystery.
It opens with a guy named Victor (Jay Baruchel, also the star of The Trotsky), just back from a year teaching school in China, moving into a new apartment in Montreal. On moving day, he meets two other tenants in the building about his age, a woman named Johanne and a guy in a wheelchair named Spencer (Scott Speedman from Felicity). Though both Johanne and Spencer are, quite frankly, prickly assholes, Victor quickly develops a crush on Johanne and the three become somewhat bristly friends.
Meanwhile, a serial killer is stalking the streets of Montreal, torturing and killing young women at random. When one of Johanne’s workmates turns up dead, Victor insists on meeting her each evening after her shift to walk her home. It’s not long before his crush has turned into full-on love — love she doesn’t seem to reciprocate, not that he notices.
As bodies pile up and hints keep dropping, it becomes evident that one of the three main players is the killer, but it’s hard to figure out which one. Ordinarily, this is the kind of thing I’d appreciate in a mystery, but here it was so clearly and clumsily being done on purpose to yank us around that it was more annoying than intriguing. Worse, though, was the fact I didn’t really care who did it anyway. I didn’t care about any of these characters, and when the killer’s identity was finally revealed, I was torn between finding the resolution completely boring and being relieved Tierney didn’t opt for the twisty bait-and-switch I was expecting. The bait-and-switch would’ve been predictably gimmicky, so I was glad he didn’t go that route. But the route he did go was completely ho-hum. So: lose-lose for me on the final act, I’m afraid. There was really no ending that could’ve rescued the film from its lameness.
I love Jay Baruchel, even though he plays the same character in every film he makes. The problem here was that he was totally over-acting that character, as though he’d been instructed to “be himself” and had no idea what the director meant by that. He ended almost every sentence with an awkwardly tacked-on “eh?” to make sure we remembered he was Canadian, and his typically adorable hangdog expression was completely lacking in charm this time, possibly because I spent most of his scenes wondering what in the hell a nice guy like that saw in the bizarrely-boring-for-a-psychotic Johanne.
And let’s not even talk about Scott Speedman, who also always plays the same character in everything he does. That character? A cardboard box.
Yawn.
Good Neighbors is not unwatchably awful — we’ve all certainly seen much worse. But it doesn’t have anything interesting to offer either. Here’s hoping Tierney goes back to wacky comedy next time, maybe trying someone new in his lead role, and that Baruchel’s next gig forces him out of his increasingly uncomfortable comfort zone a bit. Can’t stay on the dork train forever, dude; your fans will get bored and jump. I’m starting to mosey toward the caboose myself and I haven’t even had a chance to make you a Boyfriend of the Week yet, man.
Thoroughly skipable.
[Prequeue at Netflix | Stream at Amazon | View trailer]
Genre: Mystery
Cast: Jay Baruchel, Scott Speedman, Xavier Dolan, Emily Hampshire, Gary Farmer
I finished this novel almost a month ago, but every time I sat down to write about it, I struggled with what to say and then gave up. Something was bugging me about it and I couldn’t figure out quite what. After thinking it over a while, though, I’ve decided that while there were a lot of things I really liked about this historical novel, set in early 19th century Japan, overall, I found it lacking in both focus and connection. It’s about a hundred pages too long, though I couldn’t tell you just which pages to cut, but it’s also kind of distant somehow, reading at times more like a really detailed, brilliantly written history paper than a story the author felt truly compelled to tell me. A review of the novel in the New Yorker last year described it as lacking in “inner necessity,” which sums up my feelings about it perfectly. Without that emotional engagement from the author, I found it difficult to connect to the story or its players.
That said, though, what kept me turning the pages of this book was both the story itself, which alternates between being fascinatingly informative about that era in Japan and reading like an impossible-to-put-down thriller, and the mind-blowingly brilliant writing. This is the first David Mitchell novel I’ve read and I was completely stunned by his talent for stringing words together into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into worlds. Plus, not only is it marvelously written, but it’s also quite funny at times, a combination that reminded me a bit of Herman Melville, oddly enough. The writing style and structure are the perfect combination of beauty, wit, smarts, experiment, and reality, and though the characters sometimes struck me as slightly off (Jacob, for example, sure has a very modern perspective on the role of women in society for a dude living in 1799), the writing plays well with the cast overall, using uniquely crafted dialects to draw uniquely crafted people.
The story essentially breaks down into three parts. The first introduces us to our two main characters, a young Dutch trader named Jacob de Zoet, and a Japanese midwife, Orito Aibagawa, the first female medical student in Japan.
The year is 1799, and Jacob has just arrived in Dejima, a man-made island off the coast of Nagasaki created to serve as the only trading post open to the West in the otherwise-completely-isolationist Japan. Jacob’s an employee of the Dutch East Indian Company, hired to audit its books and root out corruption, a task soon complicated by his discovery that pretty much everyone working in Dejima, his boss included, is stealing from the company.
Jacob’s determination to stop the theft results in his rapidly becoming about as isolated and ally-free as Japan is itself, until he meets Orito, whose talent as a midwife led Dejima’s doctor, a Westerner, to recruit her into his new medical college (a defiance of local customs regarding women’s roles in society made possible by her status as the daughter of a local samurai). At first, Jacob is mostly mesmerized by the enormous burn scar covering half her face, but after talking to her a few times, he falls head-over-heels — a love he knows can never go anywhere because of her high station.
The second part of the novel kicks off when Orito’s father dies, leaving behind a ton of debt, and, to pay it back, Orito is sold to a local nunnery. At first, she kind of takes it all in stride, until she discovers that the nuns there, all also disfigured in some way, are forced to serve as sex slaves to the local monks, their babies then sacrificed and killed instead of sent away to good families, as the women are promised. Horrified and desperate to escape before it’s her turn to spend a night with a monk, Orito begins planning her escape, even as she finds herself torn by her calling as a midwife to stay (a lot of nuns having babies without help there, after all). While she plots on her end, back in Dejima, Jacob has joined forces with another of Orito’s suitors, a Japanese man named Uzaemon, to try to come up with their own plan to bust her out. This section culminates in a thrilling prison break of sorts that kept me turning pages way past my bed time — always a plus in any novel.
The final section of the novel gives us a much more subdued account about what happens to both Jacob and Uzaemon after Orito’s escape attempt, as well as the impact on Dejima and Japan in general when a British war ship parks itself in Nagasaki’s harbor.
Overall, I enjoyed this novel, and I can’t praise the actual wordsmithing highly enough. Seriously great. But I didn’t connect to it emotionally at all, and that makes it hard to recommend. That distance I mentioned earlier kept me from truly engaging with the characters and their various plights. It’s a creative, original story written beautifully, yet I was ready to see it end when it did. That ain’t no good. I definitely want to try more of Mitchell’s work in the future, having since read that he’s written a lot of more “experimental” fiction, but it’ll probably be a while before I pick anything up. If you’ve read any of his other novels and really enjoyed them, let me know which ones in the comments?
[FICTION]
[Buy from an Indie Bookstore | Buy from Amazon | Browse more book reviews | Search book reviews]
I launched into this Spenser novel last weekend thinking it was the last one I’d ever read, as Robert B. Parker died last year, much to my incredible grief. Happily, I was wrong about that — there’s one more (Sixkill) AND, hurrah!, there’s also a “Young Spenser” novel for young adults (Chasing the Bear), which is the next one in my pile.
(Incidentally, and unhappily, I also learned recently that the publisher of this series hired SOME OTHER GUY to continue writing Spenser novels (!!). Sacrilege! Just let it go, stupid publisher! I get that you want to keep raking in the dough, but you’re going to ruin it, and everybody who’s a true fan knows it, and you’re a bunch of buttheads. THE END.)
This one is about a stolen painting, a ransom payment that goes terribly wrong, and Spenser’s quest to put things right again. It’s as funny, fast-paced, and thoroughly entertaining as all the rest and, unfortunately true to form with the last several in the series, I felt like the ending was kind of abrupt and rushed. But now that Parker is gone, I confess I wish he’d rushed a few more endings and cranked out a few more stories. I first started reading this series when I was working part-time as a library assistant in high school, at a military library that got almost no patrons. I devoured every one we had in the stacks in a single summer, along with all of Ed McBain’s 87th precinct novels (which are also excellent), and I’ve been reading them steadily ever since. I’m just not ready to let them go.
It’s rare a writer doesn’t totally fizzle out after keeping a series going for such a long time — aside from Parker, Ed McBain, and Dick Francis, I can’t think of another modern mystery series that didn’t start to suck after about seven installments (long since given up on Patricia Cornwell and about to ditch Kathy Reichs too, for example). But the Spenser series never jumped the mystery-series shark. The people grew and changed, they came and went and sometimes came back again, the stories never got tired, and the setting, Boston, one of my favorite cities, was always a joy to hang out in. As corny as this sounds, I’ve long thought of Spenser, Susan, Hawk, Bensen, Quirk, Pearl, and the others as my friends. I got to know them that well. And I will miss them tremendously.
Luckily, I’ve forgotten most of the early books, so as soon as I turn the last page of Sixkill, I think it’ll be time to start all over again. Thanks for the memories, Mr. Parker. You will be missed.
[MYSTERY]
[Buy from an Indie Bookstore | Buy from Amazon | Browse more book reviews | Search book reviews]
