Saturday, December 03, 2011

Rob's Reviews "Helena From the Wedding."

If they ever decide to teach a course in how to make a movie Robert Loy hates, the students will do well to study this turkey.  3 or 4 couples get together, they are all whiny and self-absorbed, and are all either having an affair, trying to have an affair, or dealing with the repercussions from the affair they just had.  Nobody really likes any of their "friends" (and who can blame them?)  Throw in a pointless fake British accent from Gillian Jacobs that fades in and out like an AM radio station at night, and an ending where two people who have a lot they need to talk about say absolutely in the climactic scene -- if a movie where nothing happens can be said to have a climax.  Ostensibly this is because they're too emotionally overwhelmed for words, but it feels like the writer and director were just lazy and wanted us to do their work for them.  (Most egregious example of this I can think of is "Lost in Translation"; they can study that one in this class too.)
Speaking of Gillian Jacobs, she is not pretty.  I don't care what anybody at Greendale Community College thinks.  I did watch some of the extras on this DVD just to see if the cast said all the usual "I just loved the script, it was so intelligent and different" and they did, with a straight face, which means they saved all their best acting for the extras reel.  Jacobs added that what she loved about her character was that she was an enigma.  That girl needs a dictionary, "enigma" does not mean "half-baked character from lazy writers."

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