Me Myself Irene and Space Cowboys Movie Reviews
Movie and Film Rental Reviews Rants Comments and Critiques
Nov 4, 2009
Ever found yourself hankering for a good movie - the kind of film that will keep you fixed in your seat, on the edge of your chair, snickering for days, or sobbing in your popcorn - but cannot quite remember what was watchable 2, 5, 10, or even 15 years ago? Are you sick of sick and tired of sifting through old DVDs or blindly browsing the internet, finally settling for that deeply unsatisfying flick?
This ongoing film review series pairs the good with the bad (and sometime ugly) in an attempt to sort through Hollywood hype and movie industry muck using the latest, most exacting, inscrutable, and purely subjective rental review standards. Got a beef with one of the reviews, or just want to add a comment? Click the add a comment button at the bottom of this published article. And enjoy!
Jim Carrey the Farrelly Brothers and Tired Comedy
Me, Myself, and Irene is supposedly a comedy, but is Carrey such a rubber-faced deity that movies are built simply around his physical expression? This is a rhetorical question, to be sure.
But one thing not in question is that you can count on the Farrelly brothers to take something originally funny and beat it repeatedly over the head, exploiting it for every drop of slapstick, until its tired, worn out, and flops exhausted onto the movie screen reeking of dead plot and featuring caricatures instead of characters. What makes this film so impossible to watch is the fact that you can see exactly how the story was designed around Carrey’s rubber-faced and well-exploited physical comedy. Clearly, we get it, your face is made of some kind of new space-age plastic that you can contort into hundreds of hilarious and unimaginable expressions. Great! Now what? How about a storyline? Anyone?
Unlike, "There's Something About Mary" and "Kingpin" the story here is boring, tired, and thin. The twenty-million dollars per film that Carrey raked in at the time for acting like a human cartoon seem apparently clouded his judgment, because unlike “Cable Guy (which was very impressive indeed),” this movie is just stupid. But, presumably, when you get paid that much you can make horse manure and not care much about a reputation.
Rene Zellweger and Jim Carrey in Love?
Unfortunately for Carrey lack of plot in a movie script often leads to storylines elsewhere, and the best thing going for this movie may have been the whole Renee Zellweger-Carrey-in-love-on-the-set-thing. It was probably the closest thing to a storyline (however real) the production ever got, but unfortunately this doesn’t make the movie any more bearable to watch.
The truth is that some of Carrey's movies are known to give a good guffaw, snort, chuckle, or occasional chortle, but overall this film was a failure, making only an estimated $24.2 million dollars on opening night despite all the hype, according to David Poland at the Hot Button on-line. It should be no surprise, then, that this film continues to disappoint as a rental, that is if you are one of those people who are sitting upright and facing the right way, which, evidently, the Farrelly Brothers are not.
Rating *
Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry and the Space Cowboys
Eastwood keeps it mind-numbingly basic in this film, despite an elusively enticing and visually rich tile. His plots, come to think of it, are always pretty simple. And he always seems to play the same character - “do you feel lucky, punk?" - which might not always draw the biggest crowds, generate the most hype, or pander to the often exploited and over-milked audience wow factor, but it is refreshing to see a movie with an actual plot, however predictable. The viewer will find spare special effects, pyrotechnics, or other kitschy tricks here, and the film is much better for it.
Frank Corvin (Eastwood) and Hawk Hawkins (Tommy Lee Jones) are the main characters in this film about astronauts who think they are about 30 years younger than they actually are. It seems that Corvin's navigational system has somehow been used in a Russian satellite, and everybody keeps asking Bob Gerson (James Cromwell), the bad guy type, how in the world that happened.
Gerson, who years ago replaced Team Daedalus, which also includes Jerry O'Neill (Donald Sutherland) and Tank Sullivan (James Garner), with a monkey, insists he has no knowledge this wrongdoing, but as options to disarm the rogue satellite run out his is forced to call upon the team one final time. And so the Space Cowboys get one last chance to show the world, and Gerson, that they are better than a chimp, which mostly they are. The rest of the film consists of the aging team shaking off the rust, re-acclimatizing to their old lives, and trundling around in big space suits.
This film does offer a rather odd ending, though, as in Hollywood there is the romantic, if not grossly misguided, perception that the general public might feel better about death if it were treated in all industry films as a great opportunity. The notion that death can be brushed aside by a simple act of good will in film is notably odd here. Oh well. For the most part the day is saved, and the nostalgic music starts to play. Maybe we should send old guys into space more often, or at least learn to keep movie plots simple.
Rating: ***
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