Spring Break Movie Reviews | Part 1
Rom-coms, some serious shit, and Boston!
I’ve been on Spring Break for the last week. Actually, I still am now. But today I’m going out and doing things, and that’s a real first.
Because, since Saturday, I’ve been sitting motionless on my couch, watching just a ton of mostly mediocre movies.
Why would I do this?
I’m lazy!
Also, I’ve been fighting a mild cold for a couple weeks, and I got two meningitis vaccines on Monday on top of it. So I’ve had a really great excuse to just not move all week.
But I feel better now! So today I’m gonna meet a friend and play Geoguessr with him in a cafe, because we’re cool.1
Still, I don’t want this week to have been a waste. So I’m reviewing all the movies I watched!
Fair warning, though: I don’t remember all of them super well (meningococcal fevers be wild), so my reviews might suck. On with it!
[Spoiler alerts for everything, by the way]
Miss Congeniality
This movie kicked ass. It’s fully within the early-2000s girlboss genre, and yet it still just works. Sandra Bullock is a tomboy-ish FBI agent, who everyone pretty much thinks looks like shit. This is the only bit I couldn’t buy into—Sandra Bullock is attractive! Even when she’s wearing a suit! Obviously!
The FBI needs an agent to infiltrate a beauty pageant, and they spend a solid half hour farting around, looking for someone to go undercover, while Bullock just acts like one of the guys. Eventually someone proposes her as a joke, the tech guy mocks up what she’d look like in a swimsuit, and everyone goes, “Whooooaaaa, whaaat?? Sandra Bullock is hot???” And she’s like, “Whaaaat?? No, I couldn’t possibly be hot!”
But they need someone to do it, and she’s the only possible option. So the FBI hires a pageant consultant to get her ready, and he takes one look at her, and says, “Ew, gross, no way, no, I’m not doing this, it’s impossible to make Sandra Bullock look hot!” And all the FBI guys say, “Yeah, we know, but can you just try anyway?”
So he does, and of course he’s successful, and she walks out of his airplane-hangar-turned-salon in a tight dress, and all the FBI guys go, “Whooooaaaa, whaaat?? Sandra Bullock is hot???” again.
The rest of the plot is silly, but it’s good enough and believable enough that the whole thing works. In the end, Bullock defies her lame-o boss to save the day, she gets with the dude FBI agent who’s been razzing her the whole time, and everyone lives happily ever after.
I liked it! 6 stars out of 7.
Wedding Crashers
Keeping it fun and rom-commy!
Wedding Crashers is an awesome movie. Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn live apparently boring lives as apparently slightly weird divorce lawyers. But then, out of nowhere, we get an extended montage of wedding-crashing!
Whoa! Turns out that these guys spend every weekend of spring at a wedding, uninvited, and find someone to sleep with. It’s something to do with the romance getting women’s juices flowing. Oh, and we learn that the whole thing is subject to a strict ruleset, including entries like “Rule #2: Never use your real name” and “Rule #32: Don't commit to a relative unless you're absolutely sure that they have a pulse.”
Anyway, this all is going great until they crash—gasp—the wedding of the Secretary of the Treasury’s daughter. Vaughn and Wilson each fall for other daughters of the secretary—Vaughn for a loony who tells him he took her virginity (Isla Fisher), and Wilson for an altogether very nice girl (Rachel McAdams). Unfortunately, McAdams already has a boyfriend!
Fortunately (for Wilson, not for Vaughn), Fisher gets all clingy and drags the two men along to the Secretary of the Treasury’s little family get-together.
McAdams’ boyfriend is named Sack (???) and he’s a real dick. Cheats on her, is mean, the whole nine yards. Everyone starts playing football, and somehow Sack just pummels the shit out of Vince Vaughn, which sets up the dynamic for most of the film: Wilson wants to stay at the get-together so he can steal McAdams away from Sack, and Vaughn is having just an awful time.
Lots of boring nonsense happens, eventually Vaughn and Wilson are discovered to have been Wedding Crashers, and they get kicked out by… the Secretary of the Treasury.
Wilson falls into a depression, Sack proposes to McAdams and she’s like, “ugghhh, oookay.” Vaughn has some weird side-plot going on where he really seriously falls for Fisher, they start dating in secret, then get engaged, and when Wilson finds out, he gets very angry. Why? I don’t know!
But he’s angry, so he goes to hang out with Will Ferrell instead. Ferrell tries to get him to crash a funeral, which is a real wake-up call for Wilson, so he goes to Vaughn’s marriage instead to be the best man.
McAdams and Sack are there! Wilson professes his love for McAdams, Sack tries to punch him, but Vaughn knocks his lights out. Everyone lives happily ever after!
Ugh, this is just a summary, isn’t it? I don’t have many thoughts to offer… I guess I don’t get why Wilson liked McAdams so much. Or why Vaughn fell for Fisher, really. Or why the goddamn SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY is involved at all!
But I really like all the actors (the SoT is Christopher Walken!) and I think Vince Vaughn is particularly hilarious, so… 5/7?
Dodgeball
Right, after Wedding Crashers, I decided I liked Vince Vaughn, so I looked up his name on my smart TV-thingy, and Dodgeball came up!
Vaughn is the likable owner of Average Joe’s gym, which has… a total of five customers? Ben Stiller is the same weird dickish character he always is, and he owns the neighboring super-conglomerate gym. It’s worth “over $4 million,” he says, specifically, but not in a foreshadow-y way at all, wink.
Average Joe’s is $50,000 in debt, and hey, look at this, there’s a dodgeball tournament offering a $50,000 prize! They enter it, and they’re very ragtag, but then a crazy Irish guy in a wheelchair teaches them not to suck, and they do pretty well.
Drama, drama, drama… and then they’re up against Ben Stiller in the finals!
And they win!
But it turns out that Vince Vaughn sold the gym to Stiller for $100,000 before the game anyway… aw man.
But then it turns out that he used that money to place a bet on Average Joe’s to win! And he made—hey, look at that, $5 million! So he buys Ben Stiller’s gym—which means he buys back his own gym—and everyone lives happily ever. Except for Ben Stiller, who gets all sad and fat. (Despite having made $5 million, I guess.)
Oh, also there are a couple romance arcs.
5/7
Awakenings
Time to… shift the tone. If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t read this one. You don’t want this movie spoiled.
Awakenings is based on Dr. Oliver Sacks’ book of the same name. It’s about how he revived a bunch of long-braindead encephalitis patients with an experimental drug. Some of them had been gone for decades, since they were children, even.
I cried at Awakenings, kind of a lot.
Robin Williams plays a fictionalized version of Sacks—a neurologist working at a “chronic hospital”—who’s awkward with women and people in general. In real life, Sacks is suuuper gay—so the little romantic side-plot landed weirdly. Otherwise, Williams is superb.
His most important patient is a man named Leonard Loew, played by Robert De Niro. Loew went braindead as a child, and his mother’s still been visiting and caring for him the whole time.
Williams uses a Parkinson’s drug called L-DOPA to awaken De Niro. It’s very nice and meaningful—cry #1.
De Niro becomes like a normal person again, and asks the hospital administrators for more freedom. They deny the request.
At the same time, De Niro is starting to show some worrying symptoms—he’s developed facial tics, is becoming paranoid. Eventually he has a full-on psychotic break—he’s locked up in the hospital’s psychiatric ward as his condition deteriorates.
Eventually, Williams is able to pacify him, but as much as they increase De Niro’s dose of L-DOPA, they can’t stop his return to braindeadedness. De Niro asks Williams to record his decline, in the hopes it’ll help future patients.
He has a last dance with a woman he met while he was awakened—cry #2—then he de-wakes—cry #3.
7/7, beautiful story, beautifully executed.
Good Will Hunting
Really, I just wanted more Robin Williams.
I already knew what I thought of Good Will Hunting, thanks to Louis CK, and my opinion hasn’t changed a bit since I saw it myself:
4/7
Ted 2
More Boston!
Bostonian accents are ridiculous. Like, even worse than Very British Substacker
’s non-rhotic garbage-tongue.Ted 2 is another movie where the plot just doesn’t matter at all. I’ve never seen Ted 1! But it’s still hilarious.
Here’s the best bit; honestly you can just watch these 40 seconds and skip the rest:
3/7
Ok, this post is getting a little long… And I have like five more things to review, so come back tomorrow for part 2!
We’ll also be memorizing all the provinces of Thailand, because we’re extra cool.