Girls Just Wanna Help Autistic Kids!

The great thing about house-sitting, especially with a massive DVD collection, is that you get to watch movies you would never in a million years actually want to watch other than having a morbid curiosity as to whether or not the two critics for At The Movies actually got it right. There's no paper trail from the library, no comments by a video store clerk that might arouse a blush and tarnish your image as a film snob with impeccable taste. Now, I consider myself a gal with a good taste in movies, but I also realize that from time to time looking outside the box can have beautiful consequences, if anything just to realize how great a good movie really is by comparison. So here's a brief rundown of the more fluffy "chick flicks" I viewed on a particularly lovely house-sitting weekend.

Eat Pray Love (2010, Ryan Murphy). Based on the best-selling memoir of a woman who overcame a crisis brought on by divorce by traveling to Italy, India and Bali to find her center in life, the film version, despite some truly moving moments, cannot overcome the bad casting of Julia Roberts; As an actress famous for her million-dollar smile, Roberts simply cannot personify self-pity or depression because even frowning makes it look like it takes all her effort. As a result, the film is less a story of a woman's realization of her self and happiness than another rich American who travels abroad and heartedly laughs at how Italians uses hand gestures to kiss off others, then has the cathartic moment when she travels to a more poverty-stricken nation that everything does *not* revolve around her.

Dear John (2010, Lasse Halfstrom). Nicholas Sparks may be one of the worst authors to ever be printed, and the fact that he is an internationally beloved best-seller is only proof that the terrorists are winning. As such, the only reason why any film adaptations of his works succeed are because of the commitment of the female leads. Rachel McAdams put her heart into a role that was very beneath her in The Notebook, and her Mean Girls co-star Amanda Seyfried follows in her footsteps for Dear John. As the girl who is so angelic she's practically a saint (she doesn't drink, smoke or sleep around but she does admit to "swearing constantly in [her] mind"), Seyfried is so good that she nearly makes the utterly wooden Channing Tatum seem engaging just by looking into his eyes. As Savannah and soldier John, they have a beach summer romance as typical in a Sparks story, then things get overdramatically complicated as typical in a Sparks story, in this case John enlisting immediately after 9/11 and their continued relationship via snail mail. Both roles are too good to be realistic (in addition to Savannah and her dream to open up a horse camp for autistic children, John is written as a sometimes badboy with a heart of gold, and by the film's end, the only career soldier not to swear, drink or get PTSD), but despite this I really was with the film until the last third when the plot manipulation needed to throw the couple into an emotional climax threw me off because it relies far too much on Savannah's goodness to a point where it really, truly did become unrealistic and even uncharacteristic. But nothing wrong with the film is anybody's fault, not even the dull leading man or the director known for his overly warm-hearted fare, except the screenwriter who was too dumb or too scared to change Spark's book.

Letters to Juliet (2010, Gary Winick). Another summer Seyfried romance involving letters! This time Seyfried gets a better character to play with, in this case a young fact-checker for the New Yorker named Sophie who discovers a long-lost letter to "Juliet," really a group of female secretaries who answer letters written by the love-lorn in Verona, Italy, and decides to set out and set things straight. The writer of that letter, Claire, played by a still-luminous Vanessa Redgrave, never forgot her first love and sets out with her grandson Charlie and Sophie to see if her love is still out there. Even though Sophie is engaged to a workaholic chef and Charlie's so cynical he's clearly hiding a heart of gold in plain sight, the two become attracted to each other. I might have been able to forgive the predictability of their blossoming from animosity to love had the ending been a little more real. I fast-forwarded through it, but believe me when I say it involves a balcony of some sort. The real heart of the film lies in Claire's search for her long-lost love (the fact that he is played by Franco Nero, Regrave's real-life longtime love, only adds to the story's genuine spirit), because it's a rare chance to show love between seniors in a very warm and real way. If only someone had had the courage to make it all about her.

It's Complicated (2009, Nancy Meyers). I like Meryl Streep, I love Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin will always have a very special place in my heart for portraying The Jerk's Navin Johnson, the man born a poor black child. I thought all of this would overcome the fact that Nancy Meyers shoots romantic comedies as though they were an ad for The Olive Garden. It didn't, and unlike Letters to Juliet (and much like Meyer's earlier Something's Gotta Give), it turned the depiction of a romance between people over 25 into a never-ending parade of sex jokes. By the time Meryl and Steve were lighting up marijuana I blew this joint.

No Strings Attached (2011, Ivan Reitman). It turns a depiction of a romance between people barely over 25 into a parade of never-ending sex jokes....and somehow it mostly worked. Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher are a pair of friends who decide to have a friends-with-benefits relationship, not knowing that they will eventually fall in love with each other. Shakespeare once coined this phenomena of the audience having the upper hand as dramatic irony; we call it predictable writing. Or art imitating human nature. Portman and Kutcher are not actors I usually enjoy, Portman for her acting choices and Kutcher for his personality, but I found them surprisingly winning together; this comedy allows Portman to breathe and have fun while Kutcher is genuinely down-to-earth and likable. It's also very rare for a film to depict a woman as an utter non-virgin (it is Portman's character who proposes the sexual relationship) and who has to go through the journey of truly listening to her heart. Not every joke lands in this film, especially not Kevin Klein's scenes as Kutcher's dad, but pull a few of your judgmental strings and you might be pleasantly surprised.

Terrence Malick's Big Bang Theory

And so our thirst has been quenched, if ever so momentarily before another potential drought, by the arrival of a new Terrence Malick film. And so the never-ending debate has been resparked of the notoriously reclusive director's status as a master filmmaker or a pretentious hack. The utter disregard for linear storytelling, the scope of his story and his questions, the whispy voice-overs in favor of dialogue, the years--literally, years--of editing in which Malick has a chance to leave no permutation of sequence uncharted. As a fan (albeit apprehensive) of Malick's films, I never find it easy to wrestle with the tireless existential questions his films ask about human beings and our place in time, nor have I even found it easy to be completely engaged as was the case with The Thin Red Line and The New World. But I'd rather watch a film that tries to be great and asks more questions than it answers over a film which strives for nothing and succeeds.

"There are two ways through life in this world--the way of nature, and the way of grace" intones Mrs. O'Brien (Jessica Chastain, who is the stunning image of a young Liv Ullmann in more than just looks). Malick, I believe, given his trademark of the relationships between humans and their environments, is more in line with the way of nature. In a stunning, utterly surprising turn, Malick includes a 20-minute sequence in the second reel of The Tree of Life depicting the beginnings of the universe, from the big bang to dinosaurs. In the hands of any other director this could have been preposterous, but Malick uses this sequence to demonstrate that every life, every family, goes through their own life and death, and shows how miniscule our place as humans has been in the grand scale of time. Every triumph and failure can be seen as gargantuon or miniscule depending on how you look at it. Much of the film takes place in the 1950s as the O'Briens (Chastain is the mother and "way of grace," while Brad Pitt turns in a surprisingly restrained turn as the more complex father who takes a Darwinistic approach towards parenthood) and their three sons as they experience a loss of innocence, a tiny spot in the place of the world but a universal story of a family's loss of innocence.

Malick uses many, many different layers and allusions, from fairy tales to The Book of Job, and a Fellini-esque ending which may or may not be the afterlife--I really don't want to get into all of that, because I know that whatever answers I may come up with may not will not begin to scratch the surface of the film's many mysteries. Maybe I just don't know what the hell Malick was trying to say or prove. But I do know that although I don't think Malick will ever reclaim the focus of his 70s work, I was hooked on every minute of the film's 2 1/2 hour running time in a way that I haven't been since Malick's Badlands. Many people may tack the word "pretentious" onto Malick because he asks more questions than he answers. If only they knew it was far, far more pretentious for a filmmaker to ask questions than to claim to have all the answers.