Marry Me (02.25.22)

 

Most boy-meets-girl romcoms follow the same basic structure: two people meet, slowly fall in love, have a misunderstanding that forces them apart, and then get back together at the end just in time for the credits. It’s a tried-and-true formula that has been shown to work over and over again, and this uniformity necessitates that new releases in the subgenre have narrative hooks in order to set them apart from their brethren. What if the meeting happened because a famous pop star decides on a whim to marry a random guy in the audience to spite her unfaithful and equally famous betrothed, for instance? This is the hook of Marry Me, a Peacock original that has very few unique things to offer other than its bonkers premise.

            Based on a graphic novel by the same name (yes, really), Marry Me has romance, a small dash of comedy, and very little originality. There’s really not much more to the story than I described already, and the film leans heavily on the aforementioned hook as well as the likeability of its leads, Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson, to make up for it. As Lopez plays a pop star (not too much of a stretch, is it), there are a few original songs that pad things out as well, some decent (the ballad she writes for Wilson’s character) and some a bit more irritating (the titular track, which they will not let you forget). The inevitable conflict that breaks up the string of fuzzy falling-in-love scenes also feels a bit manufactured and isn’t super convincing, as if the filmmakers were not only fully aware of the basic boy-meets-girl romcom structure but were also determined to follow it to the letter. Or maybe they just realized that they were already three-fourths of the way through the film and hadn’t introduced any actual conflict yet.

            I never really laughed out loud during Marry Me, which is a bit disappointing for a romantic comedy, and I can’t for the life of me see what would have attracted either of the stars to the script other than the chance to have a few kissing scenes with Jennifer Lopez or Owen Wilson. To its credit, the script does try really hard to be memorable and profound, constantly requiring Lopez (and occasionally Wilson) to drop what the writers probably thought were insightful one-liners about everything from self-reliance to the benefits of social media, but the juggling of all of these themes leads to a few balls being dropped along the way.

            Marry Me isn’t a bad film. The warm and fuzzy scenes feel warm and fuzzy, the characters are likeable enough (shout-out to Sarah Silverman as the best friend character, who I have not mentioned yet), and any eyerolls are solidly contained to the ludicrous proposal moment early on. It just doesn’t do much of anything special and is easily forgettable as a result. If you need some comfort food in the form of a movie you might as well watch something that fills you up a little longer.  

            Marry Me is now available on Peacock.

This review was first published in The Keizertimes on February 25th, 2022. Visit at http://keizertimes.com/

The Book of Boba Fett (02.18.22)

 

If there is one thing that the highly fickle and fragmented Star Wars fandom can agree on, it’s that the only thing good to come out of 1978’s infamous Star Wars Holiday Special was the mysterious bounty hunter known as Boba Fett (and arguably Mark Hamill’s Carol Brady haircut). The cold-blooded killer’s screentime after this coke-fueled and bizarre debut was minimal, having just a few lines in the original Star Wars trilogy before being unceremoniously thrown into a sarlacc pit, but his staying power (and ability to sell toys) was undeniable. It would take over forty years since his introduction to get his own spinoff, however, and that spinoff is the sometimes boring, sometimes awesome, sometimes unfocused Book of Boba Fett, a Disney+ original/spinoff of The Mandalorian.  

            Sixty-one-year-old Temuera Morrison stars as the roughly 41-year-old Boba Fett after previously playing his father/clone template Jango (as well as other clones) in the Star Wars prequel trilogy. Along for the ride is Ming-Na Wen, reprising her roll as master assassin Fennec Shand from The Mandalorian, as well as a couple of new characters that you probably won’t care about and a few that will only be familiar if you’re a fan of the Star Wars comics and animated series (one from the latter I was particularly jazzed about, but that would be a spoiler). There’s not too much to the story: After the events of Return of the Jedi Boba slowly gets his groove back, decides he wants to retire from bounty hunting and become a crime boss but comes into conflict with a rival syndicate, and western standoffs and sci-fi explosions ensue. The first four episodes or so are rather boring, relying far too much on flashbacks to pad the barebones “present-day” storyline, which mostly consists of talking and posturing, and the action varies greatly in quality as well. There isn’t really an excuse for this latter complaint because while the lead is 61, he also plays a character that wears a helmet and could therefore be played by a stuntman for a good deal of the time (the same is true of Wen, who is supposedly 58 but must have an aging portrait sitting in her attic ala Dorian Gray or Paul Rudd). To be fair, the action is not all underwhelming, just inconsistent (as the awesome train scene will attest), and in episode five things finally start to pick up instead of merely chugging along.  

            The only problem? The titular character is completely absent in one of those three final episodes, is barely in another, and has to share focus in the third. It is when The Book of Boba Fett is no longer about Boba Fett that the series gets really good, which is a downright shame considering how long he has waited to get his own spinoff. These last episodes are not awesome because they are furthering Boba’s story, but because they are furthering other stories in the Star Wars galaxy. This alone makes The Book of Boba Fett worth watching, but it would have been nice to have these stories told elsewhere to tighten the focus of the show. Boba deserves better.  

            Also, there is no book. The title is a lie.  

            All seven episodes of The Book of Boba Fett are now available on Disney+. 

This review was first published in The Keizertimes on February 18th, 2022. Visit at http://keizertimes.com/

The Tender Bar (02.04.22)

 

            I like to think that I have lived a fairly interesting life so far, but I am under no illusions that anyone would ever care to read a book or watch a movie about it. It’s a good life and it’s my own, but it just doesn’t have a narrative that would compel or interest anyone with the possible exception of my closest friends and family. Biographies need to have a little something special to them if they are going to entertain, and it certainly doesn’t hurt if the subject is a larger-than-life figure that everyone knows. The Tender Bar is a fairly well made (if not mind-blowing) film about the life of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist J.R. Moehringer that is mildly interesting in the first half, a slog in the second, and ultimately has very little of interest to say.   

            Directed by George Clooney, The Tender Bar (a pretentious and awkward name that I absolutely despise) is, in a word, adequate. The cinematography is fine (with the exception of a goofy-looking zoom-in here or there), the acting is fine (Ben Affleck as Uncle Charlie is the clear standout), and the script is, you guessed it, fine. The first third of the film that focuses on a younger Moehringer (played by Daniel Ranieri) with occasional jumps to Tye Sheridan’s version of the character a few years later is interesting enough with its themes of fatherhood and family, giving the proceedings a nostalgic feel despite the commonplace tropes of the story. But when the narrative moves completely over to Sheridan the pacing slows to a nasty crawl that is not alleviated by anything we as an audience have not seen thousands of times before. Sheridan’s version of Moehringer goes to college, meets a girl, falls in love, experiences heartbreak, doubt, all that fun stuff. He gets a job but doesn’t get the job he wanted, finally confronts his father, blah blah blah. Not helping matters is the fact that Affleck, the best part of the film, is mostly thrust into the background at this point and that Sheridan shows the emotional range of a particularly stoic cardboard box.   

            And somehow, The Tender Bar just kept going and going. I was stunned when I learned that the entire film clocked in at only 104 minutes, as it felt like at least 180. Could this have been improved by tighter editing and more succinct scriptwriting? Perhaps. But honestly I think the true culprit was the fact that Moehringer’s story isn’t that unique. Countless protagonists in literature have daddy issues. Everyone doubts themselves and everyone gets rejected by people they love and jobs they want. And instead of giving the audience the “oh, this guy is just like me, how relatable,” feeling The Tender Bar instead comes off as someone telling a story that they think is fascinating and unique when it just isn’t. When it comes to being a piece of entertainment, The Tender Bar doesn’t really justify its existence, I am sad to say.   

            The Tender Bar (ugh… that name…) is now available on Amazon Prime. 

This review was first published in The Keizertimes on February 4th, 2022. Visit at http://keizertimes.com/