Straight from IMDB: Nominated for 4 Oscars. Another 16 wins & 66 nominations.
Tired from a long day of work, I decided to watch it.
Summary and rating here (No spoilers!)
Alright, there are no screenshots in this recap because everybody in this movie is fucking ugly. If you are not prepared for a thorough bashing of every single person remotely connected to this movie, turn back now. You have been warned.
I can't be bothered to rewatch this movie or go through it slowly, so I might skip some parts. It's not a huge loss. Trust me.
So the movie starts out with them eating dinner. There's this homely looking girl, a guy, and Julianne Moore, who was probably MILFy 20 years ago, but now is just really old. So their other mom comes home, and that's where things go wrong.
The reason why this movie is so beloved is because it's about lesbians. But honestly, it sucks. Keep reading.
So the other mom, which is the butch mom, gets on the daughter for not writing thank you notes for her birthday presents, because she's the controlling doctor mom. Then, both moms get on the son about his friend who is like a druggie kind of guy. Kind of standard for a movie like this. No big woop. Not inspired at all. Then, the non-butch mom talks about how she bought a truck for her new landscaping business. Butchy Magee starts questioning her because she doesn't even have clients yet. Kind of sets the tone for the movie.
Later, they talk in bed. Then, they watch a movie. A gay porn movie, with the non-butch one eating Butchy Magee out under the covers.
Meanwhile, the son is talking to the daughter, and he's like: "You have to make the call. You're finally 18". And I didn't connect the dots until they showed her snooping through her parents' files looking for her adoption papers. Yay for lesbian children.
So something happens with the sex, and the butch one sits on the remote and turns the volume way up, which scares away the daughter. Then, she goes to the bathroom and yells at the non-butch one about the hair in the sink or something.
Then, Mark Ruffalo is this hippie-ish guy who is having sex with Ms. Foxy Brown, who is a waitress or receptionist at his organic foods restaurant. Whatever. Then, he gets a call from the sperm bank, who tells him that one of the children that was conceived from his sperm 18 years ago wants to meet him. He's a good guy, so he says yes.
The daughter and son go meet Mark Ruffalo in secret, and the daughter likes him, but the son doesn't really. So they're actually both derived from his sperm, because each mother got pregnant with his sperm 3 years apart or something like that. Because developing another character would be too large of an order for this director to deliver.
Then, there's this little side story where the son and his delinquent friend snoop through his mom's bedroom, and find the gay porn video, and watch it. The moms suspect that their son is gay because they are raging lesbians, and then they talk to him about it. He lets it spill that they met their biological father, and of course Butch Magee starts freaking out. They're like, we've got to meet him ourselves.
Obviously Butch Magee doesn't like him, but Mark Ruffalo hires Julianne Moore to landscape his backyard as her first client. Here, it's revealed that Butch Magee has a drinking problem, as all controlling doctors have in this kind of movie, and she's just downing it like cream soda. Butch Magee does not approve of Julianne Moore hiring Mark Ruffalo, but it is what it is.
Mark Ruffalo hangs out with the kids, and bonds with the daughter. He meets the son's friend, and there's a scene with the friend and the son doing cocaine and then they're walking in an alleyway where the friend says to hold down the stray cat so he can pee on it. I have problems with this for so many reasons, but I'm going to try to condense everything I hate about this movie in the summary. Mark Ruffalo tells the son that his friend's a loser, and the son gets angry. This is something we've seen far too many times.
Then Julianne Moore sucks at landscaping, but Mark Ruffalo is trying to be nice. She has this Mexican lackey who does all her work, while she just sits. So once he leaves, she's talking with Mark Ruffalo, and she kisses him!
I forgot what happened next, but it doesn't really matter, because eventually she starts having a torrid affair with Mark Ruffalo and has sex with him. Then, the Mexican lackey goes ultimate cockblock and calls for her while she's having sex, so she gets dressed and goes outside, and Mexican gives her a knowing look.
Then, boring shit happens, until Mark Ruffalo invites the family over for dinner. Butch Magoo finds that he likes a singer she likes, and they bond. This was a really weird and uncomfortable scene, but the whole movie kind of is.
Then, she goes to the bathroom, and sees hair in the sink. Then she knows her wife is sleeping with Mark Ruffalo. Everybody's angry and all that stuff. The daughter goes drinking, makes out with the Indian best friend she had in the friendzone, drove home drunk, didn't crash into anything because this director hates excitement, then yells out her moms.
The movie ends with her going to college, and the moms are overbearing, trying to help her. She tells them if she can have a little time to herself, so they leave her alone. Then, she goes out looking for them, but can't find them, and she thinks they left. But then they pull up in a car and they're like: Oh, we just had to move our car. They all hug, then they drive away, with non-butch putting her hand on the lap of Butchy Magee and Butchy holding her hand.
Summary:
What a shitty movie. I'm not sure if this is one of the worst movies I've ever seen, but it's definitely up there. I'm really really unclear as to how it got so many awards and got such acclaim. There's nothing likeable about this movie.
Issue 1: This movie is that it feels like something a 12 year old wrote.
Like they obviously just put things in for shock value: the kids doing coke, the lesbians eating each other out, the gay porn, the delinquent friend wanting to piss on the cat. And none of this stuff added anything valuable to the movie. This movie could have easily been 10 minutes long, and nothing about the plot would have changed. It was so lacking in actual substance, that even the hour and a half seemed way too long for the amount of information I was getting.
Issue 2: The characters and character development were awful.
On a superficial level, they're all ugly. Having to look at the butch woman's ugly haircut is rough enough, but then, we're treated to an hour and a half of Julianne Moore's old sun damaged skin, which is some of the grossest shit I've ever seen. Then, the daughter and her slutty friend are not even remotely attractive. I don't have high standards. Just shell out the extra 10 bucks to get a teen girl who is semi-attractive like Emma Roberts. Who are you benefitting by putting all of these haggard people on screen.
Then, no outside characters are introduced into the movie. Everybody just interacts with each other, with no real fresh takes on anything. I get tired of seeing Julianne Moore's wrinkly freckled arms. Get some strange in here as a change of pace. Is it really that hard?
And none of the characters are remotely likeable. Maybe if I were a hipster that liked organic foods and composting and stuff I would maybe like Mark Ruffalo's character or even the lesbians, but no. I feel like hipsters are the only reason this movie got awards. Because it's so bad somebody convinced themselves it was good. I'm sure having all of the characters be flawed was part of the point of this movie, but flawed does not have to equal unlikeable.
Issue 3: The kids have no role in this movie.
The kids are not alright. The kids are a complete waste of space. They did absolutely nothing this entire movie. They could have been better if the next point was executed better.
Issue 4: The director seems averse to taking any risk
And not even risk. This movie is a mashup of everything cliche about every single dramatic movie. The characters, their actions, and everything are exactly what you would expect. It would have been so easy to add a little excitement to this movie. Just spitballing ideas: the son OD's with his friend, the son punches Mark Ruffalo, Butchy Magoo punches Mark Ruffalo, the daughter crashes on her way home from the party, the parents do leave her at college without saying goodbye, confirming they are horrible people.
But the director did absolutely none of this. This was not exciting. This was not fun. This did not teach me anything. This wasted far too much of my time.
I'm sure there are other reasons I hate this movie, but I'm going to stop here. The only redeeming quality of this movie is that it ended
Rating: 0.3/10
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