Monday, May 18, 2009

Does the 'management' include editors?

This is a bit off-topic, but...hey, it's my blog, and my pet peeve: can't people who write for a living get the details right? And where are the editors?

Last night I saw the new Jennifer Aniston/Steve Zahn indie Management. Plot is simple: Sue (Aniston) takes business trip to Kingman, Arizona and stays at motel where Mike (Zahn) works. Mike falls for Sue, and follows/stalks her to Baltimore, and then to Aberdeen, Washington. Hijinks ensue.... The locations play prominent roles. The characters repeatedly refer to the city names, and multiple shots of the "Aberdeen" sign at the city limits (not to mention the Kurt Cobain references) leave precisely zero doubt as to where it's all taking place.

Anyway, the movie stinks. The highlight for me was the real-life earthquake that rattled the theater about an hour in. (If you need a Jennifer Aniston fix, go rent the excellent The Good Girl instead.) Afterwards, my movie companion read a bunch of reviews, wondering how anyone could have enjoyed this contrived, unrealistic, flat, unfunny, and downright creepy mess. Instead, we were left wondering: did the reviewers even watch the movie? Here are a few geographic hints that they didn't:

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times:
Sometimes, apparently, high-powered Manhattan career women swoon in the presence of a guy who looks like he should be pumping their gas.... Mike is obviously the fish out of water, so he must travel to New York to dramatize his unsuitability.
Ty Burr, Boston Globe:
Then the script demands that something quite unbelievable happen, and the movie's off on a poky cross-country courtship that finally comes to ground in Portland, Ore.
Stephanie Zacharek, Salon:
James Liao plays Al, a friendly stoner who befriends Mike after he treks to Seattle in pursuit of Sue and ends up homeless and jobless.
(emphases all mine). Sure, these reviewers are entitled to their own opinions -- but to their own facts?

2 comments:

  1. I don't know about the editors, but I do have to agree with your assessment of Good Girl. It could have been one of the worst movies ever made. But somehow Aniston delivered such a tour de force that you're able to not be bothered by everything else in the flick.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Why, why, why did you go to see this. The Metacritic score is 50. Lee Harvey Oswald picked his movie theaters more carefully than you.

    ReplyDelete

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