Moviecapper

If you’re wondering where I’ve been for the last week, I’ve been setting up a new blog.  The Moviecapper has decided to switch gears and start ranting on a completely new topic that I believe everyone can relate to.  PLEASE VISIT MY NEW BLOG:

HOW TO LIVE IN A SOCIETY

http://howtoliveinasociety.com/

This blog will teach you how to live your lives without thoroughly angering those around you simply by going about your daily tasks.  I decided it was simply time for someone to release an instruction manual about how to act in different social situations that we encounter constantly.  This new blog is that instruction manual!

Thanks for all the support everyone has given to Moviecapper and I hope to see you on the new blog!

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This is my review of Dinner for Schmucks AFTER actually seeing the movie.  ***CONTAINS SOME RIDICULOUS SPOILERS***

Click here to read my Dinner for Schmucks PRE-VIEW before seeing it.

The following actually happens in this movie.  I swear on your grave I’m not making this up.  A blind schmuck who believes he is a fencing expert, begins swinging a sword around and cuts off a Swiss multi-millionaire’s finger which is subsequently picked up by a vulture that flies out the window with it after Paul Rudd throws a bottle of wine through the glass.  If you go see this movie, you will be so mad at yourself you will begin stabbing your leg with a fork when you get home and you will not deserve any bandages afterwards.

Anyone who hated Inception will LOVE this horseshit.  Paul Rudd works for these executive clowns who host a monthly dinner where every person invited is supposed to bring a ”schmuck” with them so they can be made fun of.  Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat.  They repeatedly call this event the “dinner for idiots” throughout the movie and never the “dinner for schmucks”.  So why the fuck is the movie not called “Dinner for Idiots”?  These people that are brought to this dinner are not mere schmucks by any means.  They are absolute psychotic freaks of nature.

If I were invited to a dinner for idiots, I would have just brought a priest as my moronic guest. But the people they find are off the charts insane.  Here’s a guy who holds the record for the longest mustache.  Here’s a woman who communicates with her dinner.  And of course, we have the ventriloquist married to his dummy.  Oh and the dummy is horny for other guests at the party.  Where on Earth would they find these nutjobs?  The St. Louis Home for the Totally Fucked?  It just seemed way too far fetched that these people were able to gather all these misfits in the same room.  And they have to find a different lunatic like this once a month!?!?

The dinner itself occurs about 90% of the way through the movie which was irritating.  I kept thinking, “Get to the god damn dinner already!!!!”  Most of the movie is just the story of how Tim (Paud Rudd) meets his idiot, Barry (Steve Carell), and how Barry destroys every single aspect of Tim’s life.  Seriously, his life is basically over after like five hours with this dipshit.  Tim loses his girlfriend, his Porsche is destroyed, the most important client meeting of his life is ruined and he is in line for an audit from the IRS all because he happened to meet Barry that afternoon.

As the movie continued, it just got more maddening and painful to watch.  Barry is so stupid that it’s just not believable.  I would rather listen to Paris Hilton try to explain quantum physics to me than be in the same room with Barry for more than five minutes.  He doesn’t understand anything that’s going on.  EVER.  Just about everything he says makes Tim’s life worse.  But Tim somehow doesn’t kill him in this movie.  I thought for sure the movie would end with Tim beating Barry to a pulp with a corked baseball bat and being sent to prison.  That’s what I would have done and it would have been a far more satisfying conclusion to the movie for me.  Being forced to have sex every day in a jail cell with a fat guy with horrendous B.O. would be a better life than what Tim was left with.

But of course it all works out in the end.  Tim realizes what a sweet guy Barry really is and even sticks up for him at the dinner.  BULLSHIT!!  There’s no way these two would ever become friends.  In fact, Barry would never have a single friend under any circumstance.  The guy’s hobby is taxidermy and he has built a room full of dead mice interacting with each other like humans.  Keep Barry away from your children!  Just to be safe, keep him away from your adults as well.

As insane as Barry’s character is, I have to give credit to Steve Carell.  Somehow he took this terrible script and made the character somewhat likable.  He reminded me a lot of Lloyd Christmas played by Jim Carrey in Dumb & Dumber.

He was unbelievably annoying, but really couldn’t have played the part better.  Except while Jim Carrey had some great one-liners, Carell was given WAAAY to much slapstick.  Carell definitely delivered some funny stuff, but it was overwhelmed by absurd, awkward situations.  I think the big difference was that Jim Carrey was playing the role of a complete idiot opposite another complete idiot.  Steve Carell was just aggravating Paul Rudd the whole time and it got old really quickly.  Paul Rudd would just get angry and it seemed to rub off on me throughout the movie to the point where I became visibly angry as well.  I have since apologized to the woman in front of me after kicking her head by mistake in a fit of rage.  I was trying to kick the guy next to her.

I need to mention Zach Galifiankis’ character.  He has just a small part, but he was one of the movie’s few highlights.  He didn’t steal the show and he wasn’t hilarious, but for whatever reason, I can’t keep a straight face when this guy is on screen.

There were a couple things he did that I thought would not have been funny if it were anyone else.  But again, it’s not like he was handed a brilliant script.  He plays Barry’s boss at the IRS and of course is also invited to the dinner by someone else.  At the dinner, his character Therman gets into a gunfight with Barry.  And by gunfight, I mean they were pretending their fingers were guns and making sounds as they pretended to shoot each other across the table.  They ducked out of the way of imaginary bullets and put up imaginary shields.  So fucking stupid!!  This is basically what the movie was like.  If you need another example of the mentality of this movie, this also happened……

Steve Carell, and to a lesser extent, Zach Galifianakis saved this from being the worst comedy of the year.  Most of the movie I was thinking this was far worse than Grown Ups, but then realized I did laugh at a few things along the way.  I attribute this solely to these two actors.  Dinner for Schmucks is basically just a terrible slapstick comedy that I would never watch again under any circumstances, but I’m very reluctantly giving this an extra star because of Steve Carell.

My conclusion: 2 stars (out of 5)

To make things even worse, they do the whole narrative at the end explaining what happens to all the characters after the movie is over.  If you can’t wrap up the story on screen, it’s not a story worth telling.  For some reason, they wait until after the credits to let us know about one of the characters.  Why I was still in the theater will puzzle me for decades.

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This is my preview of Dinner for Schmucks BEFORE actually seeing the movie.

Originally, I was completely torn about this movie.  On the one hand, we’ve got a comedy with Steve Carell and Zach Galifianakis.  How can this possibly lose?  On the other hand, the trailer makes this look like the dumbest shit of all time.  On the third hand, the premise is that a bunch of corporate jag offs host a dinner once a month and invite people they think are idiots for the sole purpose of making fun of them.  Again, how can this fail?

It can fail by having a ventriloquist who’s married to his dummy as one of the characters, that’s how!!  I watched two separate previews for this and did not find one single thing funny.  I think we’re supposed to laugh at Steve Carell being a little different than the rest of us.  That was fine when he was a 40 year-old virgin.  Virgins are a riot because they’ve never had sex before.  At least not with a partner.  But his character in Dinner for Schmucks is just a loser who puts roadkill into dioramas.

I guarantee another problem with this movie will be having too many schmucks at the dinner.  There’s a shot of the table in the trailer and there looks to be like 15 people.  That’s way too many characters to try to give jokes to.  This tactic failed miserably in Death at a Funeral and Grown Ups and it won’t work here either.  They’re going to have to introduce us to a multitude of schmucks in a short period of time.  It will have to be immediately apparent why they are schmucks, so we can tell them apart from the regular people.  The only way to do this is by making them look stupid right off the bat with insultingly simple visual humor.  There will be a clumsy guy, a guy who dresses funny, this guy……

Unfortunately, we can’t always count on Steve Carell.  He’s great in The 40 Year-Old Virgin and The Office, but he also does shit like Get Smart and Evan Almighty.  Therefore, I really shouldn’t get too excited about his presence here.  It’s not like he’s Carrot Top who NEVER fails to deliver priceless comedy.  I’m being serious here.  Tell me you can look at Carrot Top for even a split second and keep a straight face.

There is only one man who can save this movie……Zach Galifianakis.  Everything this guy says or does is at least a little funny to me.  I’m not saying he will single-handedly make this a great movie.  But if there’s one schmuck that could make this a somewhat decent comedy, it will be him.  Because of The Hangover, Zach Galifianakis will be popping up in quite a few movies in the next year or so.  When you do a lot of movies in a row like that, there’s no way they can all be good.  This is like a guy having a goal of making out with a different woman every night for a week.  I’m sure it can be done, but there’s no chance those seven girls will all be gorgeous.  I just hope he salvages this movie instead of ruining his reputation.  However, he plays an alleged mind reader who wears a cape.  My fingers are crossed.

I really, really want to like this movie, but I have received some last minute information that this is a remake of a French screwball comedy.  God damn, the more I hear about this, the more it sounds like Dinner for Schmucks is less tolerable than wearing a beard of bees on a blind date.  You know what, I’ve decided that it doesn’t matter who is starring in this.  I will hate this movie.  I’m sure this is one of those films where all the best stuff is in the trailer, and therefore this will be a ridiculously painful weekend at the movies for me.

My prediction: 1 star (out of 5)

When I first started writing this PRE-VIEW, I didn’t think I would give it just 1 star, but the evidence against it being worthwhile just kept piling up.  I have a feeling that studio executives are just fucking with us.  They’re secretly calling this “Movie for Schmucks” and the audience in every theater are the schmucks that they invited to see it.

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This is my preview of Charlie St. Cloud BEFORE actually seeing the movie.

Here’s two characters from this movie looking at a clipboard.  This is probably the most excitement this stupid shit movie will bring us.  How will any human being be entertained by this film?  It sounds like a huge buzz kill if you ask me.  Some guy’s little brother dies and then he sees his ghost in the woods and gets sad repeatedly.  From the trailer, it looks like he can’t decide if he should fall in love.  I’m just not sure why anyone should care whatsoever.  What I am sure of is that this will be a bigger disaster than when the idiots at ABC actually made a sitcom out of the Geico cavemen commercials.

Seriously, let’s break down what we know so far.  This was one of those trailers that after seeing it you turn to your buddy and say, “Fuck that.”  Zac Efron plays Charlie St. Cloud.  I really know nothing about this dude Zac except that society dictates that I’m supposed to hate him because he’s a teen idol.  I don’t usually abide by what society says, so I’m going to hate him for not having an “h” or a “k” at the end of Zac instead.  And Charlie St. Cloud was going to be my porn name when I finally shot my first scene, so I’m pissed at him for that too.

Charlie St. Cloud’s little brother is killed in a car accident.  Obviously, this is not something I would wish on anyone.  I only bring it up because I know it will serve as a real downer right at the beginning of the movie.  The real story centers around the fact that he can’t let go of his lost brother.  Therefore, he begins “seeing” him in the woods where they used to play catch.  I don’t know whether it’s just his imagination or if there’s some sort of magic going on like when you spit fire on Frosty the Snowman and he comes to life.

Either way, they’re still trying to depress the hell out of me.  Along comes some woman that Charlie St. Cloud starts to fall for, but his little brother won’t let him.  Jesus, it’s tough enough trying to meet girls with all the competition out there from other guys, but to be getting cockblocked from beyond the grave?  In the trailer he says to the girl , “The more I’m in your world, the less I can be in his.”  So he’s pushing this great girl away because she’s causing him to spend less time talking to his brother who’s not really there?  He might as well be saying, “No I won’t join your Christmas Eve orgy, Playmates, Santa will be here any minute!!”

Is this girl supposed to just accept this?  It’s pretty obvious that she meets him after his little brother passes away.  Therefore, she must think he’s batshit crazy when he wants to visit the forest rather than spend time with her.  If he’s not batshit crazy, then he simply has too much baggage at the moment and needs to finish grieving for his brother.

Therefore, the idea that she would want to even share a soda with this guy at this point is ludicrous.  But no!  She wants him to accompany her as she sails around the world!  If you’re gonna be stranded at sea, don’t choose someone who’s emotionally unstable at the moment to join you.  Unless it’s Lady Gaga.  Here’s a picture of her actually stranded at sea.  She would at least make things interesting, that’s for sure.

There is only one way this movie can end.  Charlie St. Cloud’s brother will tell him that it’s ok to let go of him and be with the girl.  And both of them will be crying.  Can’t wait for that.  I will not be more bored at a movie this year than I will be in Charlie St. Cloud.  I would rather write “I hate Charlie St. Cloud” on a chalkboard a thousand times than actually sit through this depressing, sappy shit film.

My prediction: 1 star (out of 5)

This movie will definitely make money since insomniacs will be lining up around the block for this rare opportunity for them to be lulled into sleep almost immediately.

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