HALF-Hearted Review: The Extra Man (2010)

Tags

Comedy, Drama, Katie Holmes, Kevin Kline, Movie, Paul Dano, The Extra Man

Walking out of a bad movie…we’ve all wanted to do it, and some of us probably have done it on occasion.  I myself abandoned the movie “O” with about 10-15 minutes to go, though I should have left earlier.  Usually, though, if I’ve paid for a movie, I see it through til the end.

But then The Extra Man came along.  I didn’t see it in the theater, but I did pay to watch it On-Demand.  Before I delve into my experience, please watch this Siskel & Ebert review for the 1989 movie She’s Out of Control, but feel free to skip forward to about the 2:15 mark to get to the part I want you to hear.

Now…I’m not here to say that The Extra Man isn’t better than She’s Out of Control.  I mean, it HAS to be…right?  But what I am here to say is that at the halfway point of this movie, I realized I had absolutely no desire to continue watching even another frame of it.  The only reason I was trying to muscle through it was because I had paid for it, but eventually even that wasn’t reason enough to continue.  So, I turned it off and did something else.  Thus, I’m not writing a regular review of it because that probably wouldn’t be fair to the movie.  Who knows, maybe it suddenly got really good in the second half.  Maybe it all started to make sense and stumbled upon some funny dialogue.  Maybe…but I don’t plan on finding out.

So why was it so intolerable?

Well, I’m not sure I can easily point out specific reasons…but I’ll try.

may I help you out of the movie, ma'am?

The plot is as follows:  Louis (Paul Dano) is a young teacher at Princeton who is let go after he’s caught trying on another teacher’s bra.  Yes, Louis likes to dress up in womens clothing.  After this setback, Louis moves to Manhattan and rents a room from an eccentric professor/writer, Henry (Kevin Kline), and gets a job at a magazine…or something.  There he meets the annoying Mary (Katie Holmes) and develops a crush on her.  Meanwhile, Louis discovers that the monetarily challenged Henry works evenings as an “extra man”.  That is, he attends dinners and parties with elderly widows who need another man around to fill a spot at a table, etc, or to just feel less lonely.  For some reason, Louis wants to do this too.

And that’s all I know because that’s as far as I got.  And I may have even messed up some of that plot description.  It wasn’t easy to follow as my interest waned.

This was the very definition of a movie spinning its wheels and going nowhere.  I honestly thought it had to be almost over before I checked how far into I was and saw that it was only half way through.  There was just scene after scene that went absolutely nowhere.  I didn’t care about, or understand, any of the characters.  The cinematography wasn’t very interesting.  The dialogue wasn’t witty or believable.  There was no reason to keep watching.

As for the performances…well, I already mentioned that Katie Holmes was just annoying.  Paul Dano…well…Paul, admittedly I haven’t seen all of your movies, but judging by the ones I have seen…you might want to think about branching out and trying something new.  You’re starting to make Michael Cera look like Johnny Depp.  At least try a new haircut.

phonin' it in...

When I described Kevin Kline’s character as eccentric, I meant it.  Aside from his peculiar night job, he’s got a few odd views on life and society that he’s not afraid to share…oh, and he likes to dance around and sing in his pajamas.  Plus, often Kline seems like he’s acting in a play while everybody else is in a movie.  Just one more thing that wore on my nerves.

Normally I don’t condone abandoning a movie half way through, especially if you’re planning to write a review of it later.  If I was still doing my movie-a-day thing, I would have powered through this one, but in this case, it just wasn’t worth continuing.  As Siskel & Ebert said above, isn’t life too precious to waste watching something you have absolutely no desire to watch?

I decided that it was.

I’d be interested to hear other opinions on this movie, if anybody’s actually watched it…and finished it.  Not that I’d be persuaded to go back, rent it again, and finish it, but it would be nice to know that there’s at least something redeeming in the movie.

For now I’ll just assume that I turned it off right before the zombies showed up and ate everybody…

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Pieces of April (2003)

Tags

Alison Pill, Comedy, Derek Luke, Drama, John Gallagher Jr., Katie Holmes, Movie, Oliver Platt, Patricia Clarkson, Pieces of April

ok, I have a sensible wardrobe and I live in a nice neighborhood...what more does my family want??

PG-13

Katie Holmes, Patricia Clarkson, Oliver Platt, Derek Luke, Alison Pill, John Gallagher Jr.

April: We had these when I was a kid.  The one time Joy let me hold them she said, “Be careful, they’re worth more than you are.”
Bobby: Well, that’s terrible.
April:  Next year they were gone.
Bobby: So, what happened?
April: A hammer I was holding fell on them.

April (Holmes) is the black sheep of the Burns family.  The “first pancake” as she says, meaning the one that’s always messed up and you’re supposed to throw out.  In order to try to reconcile with them, she has invited them all to her apartment in New York for a Thanksgiving dinner.  April’s mother, Joy (Clarkson) has cancer and may not be around for much longer.  The drive is difficult for her physically and emotionally, and the family considers turning back multiple times.  Meanwhile, April is struggling to find a working oven in her building that she can use to cook the turkey.

This is a mostly typical feel-good movie, despite all the angry and sad feelings, but it’s done quite well and features several fine performances along the way.  It looks good, despite the limited locations (apartment, car…apartment…hallway…car), and the writing is witty and believable, for the most part.  Some of the characters say and do things just for the sake of creating drama, but not to the extent that it gets annoying.

Even though the ending is a little too over the top with sentimentality and sudden changes of heart, I still thought it was touching and well done.  Katie Holmes carries the film well and is likable beyond just the pretty eyes.  In fact, it kind of left me wondering why the family dislikes her so much, but I guess we’re seeing her after she’s jettisoned many of the bad influences in her life.  Her family refuses to believe that she could ever change into somebody they could be proud of, so this dinner is her one big chance to prove to them otherwise.

While it’s not a particularly important film and could have been tightened up a bit here and there, I still liked it.  I enjoyed the writing, the acting, the cinematography, and the music.  Didn’t love it all, but liked it.  Enough that I’d watch it again.  In fact, it’d make a good Thanksgiving Day movie…despite all the cancer talk.

Make sure your oven is functioning well before you need to use it to fix a big dinner.

10 – .8 for having a few lulls here and there – 1 for some character behavior that was obviously there just to drive the plot and create drama – .8 for overdoing the sentimentality at the end = 7.4