Review No.177: Take this Waltz

OK from now on these reviews are going to be a tad different instead of long rambling paragraphs I'm going to have headings for plot, positives and negatives before giving my overall score and we'll start with Take This Waltz



Plot: Michelle Williams plays Margot a disenfranchised writer who currently makes end's meat writing articles for a travel website however life turns around for her when she meets Luke Kirby's charming artist Daniel. The only problem is that Margot is married to the dependable Lou, played by Seth Rogen, whose latest project is to write a book of ways that people can cook chicken. Margot tries to keep her feelings for Daniel underwraps however this easier said than done when he lives on the same street as her and becomes near impossible when Lou starts inviting him around. As well as losing her husband, if Margot does end up with Daniel she'll lose her best friend in Lou's recovering alcoholic sister Geraldine played by Sarah Silverman. In the end Margot makes her choice but in the final few scenes it seems that her decision may not have been the best one.

Positives: Anybody who saw her debut feature Away from Her knows that Sarah Polley has a great visual flair and this film demonstrates it with its stark colour. Though Michelle Williams is usually glum here she at least gets to crack a smile and demonstrate a little more humour than she got to in say Blue Valentine or Meek's Cutoff. Seth Rogen is no stranger to drama but here he plays it completely straight and is every inch the good guy as he cooks chicken for his family and generally puts in an amiable yet believable performance. The revelation here though is Sarah Silverman who is absolutely fantastic in her role as the sarcastic yet damaged Geraldine who often acts as Margot's confident but also has her own issues to deal with. I also think that the situations that Polley has created are believable with the couple who were married young no longer having that spark so the wife looks elsewhere. Rogen and Williams' chemistry is great and I really bought into their relationship to the extent that I didn't want it to end.

Negatives: It seems that Polley didn't think that her story had enough going for it so had to add plenty of kooky elements from the fact Daniel drives a rickshaw round the neighbourhood to the sight of Margot and Geraldine working out with the old women in the pool. There is also an incredibly odd sex scene towards the end of the film which is incredibly arty and for me feels mildly pretentious. I also wasn't a fan of Daniel nor the performance of Luke Kirby as he tried to steal Margot away from her perfectly nice husband I really wondered what she saw in this slightly creepy guy other than he was artistic.

Verdict: Despite being overly kooky at times it's the performances from Rogen, Williams and especially Silerman that make Take this Waltz what it is coupled with a mostly believable script as well as the director's likeable style I will give this one 7.5/10

Review No.176: The Watch

You'd think I'd given up didn't you? Well oh no I'm back and I've got a mammoth slog to get through 15 reviews in the next few days. I might give up again though after having to relive my experiences of enduring The Watch an ensemble 'comedy' about a ragtag neighbourhood watch group that try to bring down some aliens. The film is apparently based on a script that Seth Rogen wrote when he was younger and I have to say I think there's a reason that it's been discarded up to now but for some reason some big name comedy stars decided to sign up. Frat Pack members Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller seem to still be harking back to the glory days of Dodgeball and Starsky and Hutch though both are a lot older now so the gags don't work as well. Stiller stars as Evan a manager of a Costco in the  small suburban neighbourhood of Glenview where he fill his days starting up clubs as he has no real friends. After his co-worker is killed and the police refuse to do anything about it he sets up a neighbourhood watch in attempt of tracking the assailants. Obviously his recruits are a useless bunch of  misfits and include Vaughn's hard-drinking spendaholic Bob, Jonah Hill's slightly psychotic Franklin and Jamarcus a recently divorced Brit played by the brilliant Richard Ayoade. Much to Evan's annoyance Bob uses the watch as a way to escape his family rather than help clean up the neighbourhood however they soon discover that Evan's friend was killed by an alien.. From there this goes into sci-fi comedy territory, think a much less funny version of last year's Paul, as the watch tries to bring down the alien invasion. Obviously all of the characters have their own issues Evan can't get his wife pregnant, Bob's daughter is starting to attract attention from boys, Franklin desperately wants to become a cop and Jarmarcus also has a secret that eventually gets out. Along the way there's swearing, plenty of sexual references and not many laughs. 

As previously mentioned Vaughn and Stiller try to capture the magic of their earlier comic successes however it seems that that magic has now disappeared instead replaced by the sight of two men not acting their age. Jonah Hill doesn't seem to know what to do with his career as he followed Moneyball with The Sitter and then 21 Jump Street with this where he essentially plays a psychopath. Even the usually hilarious Richard Ayoade is rendered unfunny here saddled with a character who basically has a silly name and likes Indian women. The alien plot is poorly handled while the individual stories concerning our four central characters are tedious and predictable. Even the choice of song in the obligatory group sing-a-long scene is a bad one as 'You Ain't Seen Nothin Yet' doesn't really have that flow to it. There's nothing particularly offensive about The Watch however there wasn't really much to like either as this saw four comedy actors purely doing it for the money. The final scene in which the quartet battle the aliens is extremely juvenile as we find out where the aliens' brains are kept I'll give you one guess as to where. Ultimately for a summer comedy there's very little to laugh and you hope that the four men, especially Hill and Ayoade, will go on to bigger and better things in the near future. 

Verdict: An unfunny comedy that isn't particularly offensive but has no merit whatsoever so I'm being generous giving it 2/10