The Five-Year Engagement (***)

It’s nice when a movie has such an informative title, and this one, like the movie it describes, is amusing while also being realistically descriptive. I’d hoped it would relate to a minor but persistent flaw I see in so many romantic comedies, which is that the happy couple always seem to be able to organize an elaborate wedding for 200 within weeks. Here Violet (Emily Blunt) and Tom (Jason Segel) get engaged at the start of the movie, but upon making arrangements Violet is told that her preferred facility has no open dates for three years—unless she’d like to book for September 11. She would not. However, as with a few other recent romantic comedies—or perhaps comedy-drama would better fit the tone here—the real source of the couple’s difficulties is career options, and geography. Tom is an aspiring chef in San Francisco, but Violet’s opportunity lies in Ann Arbor, MI. Her field is social psychology. (You don’t see that so often in films.)

Written by Segal and director Nicholas Stoller, the team behind Forgetting Sarah Marshall (and the recent Muppets revival), it has a mostly realistic feel to it with only the occasional dick joke. (Decent ones, actually.) The assorted side characters are mostly recognizable from TV sitcoms, include Chris Pratt and Alison Brie as the best friend and sister, respectively, of the two leads. At the engagement party, Pratt’s character sings an altered version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” to an accompanying slide show of Tom’s previous girlfriends. However, this is about as broadly comic as the film gets. Several of the scenes are purely dramatic. Although I don’t find Blunt and Segal to be an ideal on-screen couple, their disagreements are pretty well done. The movie is just over two hours, but the ending is abrupt.

IMDb link

viewed 5/20/12 1:35 pm at Riverview and reviewed 5/20–21/12

Jumper (**1/2)

What would you do if you could instantly teleport to anywhere? This is the premise of this slick action fantasy. Directed by Doug Liman (Swingers, Go, Mr. and Mrs. Smith), the movie is stylish, like all of Liman’s films, but, as with Mr. and Mrs. Smith, this only emphasizes how shallow the story is. (Smith writer Simon Kinberg also had a hand in this one, adapated from a Steven Gould novel.) The cameras swirl as the jumper (dull Hayden Christensen) lands atop the Great Pyramid at Giza, or Big Ben in London, where he spends much time when he’s not “getting digits” from women in Rio, or counting stolen currency in his New York apartment. But it turns out there are other “jumpers,” and also “paladins” who try to kill them, because, you know, only God should have that much power. Samuel L. Jackson, with a weird white hair cut, is the paladin in chief.

There is much that is entertaining in the movie, especially if you’re into special effects, but also much that is bullshitty and fake, even the way, when the hero takes his childhood crush (Rachel Bilson) to the Colosseum in Rome, she doesn’t take out the camera. Okay, small thing, but the movie, like so many others, is so all about quick cuts and iconic locations that the human elements get lost. (So did I at times; with all those cross-planet chase scenes, it was tough to tell where the characters were.) Jamie Bell, as another jumper, seems like he would have made a more promising lead character, or maybe just a better lead actor. As for the ending, it’s most notable for setting up a sequel.

IMDB link

viewed and reviewed 2/16/08