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Rating 1½
Directed by Ivan Reitman
Written by Don Payne
Starring Uma Thurman (Jenny Johnson / G-Girl), Luke Wilson (Matt Saunders), Anna Faris (Hannah Lewis), Rainn Wilson (Vaughn Haige), Wanda Sykes (Carla Dunkirk) and Eddie Izzard (Barry Edward Lambert / Professor Bedlam)
Matt Saunders is secretly in love with his work colleague Hannah Lewis, but encouraged by his friend Vaughn Haige, he begins to date Jenny Johnson, who at first seems to be shy and slightly odd, until she reveals to him that she is really G-Girl, a super hero who attained her superhuman powers when she was exposed to a crashed meteorite as a teenager. Matt quickly realises that Jenny is neurotic and insanely jealous. Admitting to himself that he loves Hannah, he breaks off the relationship, but Jenny starts to exact revenge on him. Then Professor Bedlam, her arch-nemesis, offers him a way to neutralise her powers.
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‘My Super Ex-Girlfriend’ was directed by Ivan Reitman, who is most famous as the director of the two ‘Ghostbusters’ films. His other films include the rom-com ‘Six Days Seven Nights’, the Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy film ‘Twins’ and two further decidedly unfunny comedy vehicles for Arnie, ‘Kindergarten Cop’ and ‘Junior’. Around the time of ‘Ghostbusters’, ‘Twins’ and ‘Legal Eagles’ in the mid to late 1980s, Reitman was very successful, but his films as a director since then have been patchy to say the least.
This 2006 film could have been very funny and should have been funnier than it is. However, like most of Reitman’s work, it constantly misfires. Too much reliance is placed on special effects in place of an actual plot. It needed to be either much more stupid, or, ideally, a lot darker. This would have played very well as a black comedy, but that is not Reitman’s style. Even Anna Faris, who has been rightly compared to Carole Lombard and is undoubtedly the best comedienne working in Hollywood today, probably since the untimely death of the great Gilda Radner twenty years ago, struggles to make much of the material, although she is the best thing here. The cast is likeable and the film itself is not altogether dislikeable. It just isn’t very funny.
‘My Super Ex-Girlfriend’ has a 40% rotten rating at Rotten Tomatoes from 124 reviews. Given a theatrical release starting in the summer of 2006, it has a worldwide box office gross a little under $61 million, although its production budget has been estimated at $65 million (I am not sure how accurate that figure is).
The screenplay was written by Don Payne, a writer on the long-running multi-award winning animated television series ‘The Simpsons’.
Review posted 12 July 2009
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Rating 3½
Written and Directed by Lucky McKee
Starring Angela Bettis, Jeremy Sisto, Anna Faris, James Duval, Nicole Hiltz, Chandler Riley Hecht, Kevin Gage and Merle Kennedy
May Dove Canady (played by Chandler Riley Hecht as a child) has a lazy eye and has to wear an eye-patch. She is shunned by the other children in her school and overprotected by her mother (Merle Kennedy), who gives her a doll, saying it will be a her best friend, although she is not allowed to take it out of its glass case.
As a young adult, May (now played by Angela Bettis) suffers from paralysing shyness and an almost complete absence of social skills. She encounters various people who are drawn to her because, they say, they like weird. These include Adam (Jeremy Sisto), a local mechanic and amateur horror filmmaker who she has a crush on and Polly (Anna Faris), the receptionist at the animal hospital where she works who seduces her. However, what they consider to be weird and the extremes to which May is prepared go in her search for connection are two very different things.
This is a slow-moving and quite unusual film, a portrait of a seriously disturbed individual whose actions are influenced by her isolation and the inability of those around her to identify that her “weirdness” goes way beyond mere affectation. While I found it very hard to understand how Adam, in particular, did not recognise May’s disturbed patterns of behaviour right from the start, this is still a very affective and increasingly unsettling story, with excellent performances by the three leads.
I do not imagine it would be to all tastes, but I would recommend it to those who have an interest in unusual horror films and psychological thrillers.
‘May’ has a 68% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes from a combined total of 63 reviews. It grossed just $150,000 at the box office in America, during a limited release in February 2003.
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Rating 3½
Directed by Gregg Araki
Written by Dylan Haggerty
Starring Anna Faris, John Krasinski, Adam Brody, Danny Masterson, Jane Lynch, Marion Ross, John Cho, Natasha Williams, Michael Hitchcock, Brian Posehn and Roscoe Lee Browne
Pothead unemployed actress Jane F (Anna Faris) spends her morning getting stoned – and she then ingests her flatmate’s cup cakes, not knowing they are laced with cannabis. From this point onwards she stumbles from one surreal misadventure to another as she variously attempts to pay her dealer to stop him from taking her beloved bed in lieu of payment, pay her electricity bill to stop the power in her apartment from being cut off, attend an audition for an acting role and replace the cup cakes.
It is one thing to be in the state of being stoned; it is another to watch someone else who is stoned, which is invariably an altogether tedious affair. A film like ‘Smiley Face’ is immediately confronted with that problem. Jane F is basically just very stoned and, as such, irritatingly disengaged from the world around her. However, the film has one vitally important ingredient in its favour; Anna Faris is surely the best American film comedienne around at the moment. She has been compared to Carole Lombard, which is not an unreasonable comparison.
‘Smiley Face’ gets off to a shaky start, but it quickly becomes more engaging as it goes along and Faris gives a typically guileless performance, rescuing it from the tedium that might have befallen it. This is not a film to compare to the Coen brothers stoner classic ‘The Big Lebowski’, but equally it never succumbs to the depths of Cheech & Chong after the inspiration of their early work began to dissipate – which pretty much happened straight after their first film ‘Up in Smoke’.
Director Gregg Araki (pictured on set with Faris) is one of the leading figures of the so-called “new queer cinema” movement. His previous films include ‘Totally F***ed Up’ and ‘Mysterious Skin’.
‘Smiley Face’ did not garner the widespread acclaim of those earlier films, but thirty reviews collected at Rotten Tomatoes still resulted in a 67% fresh rating. It was screened in just one cinema in America and grossed $9,400. The overseas gross was just under $170,000.
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Is the ‘Scary Movie’ franchise puerile and crudely vulgar? Absolutely. Is it offensively sexist? In places it definitely is offensive and the first two films, in particular, seem to be obsessed with fellatio and women’s breasts. Being that the main target audience is teenage American boys, this is, perhaps, not entirely surprising. Do I like the films? I do. I can’t help myself. As immature and objectionable as they are in places, they make me laugh.
The first two films were written by Shawn and Marlon Wayans, amongst others, and directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans. David Zucker directed the third and fourth films – and the Wayans brothers were no longer involved in any capacity. It hardly needs to be said that all four films grossed big bucks and a fifth film is now in pre-production.
The first film is a cheap cash-in on the success of the ‘Scream’ franchise. It parodies a number of other films, notably ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’. The second film deviates slightly from the formula and is a haunted house comedy-horror –- kind of like ‘Haunted Honeymoon’ with added teenage gross-out comedy. The third film returns to the successful formula of the first film and is often cited as the best of the series. The main points of reference are ‘Signs’ and ‘The Ring’. The fourth film parodies ‘The Grudge’, ‘War Of The Worlds’ and ‘The Village’, amongst other things.
One of the things that remains constant through all four films, and the main reason why they rise above the potentially risible concept, is the presence of Anna Faris, playing the character Cindy Campbell. I think Faris is the best comedy actress in Hollywood right now.
It’s difficult to put a finger on exactly what it is, but she brings a kind of guileless enthusiasm to the role. It’s almost like the oft-told story (a myth, of course) that Margaret Dumont was entirely oblivious to the fact that the films she made with the Marx Brothers were comedies, which is why she was such a perfect foil for Groucho. Faris plays the role of Cindy Campbell totally straight, as if she were unaware of what is going on around her.
This is very much in evidence in the fourth film, in which the actor Craig Bierko plays Tom Ryan, based on the Tom Cruise character in ‘The War Of The Worlds’. This role does result in some very funny scenes at the expense of the Steven Spielberg film, but Bierko plays the role with a nod and a wink, letting the audience know that he is in on the joke. Faris never does this.
Regina Hall, who also appears in all four films, is another reason why I like them. She is particularly funny in the “cinema” scene in the first film, a parody of the opening sequence from ‘Scream 2’.
Anna Faris was very effective in supporting roles in ‘Lost In Translation’ and ‘Brokeback Mountain’ and also received great reviews for her role in a film called ‘Smiley Face’, which I am looking forward to watching when the opportunity arises.
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Matt Saunders is secretly in love with his work colleague Hannah Lewis, but encouraged by his friend Vaughn Haige, he begins to date Jenny Johnson, who at first seems to be shy and slightly odd, until she reveals to him that she is really G-Girl, a super hero who attained her superhuman powers when she was exposed to a crashed meteorite as a teenager. Matt quickly realises that Jenny is neurotic and insanely jealous. Admitting to himself that he loves Hannah, he breaks off the relationship, but Jenny starts to exact revenge on him. Then Professor Bedlam, her arch-nemesis, offers him a way to neutralise her powers.
This 2006 film could have been very funny and should have been funnier than it is. However, like most of Reitman’s work, it constantly misfires. Too much reliance is placed on special effects in place of an actual plot. It needed to be either much more stupid, or, ideally, a lot darker. This would have played very well as a black comedy, but that is not Reitman’s style. Even Anna Faris, who has been rightly compared to Carole Lombard and is undoubtedly the best comedienne working in Hollywood today, probably since the untimely death of the great Gilda Radner twenty years ago, struggles to make much of the material, although she is the best thing here. The cast is likeable and the film itself is not altogether dislikeable. It just isn’t very funny.
