John Cusack plays a moronic, selfish prick with his gorgeous head up his gorgeous ass where he stores an endless pile of albums I’ve never heard of.
Well, it’s not a bad movie, but it’s not as great as some friends would lead me to believe. The biggest downer is that, because the script is presented much like how I identify with outher writers (by relating the characters and their interaction to myself and my own life, since the greatest dialogue always comes from the author-based narrator and two characters polarly opposite in behavior, but connected by a strong set of ideals shared as equally strong with the narrator himself, which shows that the author wrote a very subject version of himself to tell a story with two bumbling idiots as accomplices to represent the high-strung and the sheepish sides of him simultaneously…) I assumed that I would unconditionally love the main character. The first half hour of the whole damn movie has me at odds for whether I should hate him for being the kind of person I should hate (the kind of person that one of my dearest friends in the world might flash-back to with hints of great spite and perhaps anger) and love him for being the kind of person I should love (an obsessed fan of popular culture who quite aware of his own self absorbed flaws which he tries to mend over time and eventually becomes a better person…) …
Well, off of the complications with the main character that I have due to complications I face within myself, the script is a charming story that follows a man’s average life and is burdened by the awareness of an audience that WANTS to think of the story as a romantic comedy, which shows in scenes that cut away from the story where Cusack’s narration turns from a varying verbal orchestral piece with highs, lows, uneasiness, forebodance, pain, and pleasure… to child-talk: moments when it seemed the character was rewritten to explain the character’s conflicts to an audience that could not put two and two together.
No flashy images. Average static. Average conversation staging. Average character focus. Very little action pans. It’s filmed very much like an MTV top-list-countdown, back when the video-jockey would talk into a series of five or six different cameras while standing on the same set, which matches the content and the very mellow pace of the film, and I applaud, despite how tired I am with the approach having been used in almost every eighties movie that wasn’t reliant on stupid humor or jazz music to sway the mood.
Of course the music was good. What, you think a music connesiure’s gonna write a book and some dumb-fuck’s gonna turn it into a movie without knowing how to assemble a soundtrack? Duh! No misplacement. No bullshit. Though, the characters really demand that I pay more attention to their own tastes, and for a moment, being caught in the action and the flow of the scene, I have to suspend my own opinions in disbelief, especially when Cusack says “Frampton?” in a disgruntled sigh. I’m open-minded enough to let it slide, since his opinion is a heavy element in the development of the story in the scene to follow, but if I weren’t, would I have the patience to sit through endless dialogue about how good a girl can sing if the setup didn’t pull through? Probably not, which is true to the content, but fickle when I have to bend backwards for a romantic comedy formula, and be the only one in the room who gets a Frampton joke that isn’t funny to begin with.
And speaking of out-of-place jokes that aren’t that funny to begin with… “Thanks, Boss”?! Are you fuckin’ kidding me? I might’ve stopped watching at that point, had I not revelled in the fact that I got a reference none of my friends would’ve gotten and thrown a little party in my head called the “I’m almost cool enough to be like the grown-ups” bash. A party that got old after seeing Ian’s character the third time, but my distaste was heavily overweighed by my delight in John Cusack kicking some Steven Segal knockoff’s ass.
SCRIPT: respectable
ACTING: respectable
DIRECTION: respectable
CONTENT: respectable
