Movie Review Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver's Travels (2010) 

Directed by Rob Letterman

Written by Joe Stillman, Nicholas Stoller

Starring Jack Black, Jason Segal, Emily Blunt, Amanda Peet, Chris O'Dowd, Catherine Tate

Release Date December 25th, 2010 

Published Deember 25th, 2010

The thing about "Gulliver's Travels" is that there isn't all that much wrong with it and I still can't recommend it. The cast headed up by Jack Black is uniformly game and hard working. The story is a classic hence why Jonathan Swift's story has lingered for more than 200 years. So, what really kept me from liking this harmless, desperately wanting to be loved movie? I'm still working on that.

Gulliver (Jack Black) is the head of the mailroom at one of New York's largest newspapers. He's been at this job for a while, something that would not satisfy most adults. When Gulliver finds out that the new guy, Dan (T.J Miller), that he has trained for a single day is now his new boss, Gulliver vows to do something with his life.

That something is finally asking out the paper's travel editor Darcy (Amanda Peet) who Gulliver has had a crush on for years. Unfortunately, Gulliver chickens out on the asking out part and in his haste to escape social mortification accidentally backs into a writing assignment. After faking a writing sample Gulliver is off to Bermuda where the infamous triangle awaits.

Of course we know that soon after Gulliver boards his boat he will be arriving in Lilliput, the island home of the miniscule Lilliputians lead by King Benjamin (Billy Connelly), his daughter, Princess Mary (Emily Blunt) and her betrothed, General Edward (I.T Crowd genius Chris O'Dowd). After being captured by the General and imprisoned, Gulliver makes a friend, Horatio (Jason Segal) who happens to be Princess Mary's true love, imprisoned by the jealous General.

From that set up we get Gulliver becoming a hero defending Lilliput against other mini invaders, Horatio released from prison and wooing Mary with Gulliver's modern diffidence and the surprise arrival of Darcy in search of Gulliver after discovering his faked writing samples lifted from Fodor's among other sources.

There is a battle against a giant robot and an island where Gulliver is dwarfed by even larger beings. These ideas are introduced by director Rob Letterman and just sort of happen and are discarded. There is no lingering effect. Some of this stuff is funny, most of it might bring about a smile or a chuckle but mostly the humor of "Gulliver's Travels" evaporates as quickly as it appeared.

The thing is though; there is nothing really wrong with that. Chuckles and half smiles aren't bad when you want a minor distraction. A movie should aspire to a great deal more but when so many other movies rob audiences of life force, I'm looking at you Fockers, one is tempted to grab a giggle wherever you can find them.

Also, it's fair to say that "Gulliver's Travels" meets every expectation of its underwhelming trailer. Jack Black tumbles and riffs, Emily Blunt and Amanda Peet are pretty and the 3D is completely meaningless and unnecessary. Jack Black gets the same laughs in the movie that he does in the trailer and a few more half smiles and giggles here and there. It's everything the marketing promises.

I am hesitant to give even a half hearted recommendation to "Gulliver's Travels" in part because of a quote from the legendary, and greatly missed, Gene Siskel who once asked "Is this movie as good as a documentary about these same actors having lunch together?" Gulliver's Travels fails that test miserably. Listening into the lunch conversation of Jack Black, Jason Segal, Chris O'Dowd, Billy Connelly and Oscar nominee Emily Blunt would be infinitely more entertaining than "Gulliver's Travels."

Movie Review Juliet Naked

Juliet Naked (2018) 

Directed by Jesse Peretz

Written by Tamara Jenkins, Jim Taylor, Evgenia Peretz

Starring Rose Byrne, Ethan Hawke, Chris O'Dowd 

Release Date August 17th, 2018 

Published October 15th, 2018 

Juliet, Naked stars Rose Byrne as Annie, a museum director in a small suburb of London. Annie’s life is growing a bit stale. Her job is boring, her sister is a mess, and her boyfriend, Duncan (Chris O’Dowd), is obsessed with a rock star named Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke) who disappeared into obscurity after making just one really successful record. For 25 years Duncan has collected and obsessed over scraps of information that he puts online at a website he made and dedicated to Tucker Crowe. 

At first, Duncan’s obsession was cute but after a few years of living together, Annie has grown tired of it and of Duncan. The plot kicks into gear when a mysterious package arrives at Annie and Duncan’s home. Annie finds it first and inside finds something called “Juliet, Naked.” Juliet was the name of Tucker Crowe’s only record and the ‘naked’ of this title refers to demo tracks of Tucker’s first record more than 25 years old. 

For an obsessed fan like Duncan, Juliet, Naked is like finding ancient religious scrolls or an authentic shroud of turin. It’s legitimately, to Duncan, an act of betrayal when Annie finds the CD and listens to it before he gets the chance. The betrayal deepens when Annie states that she finds the record insufferable and says so in a review that she posts on Duncan’s own website under an assumed name. 

Things take a turn for the surreal when the real Tucker Crowe reads Annie’s review and sends her an email telling her he agrees with her. Tucker has been a ghost for 25 years for a reason and part of it is how much he doesn’t like his own music. Tucker and Annie begin to correspond and as they grow closer, she and Duncan grow further apart until apart is all that they are able to be. With Duncan out of the way can Annie actually be in a relationship with the target of her ex’s obsession? 

Clever sounding premise aside, Juliet, Naked is one of the bigger disappointments of 2018 for me. I have been anticipating this movie since I heard about it. The film is based on a novel by Nick Hornby, my favorite writer whose books have inspired a couple of terrific movies, including an all time favorite of mine, High Fidelity starring John Cusack. I desperately wanted this movie to be great and sadly, it's only okay. 

What are the specific issues with Juliet, Naked? For starters, a complete lack of ambition. The movie is so elegiac, so lacking in vitality that it feels at times to be at a crawl. I don’t need this to have the pace of a Fast & Furious movie but the montage of Annie and Tucker’s email exchange is glacially paced even as it features very charming actors providing voiceovers for the scene. Even with Ethan Hawke and Rose Byrne, the scene is lifeless. 

And then there is the character of Tucker who is a complete disaster. Ethan Hawke plays Tucker as a sincere and forthright failure, a loser who has multiple kids by multiple mothers and lives off the residuals of his one big album, sleeping on a pull out bed at his ex’s farm so he can be close to his youngest son. That’s a lot of stuff to play as a character but Hawke doesn’t do much of anything with it. The film appears to rely solely on the charm of Hornby’s character to make Tucker interesting but somehow he appears stuck in the pages and not on the screen. 

The film reaches toward a moment of transcendence when Annie invites Duncan to come over and have dinner with her and Tucker at her home as a goodwill gesture. Duncan can hardly hold back on his fanboying and tells Tucker how much he loves his record and what it means to him. Tucker replies that he hates the record and the person he was when he made it. Duncan is wounded but defends himself and his love of Tucker’s record. It’s a good moment capped off by Duncan saying that art is not for the artist but for those who appreciate it before storming off. 

The film approaches something fascinating here about the relationship between artist and fan but director Jesse Peretz fumbles the moment slightly. Is Duncan a fool or are we meant to sympathize with his love of Tucker’s music? Is Tucker a jerk? Yeah, kind of. He’s kind of like those people who can’t graciously accept a compliment and instead come off as rude and unappreciative of genuine kindness. 

That could be a perfectly acceptable response on Tucker’s part but the way it plays in the moment makes both Duncan and Tucker look equal parts jerk and offender. We do find out why Tucker hates his own creation in the following scene but he really loses our sympathy in the previous scene and the rest feels like the character and the movie are making excuses for his rude behavior, excuses that don’t hold water. 

If Duncan is a buffoon then let him be a buffoon. Juliet, Naked takes such pains to be evenhanded about these characters that it lacks any perspective whatsoever and leaves a wishy washy impression of all three central characters. Director Jesse Peretz took a similarly even handed approach to his comedy Our Idiot Brother starring Paul Rudd to a similarly wishy washy effect. It’s as if he doesn’t want to offend anyone to a point of pointlessness and an aimless narrative. 

This is supposed to be Annie’s story and yet until the end of the movie, Annie is a mostly listless character. The world continually happens to Annie aside from when she posted her negative review of Tucker’s record. Everything that happens with her after that is dictated not by Annie but by everyone else. Rose Byrne is capable of carrying this story but the movie continually lets her down scene after listless scene. 

All of that said, Juliet, Naked is not a bad movie. It suffers from a conventionalism that is rampant in modern movies, an eagerness to not offend anyone or make anyone uncomfortable. Everybody is flawed and no one judges anyone and even when they do, they are justified in doing so. This is supposed to be akin to realism but in the sacrosanct world of romantic comedy, realism doesn’t translate. Pretty much all romance is hyper-realized or idealized because real romance is hard work and we don’t go to the movies for hard work. 

There is no hard work in Juliet, Naked. The filmmakers want both to be ‘realistic’ and exist in the idealized world or romantic comedy. The dissonance is maddening and leads to a movie that moves with little momentum, features idealized characters in a contrived narrative and yet the filmmakers want to play at being taken seriously because the problems these characters have, their flaws and how they work towards overcoming them have a whiff of the real. 

Perhaps it is possible to make a funny romantic comedy that is also based in something real and insightful but Juliet, Naked never bridges that divide. Instead, it’s a maddening, slow moving, not entirely terrible movie featuring some genuinely good actors and some genuinely good moments. There is a good movie here but it’s missing a director who knows how to get at what is good about it.