Classic Movie Review Dave

Dave (1993) 

Directed by Ivan Reitman

Written by Gary Ross

Starring Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, Frank Langella, Kevin Dunn, Ving Rhames, Ben Kingsley 

Release Date May 7th, 1993 

Published June 7th, 2023 

Dave is one of the nicest movies ever made. This is such a good hearted, sweet, sincere movie that it feels entirely anachronistic a mere 30 years after its release. Politics in America has gotten so much uglier, nastier, and mean over the last 3 decades that Dave feels like a throwback to the 1930s rather than the 1990s. In Dave, politics is still filled with pit vipers and vile men with self-interested aims, but good is seemingly on an equal footing with the bad guy and more than capable of defeating the bad. 

That feels quaint today where it's nearly impossible to believe in or remotely trust anyone in an elected office. In 1993 director Ivan Reitman and writer Gary Ross were able to get away with making a political movie that never once mentions a party affiliation. The film is about the United States President and yet we never learn if he is a Republican or Democrat. The politics are able to somehow be so fuzzy that it could be either party in charge. This would be considered cowardice in this day and age and Reitman and Ross would be castigated by both sides. 

Dave is perhaps one of the last signposts of a pre-internet era of politics, a time where the lack of a constant need to feed the beast that is social media, allowed for the kind of political crossroads that seem impossible today. In the pre-internet era, parties crossed over party lines to vote what they believed in. Today, party lines are so strict, members are rumored to be leaving their party if they even consider voting against the party line agenda. The politics of Dave are, of course, secondary to the humorous conceit and central romance of the movie but it's still quite a notable indicator of just how far things have changed for the worse in Washington D.C. 

Dave stars Kevin Kline as Dave, the friendliest man in his neighborhood. When he isn't finding a job for everyone he's ever met via his temp business, Dave is opening restaurants and car dealerships portraying the President of the United States, President William Harrison Mitchell (also played by Kline), with whom he shares a striking resemblance. That resemblance is soon noticed by the White House who draft Dave to portray a Presidential double to protect the President as he leaves for a secret meeting. What Dave doesn't know, but we do, is that this meeting is actually an affair with his secretary, played by a young Laura Linney. 

Full length review at Geeks.Media

Movie Review My Super Ex-Girlfriend

My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006) 

Directed by Ivan Reitman 

Written by Don Payne

Starring Uma Thurman, Luke Wilson, Anna Faris, Eddie Izzard, Rain Wilson

Release Date July 21st, 2006 

Published July 20th, 2006 

It's a good concept for a movie. The idea of a superhero in a dating situation with a regular human being is an idea that other films, Spiderman or Tim Burton's Batman, have alluded to but only now has a film made this idea its subject. The comedy My Super Ex-Girlfriend drew a number of big laughs from this great premise but unfortunately director Ivan Reitman was unable to sustain those laughs for the length of the feature.

Thus what I get with Super Ex-Girlfriend is two thirds of a very funny film and a third of a chaotic special effects movie with no solid finish. It's disappointing but not entirely destructive. Too much of Super Ex-Girlfriend is too funny to be written off entirely because of third act problems no matter how huge those problems are.

Luke Wilson stars in Super Ex-Girlfriend as Matt an architect who spends his days pining for the engaged girl of his dreams Hannah (Anna Faris) and his nights fending off the lecherous advice of his best friend Vaughn (Rainn Wilson) whose idea of good dating advice is to find a chick and bang her then find another and do the same.

Vaughn did have one seemingly smart piece of advice, he was the one who encouraged Matt to approach Genny (Uma Thurman) , a bookishly sexy art gallery employee. Though the meet cute on the subway is interrupted by a mugger that steals Genny's purse, Matt still manages to land a date by chasing down the mugger and retrieving the lost purse, though he is nearly pummeled by the bad guy.

The relationship is nearly tumultuous as the meet cute as Matt discovers Genny is more than a little odd. Clingy, neurotic but a raging wildcat in bed, Genny is certainly not like any woman Matt has met before. But there is far more to Genny than meets the eye.

Genny happens to be the Clark Kent identity to a superhero known as G-Girl who has made a habit of saving New York City from repeated disasters. Her crime fighting has naturally hindered much of her dating life but once she tells Matt of her secret identity their relationship takes off to another level.

Meanwhile Matt is still pining for Hannah and eventually when it looks like Hannah might be available and Matt has tired of Genny/G-Girl's insane jealousy and neurosis Matt makes the difficult decision to end things. If you think breaking up with an everyday crazy girlfriend is hard, try breaking up with a girl with superpowers.

The first two acts of My Super Ex-Girlfriend are very funny in capitalizing on the unique idea of a superhero and her non-super boyfriend. Director Ivan Reitman and writer Don Payne spin a number of humorous scenes from this brilliant scenario, such as G-Girl and Matt's midair coitus and G-Girl's jealousy at having to leave Matt alone with Hannah while she saves the world. These scenes draw huge laughs from the premise to the skilled performances of Thurman and Wilson and the smart writing.

Unfortunately nobody figured out how to bring this brilliant concept  to a satisfying conclusion.

The third act of Super-Ex which features G-Girl's attempts to punish Matt for breaking up with her and the evil scheming of her arch nemesis Professor Bedlam, played by the wonderful Eddie Izzard, to use G-Girl and Matt's break-up to his evil advantage devolve to simply into a series of chaotic and unsatisfying special effects.

The story closes with a perfunctory predictable and unearned happy ending which ties the story up far too neatly. Eddie Izzard is a wonderful comic actor but his story arc as Professor Bedlam is almost non-existent. For the ending to work he needs to be a more established character. Instead he is a plot instigator, a pawn moving the story to its conclusion and not a functioning character.

Ivan Reitman and Don Payne are far too interested in Matt's mundane existence as an everyman dating a superhero and not nearly interested enough in the far more interesting superhero. Little attention was paid to giving G-Girl powers beyond standard Superman abilities, her backstory is dull and her outfit is neither sexy or functional.

Just creating a character with super powers does not make the character interesting or compelling. Uma Thurman gives an energetic but flailing performance as it seems Reitman decided somewhere along the line to use the broadest comic takes filmed. Thurman is far too classy for much of the overwrought scenes she is forced to play and thus her performance seems strained.

Luke Wilson is spot on as the everyday guy. His reactions are natural and grounded and his charm is endearing without being cloying. Wilson's comic skills are impeccable and he plays even the broadest scenes with a smart economic ambivalence that seems perfectly natural to the character. Like I said, much of My Super Ex-Girlfriend is really good. It's only the film's third act that keeps the movie from rising to a level at which I could excitedly recommend it to you. As it is My Super Ex-Girlfriend is a flawed funny movie worthy of a rental if not an actual trip to the theater.

Movie Review No Strings Attached

No Strings Attached (2011) 

Directed by Ivan Reitman 

Written by Elizabeth Meriweather 

Starring Natalie Portman, Ashton Kutcher, Cary Elwes, Kevin Kline 

Release Date January 21st, 2011 

Published January 20th, 2011 

It's becoming a modern movie affliction; movies that are more ideas than movies. "The Dilemma" is a good example: How do you tell your best friend that his wife is cheating on him? Good idea but that was all anyone seemed to come up with and the film flailed about hoping the cast would find something funny to do. More often than not, the cast never found anything.

"No Strings Attached" is another example of this affliction. The idea is simple: Can two people have a sexual relationship without feelings getting in the way? And, much like "The Dilemma," no one really thought of anything more beyond that idea and thus stranded a charming cast, lead by Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher, in a plotless mess where only occasionally does someone find something funny to say.

Adam and Emma met briefly in Summer Camp as teenagers when an awkwardly distant Emma attempted to comfort a sad Adam and he offered a clumsy teenage come on. They met again in College at a frat party when Emma asked Adam to a family function that turned out to be a funeral. You know how you invite strangers on dates to funerals, so funny. And they met again one year later at a random farmer's market where Adam got Emma's phone number right in front of his girlfriend, because our main character is a total jerk. 

Much would seem to stand in the way of these two bad-timing having folks getting together but when Adam gets blitzed after his girlfriend leaves him for his TV star father (Kevin Kline, in a shocking cameo) he ends up naked on Emma's couch and eventually in her bed. Emma is now a medical resident working ungodly hours in order to become a doctor; she has little time for a relationship. What she does have time for however is hook ups and booty calls and lots of them. Yes, Adam is given what we are to believe is the dream relationship for all emotionally stunted men 'Sex Buddies.'

So why is Adam so miserable? It turns out, in what would be an interesting twist in a better and far more thoughtful and unique film, Adam is not the typical immature boy-man that he might seem. Too bad he has fallen for an emotionally walled off nut case that could only exist in the pages of an under-written romantic comedy.

The eminent critic Mick Lasalle of the San Francisco Chronicle made an interesting point about Ashton Kutcher and his movies. To paraphrase Lasalle: Ashton Kutcher's been in a number of bad movies but he's never been all that bad in those movies. Indeed, Kutcher is an appealing screen presence who delivers more than what is on the page to his characters. He just chooses some truly horrible movies.

"No Strings Attached" is a pretty horrible movie in which Ashton Kutcher is, as usual, not that bad in. Ashton gives the character charm and a soulful, puppy dog quality. The problem is that the rest of the film is such a shambles. Director Ivan Reitman and writers Elizabeth Meriwether and Michael Samonek seem to have an idea for a movie but fail to deliver characters whose motivations from scene to scene are consistent and instead they rely on hit and miss sitcom jokes that hang off of the film's premise.

Poor Natalie Portman is the biggest victim of the hit and miss style of "No Strings Attached." Portman's Emma is called upon to be an emotional disaster reeling from one motivation to the next at the whim of whatever comic notion struck director Ivan Reitman in the moment.

At one moment Reitman finds it funny for Emma to invite a strange man on a date to a family funeral. In the next she's giving her phone number to a guy in front of his girlfriend. In the next she seeks a purely sexual relationship. Then she gets drunk and jealous. Then she tells him to sleep with other women and then she's jealous again. Each time Emma is led to look like a fool because no one bothered to give her a back-story that might lend context to her oddball behavior.

Making matters worse in "No Strings Attached" is a sensational supporting cast that drowns in the wake of the creators’ lack of any clue what to do with them. Kevin Kline as Adam's father is a heedless hedonist whose love of drugs and sex is supposedly funny because he's old. That's the joke, he's old. I imagine that Reitman thought hiring Kevin Kline was all that he needed to make this character work and that's not an unreasonable notion, but even Kline's charm can't get around how misbegotten Reitman's direction of No Strings Attached is. 

Lake Bell plays Adam's co-worker who clearly has a crush on him. Here, the film adds a strange sort of cruelty as nice guy Adam is asked to flirt with Bell's Lucy while pining for crazy Emma. If Lucy were a bigger nutcase than Emma or maybe just mean in some way then his behavior toward her might be excusable. Instead, Lucy and Adam have an uncomfortable and brief courtship before she is shuffled off into another character's jockey send off. 

The brilliant Greta Gerwig from “Greenberg” is wasted in the role of Emma's best friend, sweetly paired off with Adam's best friend Eli (Jake M. Johnson) in one of the film's many thrown away plots. And The Office star Mindy Kaling is brought in to deliver a few tart one liners that sound as if she wrote them herself. Kaling's character exists only for one-liners and to her credit they are the funniest moments in the film. 

There are parts as well for rapper Ludacris, Cary Elwes, and Juno's best pal Olivia Thirlby but nothing really of note. It seems at times that everyone in the cast was hired to inhabit a type and then jokes were written to play off of that type and then everything was cut together with fingers crossed that something coherent would emerge. 

Sadly, nothing coherent does emerge from No Strings Attached aside from a continuing sense that Ashton Kutcher has talent and really poor taste in material. Like us, Kutcher saw the potential of the idea of No Strings Attached but like the rest of the cast he is left hanging by a creative team that failed to develop anything beyond a premise and a couple of good one liners.

One last note, some Oscar pundits have wondered aloud if No Strings Attached were bad enough to be Natalie Portman’s “Norbit,” i.e the film that some believe sunk Eddie Murphy’s chances of winning Best Supporting Actor for his excellent turn in “Dreamgirls.” The answer is a simple no: “No Strings Attached” is not as bad as “Norbit.” Indeed, few movies have ever been as bad as “Norbit.”