Another Weekend at the Movies

It was another "movie-packed" weekend for me. I caught Red Eye on Saturday, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin on Sunday.

Red Eye was a very pleasant surprise. Wes Craven has made a fair amount of crap in his time, but he's also on occasion hooked up with a very strong writer who produced a very strong script (Scream being the best example), and in the process created something better than the average for his genre.

So it was with Red Eye. The movie zips along, being only about 85 minutes long, but it feels like a full meal. A decent, and not preposterous, number of "beats" are set up for our heroine to navigate. A small number of reasonable characters are established efficiently and early, to participate in these later beats. The heroine is given just enough backstory to be interesting and plausible -- and most importantly, she behaves intelligently throughout the movie. Her struggles are often clever, and she never succumbs to any of the dumb thriller cliches. The actors' performances were all very strong.

The only "off moment" for me in the whole movie involved someone not being able to get a cell phone signal from inside a major international airport. Ridiculous. Same cell phone then has some battery problems a short while later, which was also a bit laughable, but only because my belief surrounding this phone had already been eroded. Besides being a plague to theater patrons and a serious road hazard, I think cell phones are also really a bane to most writers, who must now contrive reasons why they don't operate when they should.

In any case, I give Red Eye a B.

Then there was The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Strangely, Rotten Tomatoes' net average at this point has this movie basically being the most highly rated major studio release of the year to date. I don't think I'd go nearly that far, but it is a pretty funny movie.

I really like Steve Carell from his days on The Daily Show, and he ably carries this movie. The supporting cast is also very good. If I can totally pick my comedy the way I'd have it, I think I'd pick giggles throughout more than belly laughs in two or three places. And this movie was more the latter than the former. Still, that's not a deal breaker.

Any geek should see this movie, because you're basically guaranteed to have at least two hobbies/idiosyncrasies in common with the main character. For me, it was online poker and hosting weekly get-togethers to watch a TV show (I've even done it for the particular show in question, Survivor).

Despite this hitting maybe just a little too close to home, I give The 40-Year-Old Virgin a B.