Everything Must Go: A Quick Review

Dramedies (dramadys?) are great. They combine the best of both worlds. You get to laugh and then you get to cry and then probably laugh again. It's just like real life! Except all the boring parts are taken out. Anyways, last year Everything Must Go hit the indie circuit and finally got a sorta bigger release and I was lucky enough to see it.

Will Ferrell is Nick Halsey, an alcoholic sales associate at a very nice firm. Actually, a former sales associate. After falling off the wagon and celebrating a little too hard, Nick got into a potentially damning situation with a female employee. He was fired and when he got home he discovered that his wife left him and put all of his belonging out on the front yard. She also blocked all his bank accounts. Don't trust women kids. Nick decides to hold a yard sale on his front yard (using the money mostly to purchase pabst blue ribbon) and hopefully eventually recover from alcoholism and win his wife back. Hint: he only does one of those things because his wife sucks.

Will Ferrell is great. I loved him in the okay-movie Stranger Than Fiction. He is very good in a dramatic role and portrays a recovering alcoholic very well. I laughed with him, I cried with him and I just plain enjoyed this movie. It's kind of sad if you really think about it but it ends on a cheery note and you can't help but feeling good about life. I want to watch it again right now in fact.

Featuring a breakout performance by C.J. Wallace (Notorious B.I.G.'s son) and some sharp, witty writing. Will Ferrell proves himself to be more than just a funnyman.

3 and a half out of 4 stars

-Christopher O'Connell

P.S. why doesn't he just break a window and get into the house? That always bugged me.

Days of Glory (Indigenes): A Quick Review

I love war movies. I like action and I love the drama that always goes along with them. I waited a long time to see Days of Glory. It got a limited release and it never hit my local movie store. Finally my college library had it. Score.

In WW2, France kind of got the short end of the stick. As in they got absolutely violated up and down the continent of Europe. But before that (and before WW1) France was pretty dominant in the world. They had a few colonies in Northern Africa who, although being treated like slaves, were still loyal to France. When France finally got back on its feet, they recruited young arabs from Algiers and Morocco to help fight for them. That part is true. It's also true that these men were basically the African Americans of the U.S. Army. Not treated very well during and after the war. I'm not sure if the story told in Days of Glory is true. Where four arabs are the first into France and defend a town by themselves. Probably not true.

Days of Glory is a decent film. It's got some action, it has likable characters and the story is pretty good. But it does suffer. It suffers from what I like to call, how many bullets can one gun shoot before reloading? Answer: a lot. One guy with a tommy gun has more rounds than a stationary emplacement. And four guys holding off two german squads? Cmon. I need some historical data to back that up before I believe it.

Not the best but certainly not the worst, it's a decent trip into racism on a side you probably have never seen before.

2 and a half out of 4 stars.

-Chris O'Connell

Drive

Scooby Doo and the case of the most misleading trailer and reviews ever. Sorry, I was thinking of better titles for Drive. Since there's almost no driving, or anything else for that matter. I usually trust rottentomatoes. Drive is currently at a 93%. That means it should be good, right? Wrong. And I will explain after a nice summary.

Ryan Gosling, arguably one of the sexiest men in Hollywood right now (not gay, I swear) stars as driver. That's right, he isn't listed as having a name. Nor does anyone ask. Anyways Driver, is a hollywood stunt driver. We know this because he does exactly ONE stunt in about a 5 minute scene. The only point being it shows that he takes risks and has access to face masks. Driver is also a mechanic at a friend's shop. Those are his day jobs. At night, Driver likes to drive criminals away from their heists and crimes and whatever else criminals do at night.

At some point Driver meets his neighbor who he likes to stare at every time she talks to him. Her name is Irene (Carey Mulligan) and she has a cute little mexican son and a husband who is currently in jail. Obviously she falls in love with Driver even though his vocabulary consists of "thanks" and "no". But then her husband gets out of jail and Irene is all confused. Driver just goes with the flow because he's a driver. But some mob bosses want her husband to get back in the game so Driver helps out. It gets messed up and I don't really care anymore. I'll just sum up the last 20 minutes of the movie. Driver has to kill all these mob guys before they kill Irene and her kid.

There are two movies here. The first movie is about a driver. He drives criminals around but a job gets messed up and he has to kill a lot of people in the most violent ways possible in order to save his girlfriend. I can buy that. The second movie is a romance in which a mother with an estranged husband falls in love with her reclusive but sexy neighbor. I can buy that as well. But both in the same movie? Not a chance.

There is actually a lawsuit about how misleading the Drive trailer is. What they advertised was fast and the furious six. What they got was this arthouse movie that out of nowhere took a turn for Saw levels of gore in the end. Lately, I've been describing it to people as Kill Bill. If Kill Bill had no talking, everyone staring at each other for 2 hours and a body count of about 6. A.K.A. boring. Even when the action started it was only briefly satisfying and the two guys you wanted to see killed, get killed offscreen. What a freaking rip-off. I spent 10.50 on this damn movie and I have never been closer to walking right out of the theater.

Drive, I see your point stylistically. You called with visual stimulation and atmosphere. I raise you a plot, non-wooden characters, decent action, entertainment value and a nonmisleading trailer. Oh, you can't counter? Than I get all the chips baby.

If you're going to have a movie called Drive, have some freaking driving. It started off strong but then there's nothing. Nothing decent anyways, even the getaway scene later on has driving that I could do. I don't want to watch a man drive around in his car for an hour contemplating life and obeying traffic laws, I want to watch him get away from the police guns blazing. The movie should be titled Stare because that's all that happens.

0 out of 4 stars

-Christopher O'Connell

Moneyball

Quick, name the saddest team in baseball. After this September the answer is the Boston Red Sox, but overall it always seems to be the Oakland Athletics. Despite having a few World Series championships under their belts, the A’s stand as the team that can never seem to win and everyone feels sorry for.

  

And it all comes down to money. Who has money? The New York Yankees do. Who doesn’t? The Oakland Athletics. This was made painfully obvious in the opening scenes of “Moneyball”. In 2001, the Oakland Athletics made it to the playoffs despite having only a $39 million dollar payroll. They were up against the New York Yankees who had a payroll of $122 million. Of course the A’s lose and the star players that got them there now know that they can make the big money with other teams. The A’s general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) has to put together a new team without the star players that helped them get to the playoffs.

  

In steps Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a young economics graduate from Yale. Brand convinces Beane to forgo the usual method of baseball scouting and recruiting and replace it with a system revolving around statistics. Instead of picking players for their look or their swing Beane picks players for their stats like on base percentage. With Brand’s help Beane assembles a ragtag group of cheap players that no other team wants but have good stats that are underappreciated by other teams. They lose pretty badly at the start of the 2002 season, garnering criticism from the entire league for their unorthodox style. But as the season rolls on, the Oakland Atheletic’s start winning more and more games, eventually tying the Major League record of winning twenty games in a row.

  

Underdog stories are the best. True underdog stories are even better. It was fun watching the A’s, with no “stars” to speak of go up against the highest paid teams in baseball and win. Brad Pitt is one of the best actors around, expertly portraying a general manager putting his job on the line to offset baseball’s money disparity.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t pay off. The A’s ended up losing to the Minnesota Twins in the playoffs. The rest of Major League Baseball took notice though, and adopted Beane’s strategy. The movie claims that the Boston Red Sox used the technique to help them finally win their first world series in 86 years. Although, after this season I think they need to relook at their strategy.

  

Making a boring premise exciting is hard. “Moneyball” makes it happen though. It is an entertaining movie for baseball and non-baseball fans alike. Sometimes it takes itself too seriously, because c’mon, it’s just a game, but for those who love inspirational sports movies, you won’t do much better than “Moneyball”.

-Christopher O'Connell

3.5 out of 4 stars