GBU: "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel", "Wanderlust", "Total Recall" and "Dark Shadows".

Since writing full reviews - and even Short Takes - has become almost impossible (until someone pays me maybe...hehe) we'll give GBU a try and rank the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of recent films I've seen. Let me know what you think of this new experiment and as always thanks for reading!

Total Recall (dir. Len Wiseman) *½

The good: It's always nice to see Colin Farrell onscreen, although he's made it clear that he now fares much better in smaller works (see Ondine and In Bruges). Also that body, wow!

Also, give Kate Beckinsale more villainous roles, she was delicious in this!

The bad: why bother remaking a movie when you'll just remind audiences of why the first one isn't even much of a classic to begin with? 

The ugly: the whole Asian-meets-futuristic aesthetic felt old in The Matrix and that came out almost 15 years ago, in this movie it just was awful to watch.

Wanderlust (dir. David Wain, 2012) ***

The good: this Aniston/Rudd reunion reminded us what made them so great to watch in The Object of My Affection back in 1998. Their chemistry is spot on! Wain's screenplay (co-written with Ken Marino) is a treasure chest of one liners and manages to be funny without being too crass and insensitive.

The bad: just nitpicking here but the ending was slightly facile.

The ugly: N/A

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (dir. John Madden) ***

The good: Judi Dench. Maggie Smith. Tom Wilkinson. Bill Nighy. Celia Imrie. Penelope Wilton. Ronald Pickup. Enough said. This cast is to die for and it's great to see real grown up movies are still being made. Dench's soulful performance was worth the admission ticket. How can an actress do so much with so little?

The bad: too many plots means we always end up craving more from the best, like Wilkinson's character.

The ugly: why does Dev Patel keep playing Indian stereotypes?

Dark Shadows (dir. Tim Burton) *

The good: Michelle Pfeiffer needs to be in more movies! It was also nice to see Helena Bonham Carter pushing her shtick to new places and Eva Green was simply to die for! (No pun intended)

The bad: the Burton-Depp thing has been old for almost a decade now, it's time to stop them!

The ugly: Burton's aesthetics seem to be getting more self indulgent with each passing film, in Dark Shadows the settings were so contrived that we couldn't allow ourselves for a moment to see the fantastical in all of this, everything felt just so stale.

Isn't Paul Rudd the Perfect Man?

While Watching "I Love You, Man"...

...I was delighted to see a Hollywood film that actually put some interest into friendship and wondered when did movies become so love-centered? (summed up beautifully when Jaime Pressly's character asks one of her friends "why does everything have to revolve around you?", to which she anwers "because I'm single!").
In this one the typical rom-com plot is tampered with when the guy (Rudd) already has the girl (Jones) but needs the friend to be his best man.
Enter Segel and all sorts of testosterone driven insanity and sensibility a la Judd Apatow.
The screenplay by director John Hamburg and Larry Levin pokes at both men and women and raises some fascinating ideas (the first half hour is laugh out loud funny!) but then the movie misses its aim and becomes so damn formulaic.
You know, just because you change the characters' genders doesn't mean you can get away with playing by the same rules plot wise (reason why I'm one of the only living people who seriously disliked "Brokeback Mountain").
Even if Segel and Rudd have awesome chemistry (unlike Rudd's with Jones...although that could've been on purpose) the last part of the film falls flat on its face declaring the only universal truth Hollywood has learned about men and women after a century of filmmaking: that we might indeed be from different planets.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall ***

Director: Nicholas Stoller
Cast: Jason Segel, Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis, Russell Brand
Bill Hader, Jonah Hill, Jack McBrayer, Paul Rudd

Peter Bretter (Segel) is an average looking, music composer who happens to be dating hot TV star Sarah Marshall (Bell).
Sarah works in Crime Scene, a CSI type of show where she plays a sexy investigator who must deal with Billy Baldwin's smarmy one liners and later having her life commented by Billy Bush.
Peter watches all this from a distance knowing that despite the fact that he's the guy always hiding behind the spotlights and flashes, when the day is over, he has that woman in his house. Things change when Sarah breaks up with him after she falls in love with British rockstar Aldous Snow (Brand).
Shattered by the breakup, Peter goes on a one night stand frenzy, only to be left feeling emptier. Then, by the suggestion of his stepbrother Bryan (Hader) he takes a vacation to Hawaii, only to realize Sarah is staying in the same resort with her new man.
Following his male pride he decides to stay and face her, seeing the events as a sign from God he has to get over her.
During his stay he meets a colorful array of characters, including stoner surfer Chuck (the reliably scene stealeing Rudd), obsessive waiter Matthew (Hill), southern virgin Darald (a hilarious McBrayer) who's having a hard time satisfying his new wife's sexual needs and beautiful hotel receptionist Rachel (Kunis), with whom Peter sees the opoortunity of falling in love again.
Mixing raunchy humor with more emotional moments this film successfully continues the style that has made Judd Apatow (a producer here) and company so popular.
It seems as if these men are compiling pages of wisdom to aid men in future generations, as they deal with issues most hetreosexual males will go through at one point or another.
What makes their movies work in a way chick flicks never have, is that the things they put in practice are drawn from real life experiences.
While other romantic comedies always seem to rely on the need to blame someone for what goes wrong and assume its characters always need to be with someone else, Apatow's take on relationships infuses them with just about the same amount of romance and cuteness as of pain and melancholy.
Take for example the characters here: in some other movie the fact that this man, who is certainly not the most attractive specimen out there, is dating what is conventionally described as a hot girl, is never the issue they deal with.
We never know why and how they got together and when the time comes for them to break up, the very smart screenplay makes us empathize with both their sides.
Even when Peter calls Sarah "the devil" we know better than to just throw judgment around.
The ensemble makes the film work wonderfully; Segel has just the charisma to pull off some difficult moments and overcome them making us root for him, while Bell is simply delicious, showing us a side of stardom that few actresses would have gone for.
Brand's kind of careless, self parody humor that mocks European values fits perfectly with the rest of the cast's "all American goodness".
But the film's real treasure might lie in its painfully honest, too real to be completely funny screenplay, that even masters the tough art of creating uncomfortable silences in movies.
Some lines coming out of the characters might sound as lines you've said before in the exact same situations, or some, for that matter that you will start using from now on.
And the film only fails when it tries too hard to make its poinst, like a scene where Segel bares it all physically, assuming it will do the same emotionally.
A film that contains such wise words along with hilarious heartbreak should know better than to go and do that.

Over Her Dead Body *

Director: Jeff Lowell

Cast: Eva Longoria Parker, Paul Rudd

Lake Bell, Jason Biggs, Lindsay Sloane

Kate (Longoria Parker) is a control freak who can't even relax on the day of her wedding to Henry (Rudd).

While running around supervising everything and making things go her way she suffers a freakish accident that kills her.

One year later Henry still hasn't moved on, so his sister (the awkwardly charming Sloane) takes him to visit Ashley (Bell) an aspiring medium, who doesn't succeed in contacting Kate, until he falls for her.

From then on, the film turns into a preposterous, unfunny catfight between the dead and the living.

The fact that the plot seems to be a mediocre "Ghost" ripoff isn't as offensive as the clichés and stereotypes it reccurs to create a plot.

Director Lowell exploits every single element that results enfuriating instead of funny, including a distasteful gay subplot with Biggs' character.

When it comes to Longoria Parker, who gives more of a glorified cameo than a real performance (and not a very good one at that either...) the film seems to punish her for her strong, empowering beliefs.

If Lowell thinks that the easiest way to change his characters' ideals is to have them wacked, the person with the problem might not be the one in front of the camera.