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karlhl
Reviews
Amanda (2009)
a romcom for morons
Amanda has bad dialog, poor scene writing & a plot that fails to satisfy. A dumb opening scene in which Joe is surprised for his 40th birthday by having his friends and family turn on the lights just as he turns on a porno and is about to start masturbating. This is supposed to draw humor from the awkwardness, but Joe talks about it shortly after with his parents, which is the last thing ANY person would do! This leads to a pretentious and insulting introduction of the main characters, in which Joe shows Amanda a secret door to a balcony, where her shushing him to hear nothing is interrupted by his niece giving him a handmade windchime, which he obviously doesn't want or care about. A schmaltzy dating montage follows a lame first date, in which she decides to leave after 10 seconds. He pathetically begs and pleads for her to give him a chance, to have the rest of the restaurant patrons applaud, and as he turns around to thank them, she leaves, but nobody bothers to tell him she is walking out. The characters are wooden and lack subtlety, especially Joe's parents, who act like two people who only just met, rather than who have been married for 40 years, and talk to their son like he's their neighbor. The dating montage includes scenes of him watching her from afar, and following her in a cab when she's jogging. A mysterious black sedan is supposed to lend the film an air of mystery, but serves more of a deus ex machina purpose by the end. A supposedly romantic gesture on her part is to give him a picture of her in lingerie for him to masturbate to, which we then see.
On the honeymoon, Amanda says she is a post-SRS MTF & Joe bolts. His confidant tells him she moved away & he falls apart over the rest of the movie. A speed dating scene with weirdos ends with Amanda appearing to him. He still hangs out outside her apartment. It turns out his friend was lying to Joe in order to date Amanda. Yet despite this, he never saw Amanda coming out of or going into her apartment? Also, Amanda was lying about being MTF in order to find true love to then gain an inheritance, because her mom left her dad (the man in the black sedan) for a woman when she was a tot. Even though Amanda meets Joe's parents early on, she never introduces hers.
Do yourself a favor, watch something else. With all the masturbation and stalking in this film, I have to wonder if the writer wasn't just some creep who rubs off and follows women around. Evidently his day job is making movies for the Bob and Tom show, so that he can make shorts and films like this. His leads are a couple of actors who typically get bit parts, and secondary roles are played by actors who felt like they were the director's friends. This film manages to offend the trans community, the straight community, and is just generally poorly written. The look of joy on Joe's face, upon finding out that Amanda was born a woman is so wrong that it isn't even funny. His exclaiming "Yes!" leaves you wondering if his proclamation of love before was genuine or not, and why he isn't exclaiming "what?!"
The film ends with them driving a fancy red sports car up to their mcmansion and talking about how they're going to live out the rest of their lives, and her doing something sassy so that it shows she still surprises him. I would call this corny, except that it's too badly written.
Blues Brothers 2000 (1998)
Good and Bad
The film does feature excellent cameos from both music and comedic celebrities, hailing back to the time in the 1970's when everything had to have stars participating or celebrity judges. Since then, this trend has returned in other shows, but in this film it only does so much. Having original songs is okay, but in this case, it's just a corny addition with zombified performers. The addition of Goodman's character, who starts out as a nebbish employee for a strip club, is reasonable since he did perform with Ackroyd in earlier performances with John Belushi's brother Jim. Jim Belushi is nowhere to be found, though, thus throwing off a major factor might have made the movie a little more tolerable. Even the addition of a long lost, black son of Jake's is forgivable sighting the lack of Belushi. But the addition of a little boy dressed exactly like the rest of them but wearing tennis shoes adds too much campy, corny nonsense. The kid serves no purpose other than to be cute and add a fun for the family factor that was not in the much grittier first film. The first film featured Nazis, spurned fiances attacking with bazookas, stolen air raid sirens, driving around the ghettos of Chicago where blues musicians could still play in the street. This film features traveling into Creole country in an overly-idealized south. The music is lackluster because it features songs that have little to do with the story line. The best example of this is the use of the song "Think" in the first film, which was executed perfectly in a small diner set; compared to the songs "Respect" and "864-5789" which are a used terribly and with awkward timing. At least James Brown didn't start breaking into "I feel good". Someone else wrote that this couldn't have been a concert movie because those are too slow paced. I disagree in that I have seen some well shot concerts, or other films in which the concert idea was centered around a reasonable plot, but not a similar plot to other films, and the music was ingrained into the film almost flawlessly. The Blues Brothers, The Wall, Bugsy Malone (admittedly a musical), et cetera. The original featured a great plot and numerous humor points that are memorable scenes. This film used the Blues Brothers name at a bad time, and what is worse used the number 2000 when every company was putting out 2000's once a month: Dracula 2000 is an example of this nightmare in which everyone adds something to their title to make it sound cool and edgy (remember all of the movies with the letter X in them?). It would be okay if the film was released in 2000, but it wasn't. It would be okay if they had called it Blues Brothers '98 and made it a film of a concert with the old band, guest singers doing some of their other favorites live. It would have been okay to make it a comedy if the film didn't need the music to hold up the plot as much. In the first movie, the music was lively and entertaining, and it was at a point when many of those musicians had been largely forgotten due to changing trends in popular musical tastes. The script was conceived of and written in the Blues country or as mister Tonso'fun Ackroyd called it "where the barbecue is good". Ackroyd should have hit the gym to get in the same kind of shape he was in back in 1980. Now he's a comedic actor who has been in so many bad SNL movies (Coneheads) and has lost touch over the years after performing nothing but roles like Ray in Ghostbusters and singing We Are The World. A sequel made 20 years ago with a long lost son played by someone who was as gifted a performer would have pulled off the role and made a killing, but instead, this film was offered up to a public who wasn't demanding anything more from the filmmakers. I'd have been happier if they'd simply re-released as a special edition with deleted scenes, new special effects, additional performances, and giant dewback lizards/imperial walkers/a digital mother superior/Jake throwing the first bottle. This film, while cute, cannot even be called a respectful tribute to the original.