Wrist Cutters: A Love Story

Wristcutters: A Love Story
a comedic movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +2 (because my expectations were artificially lowered)
Apparent Rating: 6/10

Sometimes a movie I was not sure I wanted to see works its way up in the queue. This was one of those, because really, who wants to watch a movie about suicidal teens? But it was kind of cute, kind of funny, and kind of epic (on a small scale). I liked the resolution to the story. I even liked the cinematography, despite the atmospheric washout. The subtitles did not suck hugely. Pretty much there wasn’t anything wrong with this movie.

It was well done, it was what it promises to be (a love story about suicidal teenagers).

And I still cannot believe I watched it.

Given a choice, I prefer this a lot more than I did Juno, but they’re kind of the same premise where someone young and powerless screws up hugely and attempts to deal with it. Wristcutters is better than Juno in a few ways, there aren’t logistical faults like wondering how someone without a job can afford a case of tictacs. There are some bizarre logistical faults in this, but they’re intentional, plot-relevant, and funny— for example, the car they take their road trip through the world of the “offed” has a bermuda triangle kind of thing under the passenger seat, so things are lost forever if the passenger drops them. The main character in this has a job, he works at Kamikaze Pizza. I thought that was hilarious.

The story in Wristcutters was tight. The writing was solid. That’s why I found some parts of it funny. If something is slapped together, I am never sure if it was supposed to be funny.

If I were younger, I think I might have enjoyed this more than I did.

Rocket Science

Rocket Science
a movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 4/10
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 2/10

This was supposed to be “outcast boy makes good in intellectual competition”. It was “loser boy, from loser parents who shouldn’t have bred, screws up his life more with help from an evil bitch-girl, intellect be damned”.

The acting is terrible. The situation is badly written, so the “trick” of switching who the good guy is seems like an obvious technique that was telegraphed from the beginning. The supporting roles are horrible horrible characters, so bad that they must be caricatures or someone should have called Child Welfare.

There is an element of what debate is supposed to be about, but when the story starts with the end of the previous year’s debate, we see a student fail. Then we hear he dropped out of high school and now works at a dry cleaners because of it. That’s almost a mockery of “people taking things seriously”. So it manages to look like debate is an activity for snooty people and everyone else should just stay home. Maybe it really is like that and it’s not about ability. Certainly joining a high school sports team requires more than athletic ability.

I didn’t like how intellect was not honored in this story. It really might have been a movie about loser boy getting conned into joining the track team instead since it was a movie about how outcasts are kept out.

We’re told to feel sorry for the main character, because he stutters and it keeps him from doing anything fun in life. We see him struggling to make progress when the school’s idea of “help” is a guy who studied pallative treatments for ADD and has no idea what to do in terms of speech therapy. But I can find 10 ideas on how to deal with stuttering, just online. Most of them are free— free advice and the advice doesn’t cost anything to implement. So it’s a case where he doesn’t even try to do anything to help himself.

There was a lot to really loathe in this movie and the resolution was not particularly pleasant.

It’s not uplifting, it’s not well told, it’s not about real people trying their best, it’s a movie showing that horrible people keep doing horrible things and they seem to like it that way.

Juno

Juno
a movie
Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations: -3 (due entirely to personal squick factor)
Apparent Rating: 2/10

Normally a movie about a pregnant woman would go on a list of things never to watch, like sports news or fly fishing tournaments. However, Juno was an award winning movie that was supposed to be extraordinarily well written. I am all about the writing.

First. Let me say that the overall experience of the movie was really good. The writing was good, the directing was good, the production values matched, the settings were good, the acting was appropriate. The story’s premise is still inherently wrong and immoral and disgusting. There isn’t a way to get past that. The movie scoring a 2/10 in my personal ratings, shows it must have been phenomenally well done.

Scooting aside what I thought, Juno has some really big flaws. Like where does she get all that money? Seriously? 3 pregnancy tests and a gallon of Sunny D? That’s like $30 right there. She drives an hour out to the boonies and back in a station wagon. That’s like 8 gallons of gas. Sure the movie is from last year when gas wasn’t more than $4 per gallon, but still. Juno buys Bleeker a case of TicTacs. I don’t know what the case discount is, but a box of TicTacs is more than a dollar. Juno is always drinking on something non-water. Slushies or whatever. Those are $3-5 each in that multi-quart size. And she’s always eating. Junk food, but always eating— not eating at home, but at the mall or quickie marts or whatever. I didn’t have a couple hundred bucks a week when I wasn’t working and was just barely 16.

Some spoilers.

Sydney White

Sydney White
Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 7/10
Met Expectations: -1
Apparent Rating: 6/10

I heard about Sydney White via a knitting blog. The post described the movie as being for teens and indicated a low-level of suckage. I found that this was relatively accurate.

I had expected a somewhat smarter-seeming main character and somewhat better handling of the “fairy tale” aspect. Sydney White… Snow White. A lot of the parallels were ham-handed. It could have been funny, but since the overall story didn’t seem particularly related, the allusions seemed mocking instead of humorous. I think there’s a difference between something I’m not supposed to take seriously and something that’s actually funny. But perhaps today’s teens are less sophisticated intellectually?

The main evil is with Rachel Witchburn. The love interest is Tyler Prince. One of the plot points is Sydney White’s computer gets a virus; her computer is a Mac laptop with the “bite out of the apple” logo; the tech says, “That’s one poisoned apple.” She moves into a house with 7 guys; one who sleeps all the time, one with allergies, one who picks fights with everyone, one who’s really really smart, one who is very shy, etc.

Stars Amanda Bynes. I have seen several of her movies and she does a good job in her niche roles. Just like she does here.

Many teen movies rely on a shared sense of humor that I don’t share. I didn’t think any of this movie was funny except the allusions to the Snow White story and it wasn’t until 2 days after I returned the DVD to Netflix that I realized why those struck me laughing. Whenever a movie makes you laugh in all the wrong places but seems to under-utilize the dramatic plot aspects, you have to wonder if you weren’t supposed to be watching this. That was my problem with the movie. I thought it would have been fine if it was played as a straight up drama. I thought it could have been funnier. I thought it could have drawn that fairy tale linkage more clearly no matter which way it went. In the end, I thought it was a half-assed drama with a few humorous moments that detracted from the story.

The plot itself is about how college fraternities and sororities band together to exclude everyone else from campus activities and interests. (They make the entire school about themselves even though they are a minority. And they aren’t interested in their education because they know life-after-college is about who you know.) But how someone who originally thought being a sorority member would be terrific decides to fight against them after they snub her.

It could have been much better than it was. But what it was isn’t terrible. It’s probably a good movie for age-appropriate children since there isn’t any cursing or adult situations. There was hazing and implied nudity.