basrutten

I had not expected this movie to be one of the worst I saw this year. After all, it has a decent rating on IMDb, it's produced by Judd Apatow, and it was lauded as the "female hangover". What could go wrong here? As it turns out, pretty much everything. This movie managed to literally hit all, and I really mean all, the wrong buttons for me.

I guess that at least something could be said for the premise, which basically is combining a fart comedy with a romantic drama. Somehow, though, it manages to take the very worst aspects of a drama and the very worst part of a fart comedy.

First of all, save for one or two instances, the humor totally misses the mark. I think I smiled maybe twice during the entire two hour running time, which must be a new low on the jokes per minute scale. The jokes just don't work..the physical humor is just plain vulgar in a bad way, and the verbal humor, while probably supposed to be sharp, just comes across as pointless angry ranting. Also, just about every scene goes on for way too long, ruining any potential there might have been.

For a drama, it also fails badly. First of all, just about every character with the possible exception of the police officer love interest, is self-obsessed, unsympathetic, shallow and just plain boring. It's impossible to care about these characters as they go through the horribly overlong (the movie is slow to a fault, as well) motions and end up at the horribly predictable conclusion.

I suppose some will pass of this movie as "clever" or "original" but in the end it's just the same old romcom template which has been done hundreds of time before..only this time with no humor, no chemistry and a lot of poorly executed "serious" take on the subject.

Two years after the decent but unremarkable "Slumdog Millionaire" got an Oscar, and a year after the even more unremarkable "The Hurt Locker" also undeservedly received the coveted statue, the Academy performs an even worse atrocity by denying The Social Network and Black Swan (among others) the best picture award, instead opting for "The King's Speech", a movie so obviously engineered to win a lot of Oscars that it hurts.

Of course, this is not a BAD movie. It is just that every aspect of it is directed at raking in as much Oscars as possible: an "inspiring" story, based on "a true story", about an underdog who overcomes his difficulties and comes out triumphantly, all set to appropriate and beautiful classical music.

Granted, it's an expertly made movie. The acting by Geoffrey Rush, Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter is first-class and the cinematography is beautiful.

Unfortunately, a story about a man overcoming his stuttering is about as boring as it sounds, and the totally risk-less direction doesn't help things either. Historical accuracy is thrown out of the window in favor of creating sympathy and the result is a movie that lacks any kind of real drama or conflict. Instead it just moves along a predictable course in which the "protagonist" overcomes predicable problems (childhood trauma, anyone) and achieves a predictable triumph.

Along the way, it IS good for an occasional smile, a cozy warm feeling, and a little bit of historical insight. But inspiring cinema, this is not. Rather, it's an over-engineered piece aimed at pleasing the crowd in general and the academy in particular. It's not surprising it works, but it doesn't make the movie by itself any good