Dating Advice

He's Just Not That Into You

Director: Ken Kwapis

Cast: Ginnifer Goodwin, Jennifer Connelly, Jennifer Aniston, Scarlet Johansson, Bradley Cooper, Ben Affleck, Drew Barrymore, Justin Long, Kevin Connolly

Released: February 6, 2009

They should have called this movie He's Just Not That Into You...Unless You Are Scarlett Johansson. (Insert laughing emoji here). This movie is based on a self-help book of the same name which you have probably heard of. I am amazed and baffled that there is a book out there telling women the signs of when a guy isn't interested in her. It's really not that hard to figure out; you don't need to read a freakin' book! I suppose there are women out there like Ginnifer Goodwin's character (bless her adorable soul) who can't get a clue and need it, but there is no reason to be shelling out ten dollars for a book that tells you a guy may not be into you if 1) he doesn't call you, 2) he doesn't ask you out (again), 3) he doesn't want to date you, 4) he doesn't sleep with you, 5) he's sleeping with someone else, etc. No s&(%, Sherlock! (BTW, I looked up the price and some of the chapters on Amazon.com. I guess ten dollars isn't too much to spend if you just want to read it and have a good laugh!) 

This movie revolves around a bunch of characters whose story lines interconnect and interweave within each other. Like I mentioned earlier, Ginnifer Goodwin's character, Gigi, is the clueless girl who can't get a hint when a guy isn't interested in her. She spends most of the movie going out with different guys and wondering why they never call her back. When we first meet her, she's on a date with Conor (Kevin Connelly), who her sister, Janine (Jennifer Connelly) has set her up with. (And I already forgot how Conor and Beth know each other....through work stuff, maybe?) Through Gigi's eyes, the date seems to be going okay, but after it's been a week and he hasn't called, she begins to second guess herself and how the date actually went. Poor thing is even more confused when Conor had told he he would give her a call. Doesn't she know that doesn't mean anything? She even goes so far as to stake out the bar where he usually hangs out. Oh, honey, you are so very adorable, but a little stalkerish! Luckily, he's not there, but she does find out the main bartender, Alex (Justin Long), is a friend of Conor's. Alex sets her straight and tells her that Conor isn't into her. She goes on dates with a couple more guys and when she gets cryptic messages about whether they'll call or not, she calls Alex for advise. Alex offers to set her up with one of his friends, but when he tells her he gave him the wrong day and his friend won't be there and it's just the two of us, Gigi thinks that Alex made up his friend because Alex is into her. There were also a few other reasons (such as he would call her out of the blue to talk to her) why she thought he might be into her. Although her reasoning is sound, I just felt so embarrassed for her because I knew - I just knew! - that she was dead wrong and I was right. Turns out he wasn't into her and did have a friend to set her up with (who was not attractive, btw, nice job there, dude!) But wait...he found out he actually WAS into her and they end up together. Insert groan here.

I already mentioned Gigi's older sister, Janine. She is married to Ben (Bradley Cooper). She tells Gigi that it took Ben eleven days to call her after they went out on their first date. Holy crap; that is insane! After the third day is when I give up hope! They have been married for awhile, but it's revealed they haven't had sex in a long time (which is a chapter in the book that he may not be into you!) When she asks if he's been smoking, he denies it (though later it turns out to be true), but he does admit that he slept with another woman, Anna (Scarlett Johansson). She is also being lusted after by Conor (remember, he was the guy who went out with Gigi). In fact, after Conor and Gigi had their first date, she saw him take out his phone as they parted their ways and was convinced she was leaving her a message, but he was actually calling Anna, who he used to date and they still sometimes hang out and he's confused by her feelings for him. I am glad they made a storyline where a guy wasn't sure if a woman was interested in him, because, trust me, there should be a book called She's Just Not That Into You! Needless to say, Janine tells Ben she wants a divorce. Thank God!

Then we have Beth (Jennifer Aniston) and Neil (Ben Affleck) who are friends with Janine and Ben. They have been together a long time, but aren't married because Neil doesn't want to get hitched. Beth wants to get married and one of her friends or sisters (I already forgot who because there are so many damn characters in this movie!) tells her (like one of the chapters from the book!) that he's just not that into her because he doesn't want to get married. They break up, but realize they miss each other when they meet other people who they have nothing in common with. Beth tells him she doesn't need to get married, but Neil ends up proposing and they have a happy ending. Honestly, I found this storyline to be the most boring of the movie. 

Anna's friend, Mary (Drew Barrymore) has been meeting guys online. One she likes in particular, she met on MySpace. MYSPACE, OMG, remember MySpace? Wow, that was a blast from the past! I literally had forgotten that site existed until this movie reminded me. Now this movie came out in 2009, but was it suppose to take place in 2004 ish? Because I feel like MySpace wouldn't be relevant anymore by 2009! One of the funniest moments of the movie comes when she gets a message from a musician she met on that site who calls and leaves her a message and sings her a song with her name. She then listens to a second message and it's the same guy, only he's singing a song with a different woman's name and he realizes his mistake in the middle of the message. She ends up meeting Conor and they hit it off. 

I think I got all the storylines! 

I didn't love this Lucy!

Lucy
Director: Luc Besson
Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Amr Waked
Released: July 25, 2014

Congratulations, The Other Woman, you have some competition for being the worse movie of 2014!  What the f*** did I just watch? Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, a naive girl who's living abroad in Taipei who gets herself into a bad situation after she's gone out with some dude a couple times and he tricks her into being a drug mule by locking a briefcase to her wrist and wants her to take it inside a hotel. Of course she is terrified and becomes even more freaked out (but probably not all that sorry!) when the guy who tricked her is shot. She is taken to the basement of the hotel by a mob boss and his gang. Fearful that there might be a bomb in the briefcase, they hide behind walls and protective shields as the mob boss orders her to open the case. I forgot how she got the code, but she opens it and reveals four plastic bags of some blue substance.

Lucy becomes their new drug mule and a bag of the drug is put into her abdomen so they can export her and the drug out of the country. She is kicked there by one of her captors and the drug released into her bloodstream and goes to her brain. Meanwhile, Morgan Freeman plays a professor who specializes in the brain and teaches a class about how humans only use ten percent of their brain, which, I'm sorry, is a load of crock. He claims that if we used more of our brain, who knows what we could do! Someone asks what would happen if somebody used 100% of the brain and he replies, "I have no idea!"

Whenever Lucy starts to use more of her brain, we see a black screen with the percentage written in a bold font: 15%, 30%, 50%, 75%, 90%, etc. Apparently, the more you use your brain, the more superhuman abilities you obtain. Lucy had the power to build invisible walls (just like Jean Grey!) and move things with her mind (just like Jean Grey!) and other absolutely ridiculous things that nobody could ever do in any lifetime; I don't care how much of their brain they are using! At the very end when she is using 100% of her brain and is trying to defeat the bad guys, she turns into a freaking computer...or she makes one with the atoms in the room...I have no idea...it just got insanely ridiculous and I just didn't care anymore. And see the picture I posed above? That was when Lucy was in a car and uses the windshield as a computer because she can beam these lights onto it with her hands...I know, I don't get it either. Maybe if I could use ALL of my brain I would understand!

I should mention that I missed a good half hour right in the middle of the movie because I got a crappy disc that was all scratched. Don't you love it when that happens. When that happens, I just go back and get another disc, but with this movie, I really didn't care. It started to get messed up when she's in the hospital and calls her mother, telling her she can feel every vibration of the earth's rotation. Unfortunately I didn't get to hear her mom's reply of, "Sweetie, what are you on?" (That had to be her mom's reply right? And technically, she WAS on something!)

I think Luc Besson wanted to make his version of The Tree of Life because there are a lot of quick cuts to nature shots which reminded me a lot of Tree of Life (there was even a dinosaur in this movie!). At the beginning, when the mob boss and his crew are heading towards her, there are quick cuts to a lion killing his prey and when we see Lucy looked terrified, there's a quick cut to an antelope running from its captor! The dude who went out a couple times with Lucy tells her that the first woman was named Lucy. If you've ever taken any anthropology or archeology 101 class in college, you would know he was referring to a skeleton that scientists named Lucy after the song "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" (so it wasn't like she was named that when she was alive...what an idiot!) and hers are the most complete homosapien bones archeologists have found. But I'm not an archeology expert, so don't quote me on that. When he tells her that, they (of course) cut to a shot of a replica of what Lucy looked like when she lived nearly three million years (I can't believe that moron thought the name "Lucy" existed that many years ago!). I saw the bones of Lucy when I was at the American Museum of Natural History in New York (coolest museum ever!) Or at least, I thought that's what they were when I was looking at them, but it turned out the real bones were in Ethiopia (that's where the bones were found) and what I was looking at were just replicas for exhibits. I felt so deceived! Look at that, you got a little history/archaeology  lesson there!

Top Chef

Chef

Director: Jon Favreau

Cast: Jon Favreau, John Leguizamo, Sofia Vergara, Scarlett Johansson, Dustin Hoffman, Oliver Platt, Robert Downey Jr.

Released: May 30, 2014

Viewed in theaters: June 17, 2014

I'm a big fan of Top Chef and since I don't have Bravo, I have to buy the season pass from iTunes and while watching last season, they had an episode where Jon Favreau was a guest and he was there to promote his upcoming film, Chef. I am also a fan of Master Chef (US version is great, but the Aussie version blows it out of the water and sadly I have not been able to see the past couple of seasons because I can't find them on YouTube!) and I knew I would enjoy this movie about a chef who quits his job at a fancy restaurant to follow his dream of owning a food truck. 

Before I get into the movie, let me tell you something a little irritating that happened at the theater. I went on a Tuesday afternoon because movies cost $5 on Tuesdays and I was the only one in the theater when I arrived which didn't surprise me since it had been open for a month. I was thinking I would be the only one in the theater (and it has happened before) as I took my seat in the middle of the theater in the middle of the row. Then, a few minutes later, a guy comes in and out of ALL the empty seats in the theater, where does he choose to sit? Right behind me! I mean, not in the chair directly behind me, but he was sitting in the one next to it. Seriously, out of all the seats he could have chosen, he had to sit in that row? Sheesh, he could have at least put a row in between us. Yes, I am the kind of person who likes to have my own space especially when there are all those empty seats! Then, during the previews, the guy's wife comes in with the popcorn and drinks and I'm sure she thought her husband was there first and that I chose to sit right in front of them! 

Luckily they didn't talk or do anything annoying so I was able to enjoy the movie and forget that two people were sitting right behind me. 

Favreau plays Carl Casper, an acclaimed chef at a Los Angeles restaurant where he clashes with the owner (Dustin Hoffman). When a well-known critic, Ramsay Michael (Oliver Platt), is set to review their restaurant, Carl wants to cook something special, but his boss tells him he can't and stick to the regular everyday menu the restaurant is known for. 

When Carl reads the review the next day, he and the food are slammed and after getting a Twitter lesson from his ten year old son, Percy, he writes a not so nice message to the critic thinking he sent it as a private message, but instead Tweeted it so anyone could see it. His son is amazed that he has so many followers the next day then has to set his dad straight that anyone can read the messages he tweets. This starts a Twitter war between Carl and Ramsay and soon things get out of hand and Carl is fired and blows up in front of Ramsay which results in an unfortunate YouTube video. 

Deciding that he needs to lie low for awhile and spend time with his son and get out of L.A., his ex-wife (Sofia Vergara) suggests he come to Miami with her and Percy. There he gets in contact with his wife's other ex-husband (played by Robert Downey Jr. - when you're the director of Iron Man, it's easy to get him and Scarlett Johansson (who plays the hostess of the restaurant) to have small parts in your other movies!) who hooks him up with a food truck. The thing is a mess, though, so he and his son spend a day fixing it up - throwing junk out and buying a new stove and other necessities. He is pleasantly surprised when his sous chef, Martin (John Leguizamo), has quit his job to come down to help him. (Good thing too because he needed all the help he could get!) 

Carl and Martin are going to drive the truck all the way from Miami to L.A. (that makes the road trip I took from Omaha to Charleston, SC sound not so bad!) and Carl invites Percy to join them since he's out of school for the summer. Percy tells him that he'll ask his mom to see if it's okay and two seconds later he says, "She says it's okay." That was a cute running joke in the movie because he would just text his mom to ask her permission for things. Percy, being the tech savvy kid he is, promotes the food truck online with pictures and videos posted on Facebook and Vine and this gets them a lot of press and word of mouth.

While driving they see a sign for Disney World and Carl asks his son if he wants to stop there, but Percy tells him he'd rather to go New Orleans, a place they discussed going to earlier in the movie. I don't know what kid wouldn't want to go to Disney World, especially if you are right there anyway! At each locale they visit, they serve food that is familiar to that particular region. In Miami, it's Cuban sandwiches; in New Orleans, it's po'boys; in Texas it's pork sandwiches, etc. I have to say the food in the movie does look good, but the food they fix on the food truck looks really delicious. I have never ordered food from a food truck (I have never seen a food truck in real life - I don't think they have them where I live!). I would not recommend seeing this movie on an empty stomach because it will just make you hungry! Hell, it will probably make you hungry even if you are full!

Of course, being that they are getting a lot of press out there, Ramsay decides to check out the food truck when they return to L.A. and tells Carl he would like to back him and have him open his own restaurant. The movie's ending was a little weak because Carl and his ex-wife get back together and while there were little hints of that, it seemed tacked on. 

If you are a fan of Top Chef or Master Chef, I would recommend this movie! And if you're not, I still think you might enjoy it. 

OS Love

Her

Director: Spike Jonze

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Chris Pratt, Olivia Wilde

Released: December 18, 2013

Oscar nominations:

Best Picture (lost to 12 Years a Slave)

Best Original Screenplay - Spike Jonze (won)

Best Original Score - Will Butler and Owen Pallett (lost to Steven Price for Gravity)

Best Original Song - "The Moon Song" by Spike Jonze and Karen O (lost to "Let It Go" by Kristin Anderson Lopez and Robert Lopez for Frozen)

Best Production Design (lost to The Great Gatsby)

This is a movie I would not recommend watching with your parents or other family members or with somebody you've just started seeing. In fact, just watch it by yourself. Let's just say there are a couple awkward scenes that I was very glad I was watching it by myself! 

This movie takes place in the future (when exactly, we're not told) and I knew what it was about going in so it wasn't a huge shock that Joaquin Phoenix's character, Theodore, has a relationship with his OS system. Before seeing the movie, I assumed he was an anti-social, socially awkward person who had never had a (real human) girlfriend, but he used to be married (to Rooney Mara's character) and has friends (played by Amy Adams and Chris Pratt) so he's not a total, in lack of a better term, weird-o creep.

In this future world, everyone is always walking around with a headset on and everything is automated. Theodore works for a card company where he dictates letters for people who want to send a heartfelt message to loved ones, so they hire a company like the one Theodore works for to do it for him, which is a little messed up that that they have to hire a total stranger to write their personal messages! Theodore does this by verbally saying what he wants written down and the computer writes it down for him.

When he sees an ad for a new operating system with advanced artificial intelligence, he gets one and while setting it up, he's asked a couple questions which includes things like, "What is your relationship like with your mother?" He chooses to have a female voice and soon Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) is born. Samantha is the anti-Suri. I don't have Suri, but I have seen plenty of people interact with "her", and if you ask her a totally off the wall question she will say (in a very robotic voice), "I do not know" or something to that affect and even if you do ask her a simple question, she will misunderstand it and say "I do not know" or give an answer that has nothing to do with what you asked. If I had Suri, I would just get aggravated with it. I can verbally tell my iPod touch to play a certain artist and four times out of five, it always gets it wrong! Samantha, being voiced by an actual person, has a "real" voice and communicates like a real person and she's very charming and makes jokes and can answer questions within seconds and reminds Theodore when he has meetings and reads him his e-mails. She is very organized and friendly and you can see why Theodore is so taken with her even though she is just a computer. She and Theodore have deep, philosophical conversations and she confesses to him she wishes she were human to see what it would be like.

There was one thing that confused me. This new OS is supposed to be super advanced and something that nobody has seen, but there's a scene where Theodore is playing a video game and at one point he gets to this weird little alien who talks to him and calls him names and while this is going on, he's also having a conversation with Samantha who's telling him he got an e-mail from a friend who sent pictures of her friend who she wants to set him up with. He is able to post the pictures on the screen, along with the game, and the character in the game is able to see the pictures and comment on the girl and says how fat she is (obviously she is not since she is played by Olivia Wilde). If the OS Samantha is supposedly to be part of this new marvel of technology because the OS can interact with you in personal ways, is it really that amazing if your video game characters (even if they are jerks) can also interact with you outside of the game? And to me, that is just creepy.

Samantha insists Theodore go on a date with the woman because she's noticed that Theodore hasn't had much interaction with women. Now I don't like it when real life people meddle in my personal life, you can bet that I would really not like it if some Suri-like computer was meddling in it! So they go out and here is this beautiful woman who is interested in him, but like I say, if it's too good to be true, then it is and she just goes crazy on him and the date does not end well.

He and Samantha start connecting on a more deeper level and one night one thing leads to another and then one of the most awkward sex scenes I've ever seen onscreen happens which is pretty amazing how awkward it is considering there is no nudity and there's only one human (perhaps that's the reason it's so uncomfortable?) It is a lot like watching people have phone sex with a lot of heavy breathing. I don't know how Samantha could know what it's like to have sex since she doesn't have a physical body, but whatever.

Theodore, the human, and Samantha, the OS, become an official couple and you're waiting for his friends to find out and look at him funny or ask what he's been smoking, but they seem to take it very well and are happy for him. In fact, in this future world, it is not so weird for a true odd couple like that to happen as Theodore is not the only human dating his OS. If you think about it, people are already more interested in their iPhones and other technological devices than paying attention to the real human beings around them, so maybe it's not so far fetched that people will be in relationships with their iPhones in the future....which would be so weird and I hope that never happens! But perhaps it's not so off the mark. Theodore's friends are so welcoming of Samantha that they all go on a mini vacation together, the four of them. There's a scene where the three humans are outside enjoying a picnic and Theodore's phone is also lying on the blanket and they're all having a conversation and Samantha seems perfectly content joking around with them even though she's not physically there. In fact, she even makes a statement saying she's glad she's not a human because she can be anywhere and everywhere at once and doesn't have to worry about mortality.

As with any relationship, theirs has a few problems. (Hmm, you think?) Samantha is worried that Theodore is becoming distant and has asked a woman to be a surrogate and have sex with him so they can have a somewhat real physical relationship. The woman doesn't talk, but instead attaches a little fleck that looks like a mole to her upper lip and it allows Samantha to be connected to her...or something...I didn't quite get that and Samantha does the talking for her. I thought it would have been clever if they had Scarlett Johansson playing the woman but understood immediately why they didn't when Theodore can't go through with it and the woman, now out of character, is totally horrified and embarrassed and starts speaking.

Theodore gets jealous when Samantha says she's been talking to other operating systems (one of them with a very suave voice!) and is incredulous (as was I!) when she admits that she's in love with 641 other people because she is also the OS for 8,000 other humans. I think this shocked me because I just assumed that an individual OS was created for each human, but I guess there is only one Suri for the millions of people who have her services, so I shouldn't have been so surprised by that.

Inevitably, their relationship doesn't last, but it's not who you would think it is that ends it. A very interesting and thought-provoking movie, but like I said, make sure you watch it alone.