Showing posts with label road trip. Show all posts
Showing posts with label road trip. Show all posts

Friday, November 5, 2010

DUE DATE




Road trip

PRINCIPAL CAST MEMBERS
Robert Downey Jr.: architect Peter Highman
Michelle Monaghan: his wife Sarah
Zach Galifianakis: struggling actor Ethan Tremblay
and others no doubt

REVIEW
Right from the get-go it is pretty dull, contrived and seems to drag on forever. Desperate to inject some sort of humour in it, the producers rely upon getting laughs from such things as a man “pleasing himself” (and to garner even more laughs, his dog does it too). At that point I had seen enough so I walked out.

CLASSIFICATION
for language, drug use and sexual content.

FOR NITPICKERS ONLY
• Peter tells Ethan they’ll have to put in “16 to 18 hour days for three maybe four days of driving” to reach Los Angeles from Atlanta. According to MapQuest the distance is 2,176 miles and the driving time required is 32 hours not 48 to 72 hours as estimated by Peter.
• He’s also off when he says it will take 8 hours to drive from Phoenix to LA: it is only 380 miles and can easily be done in less than 6 hours.

Saturday, April 18, 2009

ONE WEEK



Road trip

PRINCIPAL CAST MEMBERS
Joshua Jackson: school teacher Ben Tyler
Fiona Reid: his mother Mary
Chuck Shamata: his father Gerald
Liane Balaban: his fiancée Samantha (aka Sam)
Gord Downie: a stoned biker
Emm Gryner: Tracey, a songwriter-singer

REVIEW
For any road trip movie I use the film In the Wild as the benchmark for this genre of film. In it the main subject meets interesting characters, undertakes some new and different things and the fabulous camerawork (unusual camera angles, sweeping vistas) shows off the countryside to its best advantage.

One Week has none of the above: the people Ben meets are just ordinary folks, he doesn’t do anything more than ride his motorcycle and having personally seen much of the scenery in the movie I can honestly say most of the places shown look better in real life than they do in the movie; somehow these spectacular settings come across as bland and most of them are not.

CLASSIFICATION