Oh, I think this calls for another outing

The number of Resident Evil movies is edging up on the total number of Resident Evil games. Your move, Capcom.

It saddens me to think that Milla Jovavich has not signed on for this but ( Possible spoiler for RE: Afterlife, like you care. )

has. Not that I object to that character's return (or even possible debut as a baddie!), just that I'll cry if Milla isn't in the fifth Resident Evil movie. Hell, I am not ashamed to admit I was a little upset by the fact that the army of Millas was dealt with in the first twenty minutes of Resident Evil: Afterlife. A flock of Millas kicking ass, taking no names would have sustained this franchise forever. I admit to being more skeptical of a post-Milla army, potentially post-Milla franchise.

However, if that guy from Prison Break is in this, I will be somewhat mollified. Not happy, per se, but accepting. Throw in the black guy from the last movie, too, and I'm setting aside the $20 for the 3D ticket now.

Body image issues

Not mine, just the ones under discussion in this blog post about a movie review. Being uniquely situated to comment on this--a.k.a I actually saw Crazy, Stupid, Love.--I feel I needs must add the weight of my opinion to the blogger. At issue, a scene in a movie where an extremely buff man takes off his shirt and a woman exclaims in response, "It's like you're photoshopped!" The reviewer of the movie is so relieved that she finds this gratuitous display of manly hotness revolting and takes it as a given that Hollywood, despite putting said hot-bodied man directly onscreen is likewise relieved that it no longer has to support such body types, really. Lucky break for the men who, unlike the women watching that scene, no longer have to conform to the body types that make others drool over them.

Which would be fine except that, a) see aforementioned comment about Hollywood movie putting -5% body fat man undressed onscreen, and b) that's not how that scene plays out. In the movie, the woman making this loaded comment is looking to achieve...something from this. It is she who asks him to take his shirt off, presumably to work up the courage to sleep with this man whom she barely knows. As such actions are really outside of her character--she's a play-by-the-rules, be-friends-first sort of person, not a pick-up-sleazy-guys-who-hit-on-her sort--it makes a sort of sense that now that she's talked herself into sleeping with him she needs all the courage she can muster. The reviewer would know that if he followed, at all, the scenes immediately prior and post to this line, wherein this heroine downed roughly 20,000 ounces (relative to her presumed tolerance levels) of alcohol she didn't like and then insisted that her paramour woo her as hard as he fucking knew how, respectively. This is not a scene about reassuring men they don't have to look like Ryan Gosling to get laid. This is just a scene, part of a whole psyching-herself-up-for-seduction thing that this woman is doing. If anything, the lasciviousness on wanton display proves that his looking like Ryan Gosling with his shirt off is probably half the reason she can get on with her plan to be seduced by him.

Point is, if you have a movie wherein Ryan Gosling has shirt off and a woman starts drooling (while delivering a line that indicates she's a little intimidated by how hot he is but NOT AT ALL DISAPPOINTED), and you read that to mean "Narcissism is bad!," you should be able to determine that you are an idiot who should not write reviews about films that you cannot possibly understand outside the context of your narrow film-school/film-major degree/focus. Leave the psychoanalysis to those as who get it, mm?

For the record, Crazy, Stupid, Love. was kind of adorable, though it comes with the requisite milestones of any modern romantic comedy. You have your mentor figure who tries to pull the lovelorn out of their slumps; the impossible coincidences; the boy-gets-loses-gets-girl whirlwind; the unfortunate trope that loving someone a lot, against their will, is totally cute and not at all inappropriate, mortifying, or creepy; and, naturally, no one ends up unhappy with their pairings off. There's some real issues raised--how does one be single after being with the same person for so long?--but they're very lightly dealt with for the most part. There's some real sense of melancholy and some of the negative aspects of breaking up and falling in love (jealousy, obsession, dealing with the approval of others), but none of it really pierces through the overall sense that everything is going to work out in the end. I mean, there is a lot of crushing by people on others that they shouldn't (that it is potentially ILLEGAL that they do), and yet it's all treated as candy. So long as no one really fucks this or that person, or they feel reeeeeally bad and are embarrassed a lot for it, then it's okay.

Wow, that review was more negative than I meant. The movie is enjoyable, and there's one scene that it would spoil the whole thing to reveal that was so funny people were laughing too hard to hear the dialogue. Steve Carell is so sweet, you can't be mad at him and his equally adorable onscreen son for some of their antics. Overall, it's one of the better rom-coms I've seen of late, though I grant that that is not saying much.