A very average movie weekend

While I lauded “Control” in the previous post, we also caught “Get Smart” and “Baghead”.

June, in the run up to the 4th of July hot zone of movies, seems to go through a doldrums just as the air truly begins to stultify. Left few other choices, we saw “Get Smart”. It wasn’t especially bad, but it wasn’t especially good either. I had the same feeling I had when I caught “Evan, Almighty”.

I wanted Steve Carrell to do well, and I wanted it to be funny, it just, well, failed to deliver. Not even the cute Anne Hathaway in ( I am told ) Chanel could really keep me interested. Steve, my man, get you back to Apatow lest you be relegated to Shamalyan-dom.

In what shall serve as a wooden circus-tent stake through the heart of Indydom, the Duplass Brothers’ latest film “Baghead” was also seen, and was deemed to be just about the same as “Get Smart” ( take that, indie film hipster scum ).

It was one of those movies shot on the cheap that professes to be a send up of LA types by being an indie movie about LA types. At the end we’re supposed to feel smug and Sundance-y, but instead I thought it was needlessly self-obsessed, self-referential, and self-reverential. This proves yet once more that if you stick around long enough, you too will be the enemy you once raged against.

Here’s the plot. 4 people in LA leave self-congratulatory indie film festival and decide to make their own movie–for real, no fooling around. They go up to a cabin with a ton of booze ( always a great start for serrrious work ) and plenty of latent sexual tension. In the midst of writing a story about a murderous “man with a bag on his head” they are beset by, uhm, a murderous man with a bag on his head. Thanks to the IndyScope jostleCam and badMakeUpVision, we get motion sick as the adventure(?) plays exhaustingly out. At the end, guess what, LA people are rubes obsessed with their own promotion and will do anything to break out of the rank of anonymous extra-dom. I restrain myself from sighing.

Not biting satire, not particularly insightful, just kinda, boring, really. I’d rather watch other peoples’ vacation slides.