Logging

Film:  This Is 40 and half of Gangster Squad

So I go on a walk down to the theater to see what's showing, hoping I can catch an afternoon viewing of This Is 40.  The wait is too long, so I buy a ticket for Gangster Squad.  Everything is wrong with the viewing experience:  the theater has the curtains covering up the edges of the screen, there are 25 minutes of shitty previews, and then the movie starts and it just sucks ass.  I almost decide to go get my money back, but I came all this way, so I just go and watch This Is 40 instead thinking, apparently, to test whether suicide is somewhere deep within me.

Turns out it isn't.  Let me start of by saying if I never see Leslie Mann or Paul Rudd in another film for the rest of my life, I will not complain.  Nor do I like what Apatow is doing -- essentially making the ultimate mumblecore movie -- and all that said, I didn't hate the film.  It had so many hatable elements - just a bunch of spoiled-ass babies screaming at the top of their lungs and tripping over the feet of their own lives -- endless self-inflicted conflict -- one after another without any sense of tragedy or irony in their being.  Just loud, petty people.  A pithy way to say it:  Apatow made a big movie about small people.

But then there's Albert Brooks.  And he's unbelievable and I just start thinking to myself - good lord - this guy needs to be in more movies.  And maybe there was something more going on, or maybe the bludgeoning, shrill voice of Leslie Mann finally just overwhelmed me, and I submitted like an Al Queda terrorist to enhanced interrogation techniques and just decided to enjoy the last 10 or 15 minutes of the movie.  I don't know.  What the hell.