Movie Reviews: We Drew Straws, and 50 is Your Number

Continuing with yesterday's post, today I am posting three more movie reviews!  I bet you are just riddled with joy.  Or not. Straw Dogs was already out a couple of weeks when I saw it, but both What's Your Number? (which I saw at the midnight showing, actually) and 50/50 just came out this weekend.  I saw the first two with Michelle, but Brian came with me to see 50/50.  You can read his review of the movie at his blog Addiction to Film.

Straw Dogs AVERAGE

James Marsden plays David Sumner, a screenwriter from LA who moves with his wife Amy (Kate Bosworth) to her hometown in the south.  Tension between Sumner and the locals begins to brew almost immediately, especially with Amy’s ex-boyfriend Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard) who still lusts after her.  The movie is a disturbing look at how far you can push someone, and involves a rape scene that is very unsettling—partly because it’s filmed in a sexy manner.  Kate Bosworth was the weakest component to this picture, in my opinion, because I never understood or really believed any of her character’s actions.  From what I hear, the original movie was much better.

What’s Your Number? AVERAGE

Anna Faris can be really funny, but sometimes she falls short.  I think in this movie she fell a little short.  While What’s Your Number? had quite a few laughs and chuckles, it wasn’t nearly as funny as say, Bridesmaids (the opening sequences are almost identical), which had me laughing in hysterics.  Faris plays Ally Darling, a woman who is concerned that she’s had sex with too many men, so she tries to look back at her exes and see if one of them might really be the one after all.  Her neighbor, Colin (Chris Evans) helps her out on her quest and I don’t think it’s a “spoiler alert” to say that the two fall in love.  It’s a chick flick, people.  We all saw this coming.  The movie, however, is pretty darn cute and both stars show lots of skin if that’s what you’re into!

50/50 AWESOME!

Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars in this dramatic comedy as Adam, a 27-year-old guy who discovers—quite unexpectedly—that he has cancer.  His best friend Kyle (Seth Rogen) does his best to keep Adam’s life happy, mostly by trying to get him laid after his girlfriend Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard) cracks under the pressure and leaves him.  His mother (Anjelica Huston) wants to take care of him, naturally, but it’s ultimately his psychiatrist-in-training Katherine (Anna Kendrick) who helps him to deal with everything.  50/50, written by Will Reiser and directed by Jonathan Levine, manages to infuse quite a lot of genuine humor into a pretty bleak subject and the result is a very real and relatable story of human mortality.

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