Verdict: * 1/2 – – –

Okay, so… I’m as much a believer in the afterlife and near death experiences as the next spiritual person. My daughter is also, being a chip off the ol’ block and she has been begging me to rent this one for her for weeks. It being a PG-13, I figured it was not an issue, even when it heavily deals with the concept of death and what happens afterwards. Her mother and I passed on it, not really interested because we’re not really into young adult flicks, so she watched it on our laptop. But then we noticed after she watched it that she was really passive. If you know our daughter, you know that the word passive isn’t even in her thesaurus app, so this was a strange new experience for us. She didn’t eat much at dinner and for for the entire rest of the evening and next morning, she was completely bummed out.

So I figured I’d check this movie out myself the next day, to try and find out what about it that ruined her evening so maybe I could help bring her back from her depression. I hit play and was immediately hit with a normal family doing normal family things. Mia Hall (Chloë Grace Moretz), the teenage daughter of the family and the movie’s lead actress begins the story with an ominous voice over that pretty much explained why I felt like setting something on fire by the time the end credits rolled. She said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans.

Okay, that makes sense to me. Depressing, but that makes sense. She is a concert cellist who meets local rocker Adam (Jamie Blackley) and they totally dig on each other. The cello is her absolute passion. Rock and roll is his. They get together somehow, but their different lifestyles totally don’t click. Somehow, they keep forcing this romance on us when every teenager I have ever met would have called it quits after the first date. Every time they looked at each other, I reminisced about the time I was drawn and quartered, then dragged over broken glass by watching the romantic scene between Padme and Annakin in Star Wars: Ep 3.

The one saving grace about this flick was the characterization of Mia’s parents (cheerily played by Mireille Enos and Joshua Leonard). These two are a blast in every single scene they chewed up and spit out and I found myself laughing out loud in some places just from their dialogue alone! It’s really too bad there are so few scenes because <BAM!> she and her entire family are in a car wreck on a snowy road outside of town and Mia finds herself standing barefoot in the afterlife next to her broken body.

[Alert! Alert! Spoilers Ahead! AaOooooooGah! AaOooooooGah!]

If you would like to remain completely surprised, read no further! You’ve been warned! Don’t worry though, I won’t give away anything really important and you probably won’t care anyway once you watch it. Just sayin’.

This entire flick is basically Mia’s life flashing before her eyes. One hour and forty six minutes of near death experienceness. Her entire family is dead and there are some relative (literally) tear-jerkerishly, rip-your-guts-out moments in some places. But for the most part I got kind of bored with the flashback scenes that focused almost entirely on Mia spending about a year and a half during high school with Adam, accompanied by subtle acoustic soundtracks like Ben Howard’s Promise, and watching her parents just be normal (albeit out-of-place hilarious) parents.

If Mia had lived a crazier life, if she’d operated somewhat in-the-moment instead of planning everything… heck, if she’d even had a friggin’ sense of humor, it might have been more entertaining. But as it was, her completely normal, vanilla flavored teenage life was completely normal and vanilla flavored and I found myself drifting off about a third of the way through it. Especially because I’m the father of an admittedly crazier, never-plans-anything, totally-lives-in-the-moment daughter with an incredible sense of humor.

The fact is, Mia was actually getting annoying about halfway through it. Mia is (was) all about herself. Everyone tried to make her happy in life. Her parents tried to give her everything she wanted but she moped about life not being fair. Adam, despite his hard upbringing and the pain he has gone through, was the nicest guy and totally went out of his way to do things she wanted to do while trying to succeed with the band, but she moped about how different their lives were. When Adam got signed to a record label, she was miffed that he was at a celebration party and moped that he didn’t pay more attention to her. When she auditioned for Juilliard and totally knocked it out of the park, he told her they should celebrate and she moped, asking him why he never wrote a song about her.

Eesh. High maintenance much? I was actually hoping this romance of theirs would just end so we could get back to the point of the story. The more exciting parts of the movie are when her spirit is running around the hospital screaming about how much she wants her old mopey life back. And just when you think Yes! She’s finally going to let it go and just pass on and she’s about to walk down that tunnel of light… something pulls her back and here comes another relentless flashback. Gah!

By this time, I wanted to tear my own eyes out and pour lighter fluid over them. When the credits rolled I was literally gritting my teeth, rocking back and forth in a fetal position and I didn’t even hit Stop on the remote. I just ejected the DVD and snapped it angrily back into the case. 

Oh my God. I don’t say this too often, but this is literally an hour and forty six minutes I will never get back and when my own life flashes before my eyes after I pass on, I just hope I can fast forward through this part of it!

Just a side note… before I even get started… Jason Bateman has always looked like a kid to me. Always, even if he’s about five years older than I am. I love the kindness in his eyes, the innocent youth that is always there. I have always enjoyed this guy on screen and look forward to many more movies with him in it. I just needed to get that out of the way.

Oh! Another side note… A huge HighFiveDownLowTooSlow to Doug and the gang here at Movie Madness for allowing me to blather all over this site about movies and a giant thank you to you <yes, you!> for intensely examining casually reading somewhat scanning vaguely thumbing my reviews and editorials here! I love you more than you can possibly know. No seriously, look out your window. That’s me across the street in the van.

Okay, where was I? Oh yes, we were talking about a review here, weren’t we? Sorry. I love family get togethers. In real life and in the movies. Love them! I have literally fallen in love with movies that have this idea in mind. I love seeing siblings reluctantly fly in from all over the world, usually meeting up at their parents’ upper class New England home during Fall or Christmas, to be there for a particular reason they all must address. Usually it’s for the funeral of a family member, which is ironic but also gives the story a strong thread to keep it on track until the credits roll.

Strong memories of past laughter and pain mixing with different personalities and experiences, all the siblings’ spouses meeting each other (some for the first time), getting to know each other, hearing the stories, sharing the love and communing in fellowship with the interesting brothers and sisters who share the same name. It’s always fun for me to mix these ingredients up and see what comes out of the oven.

Movies like this can be hard to make. There have been some horrible movies made this way. The Family Stone was so far off the mark, that I figured this genre of stories was finally over and I lost all hope in family movies for Hollywood these days, but no. Along comes TIWILY and I’ve fallen in love all over again.

Judd Altman (Jason Bateman) loves his wife, Quinn. He just doesn’t really pay much attention, when suddenly he finds out she’s cheating on him. The look in his eyes broke my heart, ripped it all to pieces and threw it out a plate glass window into traffic. It hit so hard and so fast that I hardly had time to recover before his sister Wendy (Tina Fey) calls him in tears and tells him that, <Bam!> their dad is dead.

Something happened to me that hasn’t happened before: I found myself actually crying before the opening credits even splashed across the screen in a movie. Never happened before.

You read that right. This all happens before you even see what movie this is! This is not a spoiler alert because it doesn’t spoil anything. The movie hasn’t even started yet! Fortunately, it being Jason Bateman and Tina Fey, they somehow take these tragedies and twist them with laughs and, this time, something happens to me that hasn’t happened in a long time: I’m laughing while I’m crying!

Okay, now the opening credits roll. I wiped my eyes, still giggling.

The long and the short of it is that the family’s Dad had a final request before dying that all his children hold a seven day “Sit Shiva” <~ Gotta be careful saying that one! And so, all the brothers and sisters who really don’t have much in common and haven’t spoken in years get together and have to deal with each other, all while dealing with the complications that they have forged for themselves in life.

I won’t give anything else away, because after the first seven minutes (in which I had already determined this movie is being added to my DVD shelf) the movie really takes off. This is one of the most disfunctional families I have ever seen, and yet, they remind me of every family with multiple brothers and sisters that I’ve ever met. It’s amazing how down to earth this story is, and how well those who read the scripts bring it to life.

Love shows both its sides in this story, the darker side and the lighter side. The love of a family and the love of others around it supporting them and you feel it’s such a safe place to be because you know that this family is always there for each other, accepting each other’s limits and pushing each other’s boundaries as only brothers and sisters can. You see the best and worst in people throughout these seven days, you laugh, you cry and in the end you are completely smitten.

As family friend Penny (Rose Byrne) says to Judd when he talks about the complications in his life: “Cut yourself some slack. Anything can happen. Anything happens all the time.”

I very much agree.

Verdict: ★★ 1/2

Firstly, please… for the love of all that’s sacred… leave your toddlers with a sitter when you go see a PG-13 movie. Is that so hard to do? I have another option for you. It’s a little extreme. I don’t mean to offend anyone but you could always wait for the DVD! I know. I know! I maaaay have crossed a line suggesting that, but c’mon people. Cowboy up. There were two toddlers in the theater (two different sets of parents).Fuuuuuuuuu…!

Okay, where was I? (huffs) On with the review…
Michael Bay apparently lives in a world where every woman alive is barely legal, has tan legs, walks around with BFFs and wears the latest sexy Beverly Hills fashion while they look seductively at boys. That’s what almost every woman in this movie is portraying. Bay makes Transformer movies for adult men who’s inner teenage boys just hit puberty and it works because these movies do very well at the box office. Well, I mean, T1 did phenomenally well. T2 should never have existed. T3: Dark Side of the Moon kicked all kinds of ass due in large part to Leonard Nimoy’s involvement and now we have T3: Age of Extinction, a rather squirmworthy fourth installment of the Transformer canon.

Optimus Prime has gotten tired of starring in Michael Bay movies humans. The US Government and their politics, black ops, backwards morals and blind sheeple as its citizenry have even gotten the best of this patriotic leader, and the human race can kiss his gigantic blue mechanical ass. Apparently, because of the attack on Chicago in the third installment, ‘muricans have declared war on all transfomers and Optimus has taken a hell of a beating. There are special black operation CIA transformer hunters who do nothing but track down and kill Decepticons and Autobots alike swiftly and harshly. Add to that a strange just arrived transformer named Lockdown who’s history those of us that aren’t up to date on the comics, know anything about. He just appears with a big, city sized ship and walks around menacingly looking for Optimus to add to his “collection” of other caged transformers of repute.

Enter Mark Wahlberg, an oddly cast electronics nerd/engineer/inventor who’s built like a mack truck and who also builds robot dogs from scrap and electronic whirlygigs that do nothing special at all. His 17 year old daughter who wears cut offs with less fabric than French bikinis, even calls him a loser. He can’t pay bills, borrows money from friends and has no social skills. When out of the blue he runs across an old, beat up, bullet ridden, mortar shelled truck cab and takes it home to part it out for cash. He lights it up with a car battery and it suddenly transforms into a rather dazed and confused Optimus.

Wahlberg was a strange casting choice here. I love Marky Mark. He’s bad ass in just about anything he does, but in this one, he constantly flips from in yo’ face with a baseball bat to running and screaming like a little girl when the shit hits the fan, back to in yo’ face with an alien gun. Not really knowing if he’s supposed to be a nerdy inventor or a special forces warrior, he fights in some scenes and in other scenes he runs around like a chicken with his head cut off and it just doesn’t look right. I will say I liked Wahlberg a lot better than I liked LaBeouf. Shia LaBeouf’s consistent hollering out pages from a legal encyclopedia and never shutting up was a little grating on my nerves and there are times when I wished he’d just die off so I can watch the Transformers just kick each other’s asses instead. Wahlberg is always a more grounded force in his movies and this one was no exception, even if the movie was scattered as it was.

Wahlberg aside, this movie is brimming with talent. John Goodman is the voice for Hound, an extremely “Murican” military transformer who speaks and acts like a gung-ho WWII soldier. Ken Wantanabe voices Drift, a peaceful samurai transformer. Kelsey Grammar plays an especially paranoid “agent” who relentlessly tracks down and destroys transformers “for God and Country”. Nicola Peltz plays Wahlberg’s daughter, who never takes her heels off in the Texas desert or in the middle of robot battlefields. And finally, Stanley effing Tucci, one of my all time favorite actors, takes John Turturro’s place as comic relief and he fills that role as only Stanley effing Tucci can! He’s serious in some places and hilariously wigs out in other places and he never makes it unbelievable. I love that guy.

A word about sidekicks… stick with one, will ya Mike Bay? A comedy sidekick is cool, so long as the jokes work with the movie. They didn’t. I mean, seriously… a surfer dude (complete with surfboard on the roof of his Mini Cooper) in Texas? And having him suddenly replaced with a more serious side kick with no comedy at all makes the movie drag its tailfin in the dirt before takeoff.

All that said, this movie did kind of work, sort of… in a roundabout way. The action was incredible, but honestly it was the same action as the first movie: robots rolling around on asphalt in slow motion, shouting and shooting giant guns throughout city streets with people screaming and running in all directions. It was just better CGI, that’s all. I thought I saw scenes from the first movie in this one, but don’t quote me.

Tell ya what. Just watch the first movie again and re-run the final action sequence an additional 20 minutes and you’ll pretty much have this movie. The story was smart… ish, but maybe it was too smart… ish for me because, amidst the French bikini cut offs, the constant robots fighting and explosions, I was lost the entire time about what was going on. Optimus is pissed off the entire time, random hottie in cut offs is leaning over something, black ops guys are chasing someone, ‘nother random hottie in cut offs is checking the mail, Optimus is pissed off and fighting something, two random hotties in cut offs or short skirts are walking together down a sidewalk, summersaulting transformers are shooting guns, black ops guys are chasing someone else, ‘nother random hottie in cut offs is smiling and leaning over something…

There were more female legs than robots in this movie and that’s saying something! All in all, I’d say save your money and watch this one on HBO if you want to keep up with the movie canon. Not really worth the price of admission though.