I Love You, Beth Cooper

Now, I Love You, Beth Cooper was never intending to be an extraordinary movie. And it’s not. It’s very ordinary. It’s exceedingly ordinary. It’s neither good nor bad. It just is. It’s the kind of movie you don’t love and you don’t hate. There are some decent moments in there, but nothing to stick with you longer than a couple minutes afterwards.

It’s a fairly standard square gets caught up with a free-spirit and craziness ensues story. And it’s not bad. But it doesn’t really add anything to the table to make it interesting or stand out. Earlier this year we had I Love You, Man which had a similar square meets free-spirit type premise but just worked better - it gave the story a different twist and interesting, good characters. The characters here are paper thin and we have no real reason to be attached to them.

The movie also fails to really be funny. It’s not painfully unfunny, but there’s no real laugh out loud moments. There are just a few chuckles here and there. And it doesn’t seem to really put too much effort into trying to make you laugh. I can’t really think of anything that felt like it was supposed to be a joke or make me laugh hysterically but just missed or fell flat. And this is supposed to be a comedy, isn’t it?

The only thing that felt as though it was meant to be a running joke is that apparently everyone can see that the main character’s (Denis) best friend (Rich) is gay and implores him to admit it, but he refuses. The thing is…he doesn’t really do anything or say anything or even act in any way to make you think he is. So when people look at him and tell him it’s ok if he’s gay, it feels weird because, aside from a flashback to something he said years ago, it seems like you’re missing something. While it’s good that they don’t make him a stereotype that makes you go ‘he is so gay,’ they fail to even give subtle hints – no sidelong glances, no Freudian slips. Apparently, the fact that he’s in drama club and quotes movies is a sign that he’s gay because, you know…no heterosexual male quotes movies compulsively. Movies like Easy Rider and Scarface. Not chick flicks and he doesn’t sing show tunes. So it feels like this is supposed to be a running joke, they just forgot the joke. If you’re going to make a point of this, make sure there’s a point.

The best moments are when Beth begins to realize that her life, as she knows it, is over. She never looked past high school, she never gave any thought to what she would do afterwards. While Denis, the class valedictorian, will be going to Stanford and, very obviously, has his best days still ahead of him, she’s looking forward to a life in which, it’s quite possible, her best days have just ended. These are the best moments because they feel the most real and heartfelt. It’s this honesty that’s missing from every other part of the movie and keeps the audience from connecting and feeling anything.

It’s not a bad movie. It’s not good. It’s enjoyable to some degree, but not a huge degree. I don’t think director Chris Columbus (of Home Alone, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and the first two Harry Potter movies) has the storytelling chops to do something a little more mature like this justice. There’s no edge to give the movie flavor or make it stand out, when there should be. I think in the end, that’s what keeps it from being something better. I can’t say to avoid this movie, but I’d suggest looking for something else.

2 out of 5

The Fourth Kind

The Fourth Kind has a promising idea. It also has an interesting storytelling concept. The film purports to have actual case-study footage regarding alien abductions which it interweaves with the dramatic “re-enactment” of the events - sounds good so far. However, in the end, the promise isn’t paid off and the concept doesn’t work.

The problem is that the credibility of the “case-study footage” gets undercut by the dramatic re-enactments. I’d imagine the idea is for the “case-study footage” to add credibility to the dramatic re-enactment. Your ability to believe this, since this is presented as a true story, is greatly diminished by the dramatic re-enactments because we are conditioned to treat them as fake. Even in movies which we know to be based on true stories, we know that the movie itself is, more often than not, not so much true.

The movie is also hurt by the fact that, unfortunately, it’s just not that interesting. It should be. It very well could be. This idea, this material, should be loaded. Instead, it’s dull – painfully so. The shocks that are supposed to be there do not come. We don’t see anything. We get distorted, unwatchable video when we should be seeing something to freak us out of our skin. That may be the greatest fear of filmmakers, but it doesn’t do anything for us, the audience.

These two problems are fatal to the film. And if the filmmakers were smart, they should’ve been able to see this coming. These could easily be taken care of early on in the process of making this. It’d be so very easy for the filmmakers to make this a better, more effective movie. So, they either couldn’t figure out that these would be problems or just didn’t care.

The fact that we don’t see any aliens is not a problem. That’s about the one thing the filmmakers do right with this movie. If they had shown the aliens, it’d likely just be a cheap gimmick. The film is merely supposed to be objectively portraying the “facts” of the case, if none of the characters see aliens (and they don’t) then we shouldn’t either. At least they get something right.

Some of these problems could be overlooked if the film were actually scary. There is nothing scary, nothing that freaks you out (except that the woman playing the ‘real’ Abigail Tyler looks, herself, an awful lot like an alien, but I doubt that’s the kind of freak out they intended). There’s very little tension. There’s certainly no real connection or empathy with these characters. There’s just nothing to make us care about anything here, unless they think that we will just because we’re supposed to.

I wish this movie were made by more capable filmmakers because it could’ve been very good. Or, at least, it could’ve been a decent enough scary flick. But it tried too hard to be something it isn’t (thought provoking, scary, serious, documentary, drama) that it failed massively to do any of it. And that’s too bad.

1 out of 5