Movie Reviews

So, I saw two movies this week. What freedom finishing my thesis brings! Jonathan and I actually went to a movie theater and saw “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” Then last night, we bought “30 Days of Night” from Amazon Unbox. So, this post is going to be a sort of double review of two very dissimilar movies, although not as dissimilar as you might think since Sarah Marshall had a hilarious Dracula subplot to it. Here we go.

“Forgetting Sarah Marshall” was really funny. I liked it a lot. I was a little bit sad that it relied so heavily on sex jokes though. I am tired of sex joke movies. We need to figure out how to be actually witty and clever instead of just exploiting bodily fluids and functions. That said, the movie was witty and funny in places, and I laughed out loud in parts. The Dracula part was really funny, and there was a kind of smart undercurrent to the whole thing that addressed the stigma of men showing real emotions. There are some funny parts where the guy is unashamedly upset about his breakup, and they make it amusing and entertaining, but at the same time they are pointing out the double standard where it’s OK for girls to lie around for a month in sweatpants and eat ice cream to console themselves, but men do not have an equivalent acceptable outlet. Several characters in the movie just tell the main guy to have sex with anyone and everyone he can in order to get over his ex-girlfriend, but it totally backfires, and I thought that was a pretty good message, too. And I just love Paul Rudd – he makes every movie better.

“30 Days of Night” was also very good. I was surprised. I thought it was going to be kind of dumb. But it was kind of like “The Diary of Anne Frank” with vampires. That sounds crazy, but it’s true. The vampires were much more like “Nosferatu” than like the “Count Dracula” figure with the satin sash, big cape, and widow’s peak. They were gross and monstrous and scary. And just when Jonathan and I had said that out loud, there was a scene that really kind of humanized them. It gave it a “Blade Runner” feel. Yes, they’re ruthless, cruel killers, but really they just want to escape their eternal hunger and pain. It was scarier than most movies I watch. I don’t, as a rule, watch horror movies, but I can handle most vampire ones simply because I don’t believe in vampires. Other kinds of horror movies – “The Exorcist,” for example – I cannot watch because I believe in supernatural forces that can actually affect humans in that way, and I don’t want to freak myself out by watching fictionalized incidents of things that might actually be possible. Vampires are pretty safe that way. We also kept commenting that the suspenseful buildup was very typical – the music stops, there are scary noises and unidentifiable figures flitting across the screen – but the action of the movie was very unique. The whole time we were watching it we were like, “This is a GOOD movie!” Who knew? And Josh Hartnett didn’t ruin it as he is so wont to do.

And the funniest thing of all is I woke up this morning with half an introduction written in my head for my new thesis on vampires. Ha ha.