The Final Destination (2009)

When Final Destination was released in 2000, it had cleverness on its side. After years of slasher films that found increasingly tortured origins for their kill-crazy villains, director James Wong (along with writer Glen Morgan) simply did away with the slasher altogether by making death itself the villain. It wasn’t a great movie, but it was a neat twist on a horror staple. Then came installments two (directed by David E. Ellis in 2003) and three (directed by Wong in 2006), which both found the perfect realization of the concept. All three films start with a catastrophic accident (plane crash, highway pileup, rollercoaster derailment) before doubling back to find that a character has had a vision of that accident, which allows for some preventative measures that allow some of the would-be victims to move away from the inevitable. But they were supposed to die, so death (an unstoppable and unseen force) hunts them down. The second and third movies still weren’t great, but they were better than their franchise’s originator in the way they let their slow building dread of death creep up on the characters. All three films successfully turn everyday objects and situations into (increasingly inventive) Rube Goldberg death traps allowing the fear to come not from what’s hiding in the next shadow but from eying all of the objects in the frame with a newfound suspicion.

So here we are with a fourth installment, confusingly titled The Final Destination and back with David E. Ellis directing. This time it’s in (mostly pointless, save for the opening sequence) 3D, but that’s just about the extent of the innovation on display this time around. The opening accident is not quite as sensational. The death traps are not as creatively elaborate. (What used to take several steps in a chain of events now tops out at three or four). The characters are not as relatable or dimensional (not that dimension was ever a major strength of the characters in this franchise), instead they’re uniformly cartoons. Our main characters are the most relatable, but even then, they’re thinly drawn.

Bobby Campo plays the one with the vision and does a reasonable job shouldering that burden, though, like every aspect of the movie, he’s not quite as good as those who’ve come before. He has some friends (Shantel VanSanten, Nick Zano, Haley Webb) and they all seem like they’re in their early-to-mid twenties but I’m not sure what they do. There’s a cryptic reference to studying in the opening scene but the rest of the film finds them only interacting with each other and others on death’s list or lounging (and fretting) around a well-furnished domicile. Where do they get their money? Are they still in school? Are they working? Where are their parents? For that matter, where does this movie take place? No one in this movie has much of a life outside of the plot, whereas in the other movies there were other characters or props that could show us that the world existed before and after the film. Here, the characters seem to only know each other in their bland generalized Hollywood town. This is a hermetically sealed death-machine with a mostly pretty cast sent to die.

The movie is reasonably diverting, though, moving right along. It’s short and barley leaves an impression. I certainly didn’t have an unenjoyable time, but it never truly delights or unsettles in the ways that its predecessors have. The most interesting moment has a (spoiler) movie theater showing a 3D movie strafed with debris from a nearby construction site. Save for this brief shimmering meta-moment, the movie just doesn’t have the creativity to fulfill its concept. With this fourth installment, what started out as a great twist on a tired genre has itself become tired.

Big Fan (2009)

In Big Fan, Patton Oswalt inhabits Paul Aufiero, a painfully realistic character, a needy, dead-end man who latches onto his small nugget of fame as he calls in nightly to a sports talk-radio show to display his fandom of the New York Giants to the region by way of his angst-filled pep-talk monologues which he endlessly writes and rewrites all day as he sits at his job in a parking garage. He’s going nowhere fast, but he barely has time to notice as long as he can keep things all Giants, all the time. It would be a shame to reveal too much about what happens to this character. Shame is exactly what the editors of the trailer and the writers of the official studio synopsis should feel, for revealing is precisely what they did. It’s far better to merely describe the characters, rather than risk betraying the small (near) perfection to be found in the structure of the story created by writer-director Robert Siegel (he previously wrote the screenplay to last year’s most excellent The Wrestler).

Paul lives with his mother (Marcia Jean Kurtz), a tough old woman with pain for her son etched onto her face. His siblings are more successful than he. His brother (Gino Cafarelli), for example, is a lawyer. But to Paul, the Giants are the only thing that matters. This is a dim, grimy, gray Staten Island neighborhood, which Siegel shows us through the spray tans, the breast augmentations, the scrimping, the scheming, and 50 Cent on child’s birthday cake. These are working- and middle-class people struggling, but Paul barely notices, or perhaps suppresses his awareness of his and his neighbors’ circumstances, by relishing his team and his small talk-radio call-in fame. To him, he is an integral part of the team. His best friend (Kevin Corrigan) will listen to the radio show and afterwards call Paul saying “you were great tonight!”

Needless to say, Paul’s fandom becomes a problem. After our slow introduction to the world of the character, there is a sequence of slow-building suspense that ratchets higher and higher as Paul’s fandom causes him to become the victim of a crime. The sequence is superb, closing out the first act with a shock. The second act, however, spins its wheels. The irony, played for both humor and pathos, is that the Giant’s chances of winning the season are now actually in Paul’s hands, but once that is established, and wrung out of its usefulness, the characters continue to fret about what will happen. As interesting as it is that Paul becomes more aware of reality at the same time his fantasy comes true, it’s a great relief when the third act kicks in.

The actions Paul begins to take are kept hidden for some time. Half-glimpsed at the margins of the frame are props which give us clues. Mirroring the first act, the third act is a great showy sequence of slow-building dread mixed with sick suspense. The release of this tension – the punchline, if you will – is one of the biggest rushes of satisfaction I’ve had from any film so far this year.

The film is two perfect sequences sandwiching a flabby midsection, but even when it’s stalling, I was never outside of the film. Paul is a compelling character, a believable character, and I cared what would happen to him, I cared about the other characters in his world, I cared about what he would decide to do next. This is a comedy, sure, but it’s also an affecting character study. It’s not as good as The Wrestler, but Siegel has crafted another interesting, memorable character (though he’s no Randy “the Ram”) and a fairly good movie in which to house him.

District 9 (2009)

District 9 takes off like a bullet, blasting its opening scenes at the audience with a terrifying speed, quickly overwhelming (but not frustrating) with new information. It opens as a documentary, showing us how, twenty years ago, a massive spaceship stopped over Johannesburg and wouldn’t move. Eventually, a hole was cut in the side, allowing the world to discover, and remove, sickly menial workers of an alien race – quickly nicknamed Prawns – the leaders already dead from disease. The aliens are shuffled off into a ghetto called District 9 where they can coexist without mingling with the humans. The immigration and racism allegories that can, and have, been used for aliens in the past, are joined here by an apartheid allegory, made all the more vivid by its South African setting (a place that really had a District 6), is interesting and nuanced. It makes feelings of revulsion towards the “other” understandable with the ugly design of the aliens (I was revolted by them at some points). What a thrilling opening to the film, a science fiction film with real brains and a fully realized world.

Our main character is Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley, first-time actor), a bureaucrat assigned to evict the Prawns from District 9 and order them moved to District 10. He bumbles along, cheerfully carrying out said job, jesting with the men working with him and playing things up for the documentary cameras. But, as often happens in these kinds of movies, something goes wrong. Wikus makes a critical mistake and consequentially finds himself falling into a bottomless pit of problems. There are scenes of great bodily horror and gross-out gags. The editing grows more frantic, the cinematography nightmarish. The good mockumentary turns into an equally good horror-mockumentary hybrid. But then, a mistake is made.

Writer-director Neill Blomkamp drops the mockumentary aspect altogether and turns the movie into a straight-up sci-fi actioner. The movie works fairly well as an actioner, and the massive set-piece of discharging weaponry that closes the film is impressive, but it’s jarring to have a fairly typical documentary style film throw in a scene that no documentary filmmaker could have captured and then drop the conceit entirely. But if that were the only problem with the last act of the film, this would still be a very good movie. The problem is it’s not the only problem. Wikus takes a series of actions, late in the film, that make little sense given what we’ve seen up to that point. (I’m sure many of you have seen it by now, but I’ll dance around the spoilers anyways). He very quickly turns on a character because he disagrees with the time a plan would take, despite the fact that this other character is the only person who could help him. Just a handful of scenes later, Wikus is helping the other character again. These changes are nothing more than a plot gimmick, a false and forced beat of drama that provides yet another hiccup in the transition from doc to schlock. Both halves are good, but the first half is more successful at its goals than the second half.

But, these quibbles aside, the movie is still impressive, still entertaining, and still good. The special effects are fantastic, stunningly integrated into the live-action material. Sharlto Copley is equally fantastic, especially considering that it’s his screen debut. There are still brains behind the concept, even though it gets harder to see them as the film goes on. There’s great intense energy and propulsion to the film – it only slows down a little in the middle – that creates a visceral series of thrills. It’s a thrill-ride of a movie. It’s not perfect – I won’t be one of those people over-praising it – but in a summer starved for thrill rides, this will do just fine.

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is pure bliss, the kind of cinematic magic that sends me out of the theater lightheaded and smiling, thinking all is right with the world. It’s intoxicating, running over 150 minutes, yet seeming to last barely more than 70. It’s bold, rambunctious, and energized from frame one, filled with nothing more than great filmmaking. It’s the rare type of film that’s so pitch perfect, so fully realized in every detail, that it lifted me into an incredibly good mood that has yet to wear off. Just typing these words, I’m getting so excited I need to take a deep breath. I need to see this movie again, not just to give added boost to my excitement, not to mention my good mood, but to get my head around it. This isn’t a movie that gently allows you to slowly comprehend. This is a movie that assaults you with entertainment, kicks you upside the head with pleasure, and sends you reeling out of the theater while begging for more. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

Tarantino has crafted an enormous yet intimate World War II action epic that brings his talents and obsessions into good use and tight control. He’s never been more in control over the elements of filmmaking. In his use of sound, color (those reds!), and composition the film, at times, comes across like a sort of dream collaboration between Curtiz, Hitchcock, Godard and DePalma: Casablanca and Foreign Correspondent meets Made in U.S.A. and The Untouchables. But, for the first time since Jackie Brown, a Tarantino film is much more than the sum of its influences. This is a passionate film, full of beautifully rendered and lovingly detailed characters saying and doing memorable things. This is a patient film, allowing for long, sizzling and suspenseful dialogue passages. This is a perfect apotheosis of Tarantino’s filmmaking, a chance for him to, at long last, put cinema itself in the forefront (a film critic becomes a suave spy at one point!), for Inglourious Basterds is, if nothing else, a grand love letter to an art form, a film where the transient yet permanent impact of film can be both a major theme and a major plot point, summed up beautifully with the shot showing a ghostly image of a face projected on a wall of smoke in a burning theater.

Going in to the film, one can be accused of anticipating a pure blood-and-guts, men-on-a-mission exploitation film, given the marketing focused on the elite team of Jewish soldiers – nicknamed “the Basterds” – dropped behind enemy lines to put fear in the hearts of the Nazis. Even though the Basterds, led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt, in a great, charming, character-actor performance), do their fair share of scalping and bludgeoning in the film, the emotional heart comes from Soshanna (a radiant Mélanie Laurent), a Jewish teen who flees the massacre of her family to eventually become the owner of a movie theater. That theater becomes an important location for the fiery finale, but Soshanna provides an emotional link throughout the film. We follow her growth from a frightened teen to a confident young woman. We care about her and about the plan that she creates in the kind of deep way that only the greatest fictions allow.

The link between Soshanna and the Basterds is the suave and sneaky Nazi detective Colonel Landa – nicknamed the “Jew Hunter” – who comes to us in a brilliant performance by Christoph Waltz, a middle-aged European actor who remains unknown on these shores. He’ll be unknown no longer. In a film filled with great performances, he’s the best. He’s quick witted, hilarious and menacing, delivering Tarantino’s dialogue with perfection. But Tarantino’s strong suit has always been unexpectedly perfect casting which leads to some wonderful performances. Here, he coaxes interesting performances out of such differing people as horror director Eli Roth, Diane Kruger (previously of Troy and National Treasure), and even Mike Myers.

But to get back to Waltz, his Landa (a great character that I loved to hate) shows up in all of the five chapters that Tarantino has broken the film into. Each chapter has only a few scenes, each given a lengthy dialogue scene as its major set-piece. These dialogues – Glenn Kenny has clocked them at about fifteen to thirty minutes each – are tense, funny, suspenseful, riveting and thematically rich. They feature some of the best writing that Tarantino has ever produced, memorable and distinctive while furthering character and plot and, at the same time, allowing the scenes to rise and fall with a sense of natural realism. The dialogue is heightened without being too “Tarantino,” playfully teasing out echoes to films of the 40’s, Leone, and more. These scenes play out like perfectly crafted short stories (chapters, if you will). The dialogue comes in a multitude of languages, all subtitled, and flows with an easy musicality. Often suspense comes from which characters can understand which languages and there’s great fun to be had in following the shifting power structure within the conversations. Through all this talk, talk, talking, the anticipation of the ultimate execution of the main plot grows unimaginably high. There are short bursts of action within each chapter but not until the fifth chapter do all the plotlines – and surviving characters – converge upon a grandly orchestrated and perfectly executed set-piece of suspense and action shot through with humor both quintessentially Tarantino and Marxian (Groucho, Chico, and Harpo, not Karl).

Even with all this subtitled dialogue, and subtle performances, and long scenes infrequently riddled with stylistic embellishments and fast-cut flashbacks (not to mention the score that borrows from Morricone and Bowie), this is the biggest crowd-pleaser I’ve seen in a long time. Every scene was received wonderfully by the audience with which I saw the film. It’s always fun to hear over one hundred people reacting to a film in the same way that you are. We all stared up at the screen and laughed, gasped, screamed and squirmed together. Tarantino knows that an audience – an ideal audience – can be trusted to follow complex lines of questioning and long-winded monologues, to laugh at subtlety and jump on command. Is his film manipulative? You bet. But it’s just as much fun as when Hitchcock famously said he loved playing an audience like a piano. When manipulated by an expert filmmaker, one who’s pushing perfectly crafted buttons, who cares if it’s manipulative?

In its unstoppable pacing and relentlessly entertaining style and craft, Inglourious Basterds reminded me of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Together, they are two World War II movies, in touch with their filmic lineage, that cheerfully warp historical reality in order to go for the jugular. They are unafraid to entertain, and unafraid to get the crowd stirred up and energized by the sight of Nazis getting beat up, shot up, and melted. (Both of them pull from the long tradition of Nazis as villains in pulp fiction including The Dirty Dozen, wherein partying Nazis find themselves torched).They are both the works of filmmakers in total control and using that control to create total perfection in the realm of pure entertainment.

That comparison also brings me to the common criticism of the film that has been heating around the Internet in the days leading up to the film’s release but seems to have cooled some now. Some have said that the movie’s brutality is amoral in the ferocity with which the Basterds treat the Nazis and in this film’s equivalent of the Raiders Nazi meltdown. That’s not an unexpected criticism, especially given the bloodlust bent of the advertising, but it’s completely unfounded by the film itself. The movie is much tamer than you’d expect, especially if you’ve seen the Kill Bill movies or Death Proof (I say that not as a criticism of the violence in those films, but as a means of comparison). Sure, it has its occasional violent moments, and they do earn the film its R-rating, but they don’t exploit World War II itself, nor do they create an irrational hatred of Nazism. The sense of revenge is well-justified, both within and outside the world it creates.

The movie is made up of earned suspense that builds to quick, restrained, flashes of violence. It also contains a built in rebuke, in its final, and most violent, chapter, to audience members who will get a kick out violence for violence’s own sake. (There are spoilers through the end of the paragraph). The characters are sitting in the theater watching a German propaganda film in which a sniper is killing dozens of Allied soldiers. The Nazis go wild, cheering with a ferocity that’s as frightening as it is morbidly comedic. Then Tarantino allows the Basterds’ and Soshanna’s plans to go into simultaneous effect, pulling a sick joke on the characters who had just been enjoying the massacre on screen by making them the recipients of one. This has long been Tarantino’s unsung gift, to at once rebuke and relish screen violence, and he uses it elsewhere in the film, as well, such as a scene where, preceding a Nazi bludgeoning, Aldo Raine tells the doomed man that it is “the closest thing we [the Basterds] have to going to the movies.” (That it’s Eli Roth doing the bludgeoning adds another tricky layer to the moment).

There’s so much to discuss with Inglourious Basterds, so much excitement attached to the way my synapses can’t stop firing with thoughts and memories of the film. I desperately need to see this again. In fact, I should stop typing what has become the longest review I’ve written for the blog thus far, and just go see it right now. It’s the best, most interesting, most entertaining film of 2009 so far, a film well worth discussing and dissecting. At the very end of the film, a character smirks into the camera and says “this might just be my masterpiece.” It’d be a cocky flourish of a finish to the film if it weren’t totally earned.

(500) Days of Summer (2009)

Nothing inspires maudlin cliché as feverishly as the romantic comedy, but director Marc Webb, in his debut film, working from a screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, makes (500) Days of Summer a compulsively enjoyable, exceedingly clever, and all-around refreshing movie, a pure summer breeze of fun and whimsy. It stars indie darlings Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel as the nice young couple (Tom and Summer) who fall in and out of love through the course of a jumbled chronology. At the outset, the narrator politely intones a warning that “this is not a love story.” But of course it is, despite being a deconstructionist genre scramble. It could have gone so wrong, veering easily into precious or precocious territory, but it never does. The movie is sweet and charming in tone and construction, even though it feels a little empty at times. It’s touching without hitting hard with emotion, but it’s dazzling all the same. Only in the days following my viewing did I find the movie ingratiating and memorable, more than just a nifty trick.

This isn’t just a clever rom-com that is nonetheless repeating well-worn paths. This is a film with a unique point of view, told persuasively from a male perspective. The audience is firmly placed in Tom’s head. Nothing we see is outside of Tom’s take on the events. Summer remains an enigma. We don’t always know her motivation; we remain unaware of her true feelings. The film gives us a purely subjective experience and it’s both exhilarating and exasperating. Levitt and Deschanel do a fine job inhabiting characters that are at once characters and archetypes, products both of imagination and intellectualization on the part of the screenwriters. They know the rules of the rom-com so thoroughly that they can tweak them or cast them aside at any given moment.

The movie’s plot is scrambled but, oddly, I find myself remembering the events in roughly chronological order. The flow of the piece is natural, placing scenes of thematic or emotional coherence against one another. We see a scene towards the end of the relationship set in an Ikea, followed immediately by a scene from early in the relationship which is also set in Ikea. We see a montage early in the film where Tom describes all the little things he loves about Summer. Later, we will see the exact same images in the exact same order, only this time the little things are driving him crazy. Webb spins all kinds of delightful webs with the visual wit of his mise-en-scéne, throwing all kinds of tricks and embellishments into getting at the film’s emotional center: dance numbers, animation, and split screens (once with the left labeled “expectations” and the other “reality” start as duplicates and slowly drift apart) are all used to splendid effect. The pain and swooning of this man’s emotions are vivid and genuine.

The movie’s not exactly groundbreaking – and can’t touch the meta-textual loop-de-loops, not to mention the humorous and emotional wallop of, say, Annie Hall – and yet, for all of its sense of being nothing more than a cleverly told series of anecdotes, it’s incredibly entertaining, continually driven forward by its sheer momentum, carried along by its fine soundtrack. (500) Days of Summer is as effortlessly enjoyable as a well-crafted pop song, in the repetition and rhythm of themes, moods, feelings, and locations that build into a cleverly satisfying portrait of a relationship gone wrong.

Funny People (2009)

With Funny People, his third film as director, Judd Apatow, the most prolific peddler of the modern R-rated comedy, has brought more ambition and less restraint, creating the type of generously textured, yet also turbulently messy, film that is precisely the type of film that deserves to be debated. It vibrates with a sense of vitality that at times makes up for the flaws. This isn’t exactly a masterpiece – I don’t like it quite enough to make that claim – but it’s the kind of interestingly tangled work – at once confidently controlled and dangerously personal – that a filmmaker can sometimes create that will inspire passionate, and justified, feelings both against and in defense. I will defend the film, for despite the genital-centered jokes that appear with inordinate frequency, as is the Apatow standard, this is a subtle and adult work, delving headfirst into tricky themes and remaining mostly unscathed.

The film stars Adam Sandler, in an oddly self-reflexive role, as successful comedian George Simmons, who has long since graduated from stand-up to land in the big-bucks studio comedies of precisely the kind in which Sandler has been known to appear. He’s the classic case of a man with everything he ever wanted, yet nothing that truly matters. As the film opens, we follow Simmons as he walks through a public space, stopping to take pictures or sign autographs for adoring fans. We end up with him in an examining room where he is told that he has a rare form of leukemia and only an eight-percent chance of surviving. We then follow him back into the world fully expecting, having been conditioned by countless disease-of-the-week dramas, for Simmons to grow and change, learning life lessons while battling the disease. This doesn’t happen, or at least, not exactly.

This is where we meet Ira Wright, a struggling stand-up comedian played by Seth Rogen. He lives with roommates, also comedians, one (Jonah Hill) his colleague in the amateur stand-up world, the other (Jason Schwartzman) relishing his glimmer of success with a mildly successful, if mostly derided, NBC sitcom. It is at the improv where George sees Ira’s act and later calls him and offers him a job as a joke writer. The film then follows George and Ira through an odd relationship, positioned somewhere between personal and professional, with interesting emotional pushes and pulls, naturally arising conflicts with uneasy resolutions. Apatow is unafraid to follow his characters down tangents in plot while in pursuit of emotional truth. In fact, the whole third act of the film could be considered a tangent, dealing with characters who, by that point, have been unseen (Eric Bana) or half-glimpsed (Apatow’s loveably cute daughters) and foregrounding a romance subplot involving Leslie Mann that is arguably unnecessary, but I went with it.

The movie is lumpy and misshapen, I won’t argue that point, but it rarely feels like it steps wrong. Even distracting cameos from real-world celebrities are easily ignored in the flow of the feelings the film evokes, in the rich texture of supporting roles like Aubrey Plaza, Aziz Ansari, and RZA who, though given few scenes, create fully realized characters that weave in to the greater tapestry. The film is not about plot. Instead, this is a film about character and emotion, tone and mood. Apatow, working with the great cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, has crafted a movie with understated beauty in the images and rhythm. How often can that be said about a big studio summer comedy? This isn’t just a comedy, but it’s also unfair to label it a dramedy, as some are quick to do. This is a drama, pure and simple. The characters happen to be quick-witted individuals who crack jokes as a default when dealing with any situation. These are funny people, no doubt about it, but they are living the same dramatic lives as any other set of people. Since Apatow started as a stand-up before becoming the success that he is now, it seems that Apatow sees himself in his two leads: Ira is who he was; George is who he all too easily could have become.

This is a film, in ways both subtle and sweet, about lives in transition. The arcs the characters travel never feel predetermined, they never creak with convention. Everyone knows by now that comedians are rarely the happiest members of humanity, and Apatow wisely avoids making this the theme of his film. Nor does he merely use the central question of disease and mortality to show us once again how confronting the abyss of death can cause radical change within an individual. With Funny People, Apatow isn’t content to restate. He’s interested in exploring the trickier, subtler terrain where people change in small, not big, ways. In doing so, though this is far from a perfect film, it casts a spell that only messy, tricky, passionately personal films can.

The Ugly Truth (2009)

The latest example of mind-bogglingly retrograde stereotypes mixed in with mind-numbingly lame comedy is The Ugly Truth, a raunchy romantic comedy with no wit, no style, and no substance. It features Katherine Heigl as a high-strung control-freak career woman harpy with an inability to relate to another human being in a non-business setting. Her foil, and ultimate dispenser of romantic advice, is the crass big-mouthed lout played by Gerard Butler who is hired as a commentator on male-female relationships by the TV station at which she works. They hate each other, but deep down they love each other. Surprised? At least the movie is utterly forgettable, however unbearable. It’s already slipping away from my memory as I type. It's a movie so forgettable, it has been out nearly a month and I kept forgetting it was released.

Indifferently shot by dullard director Robert Luketic, The Ugly Truth is all ugly, no truth. It’s a grim, joyless experience, a grueling death-march of a rom-com. The movie plods from one stupid scene to the next, giving me ample time to build my hatred towards it. It offers no real insight into relationships, instead bludgeoning audiences with banalities and filth substituting for substance. Any laughter generated must be purely Pavlovian: “This is a comedy; therefore we must laugh when an actor gives a winking spin to a line.” The movie plays out like a lame PG-13 movie made even lamer by interjecting R-level profanities in an attempt to make the material edgier or more truthful. It's sad and lifeless to watch normally charming actors get dragged through a story like this.

Not only is it unknowledgeable about human interactions, but it knows less about the TV business. The movie imagines TV-news as a land with cameras magically ready to capture all kinds of crazy situations and endless airtime on which to run them. Apparently, a technically flawless broadcast can be pulled off with almost no planning and with monologues, comedic diversions, and heartfelt emotional confessions meandering throughout the broadcast. There’s little comprehension of the real mechanics of a live television production, giving the TV-business aspect of the movie slightly less credibility than the shoddy relationships developing between the broadcasts. It’s like Broadcast News with all of its strengths removed. The Ugly Truth is nothing more than the sort of dumb "men are like this; women are like that" shtick that's the stock-in-trade of hack comedians everywhere.