In-flight movies quasi-reviewed

The insane, expensive, and exhausting process of getting a poodle to and from Germany is, at last, complete. Bisou minds flying a whole lot less than her humans, and cheerily peed for about an hour when she got out of her enormous kennel and onto Newark's familiar terrain.

At the Frankfurt airport. "Discover Germany."

I watched "The Five-Year Engagement" and "Young Adult" on the flight (spoilers ahead), and while the latter was the better movie by so, so much, the two blended together somewhat. One was in Michigan, the other Minnesota. Both contrasted sweet, fertile young women with flawed, screw-up career gals who don't know a good thing when it's right in front of them. Both showcased uprooted-cityfolk snobbery. Both were watched on no sleep, with possible nodding-off for 30-second intervals midway through. 

But gosh, "The Five-Year Engagement" was dreadful. It didn't help that the plot centered around the academic-career ambitions of the woman, yet this "career" was so vague that she seemed at various points a college student (smitten with a prof in a lecture hall), a grad student (which I believe she's referred to as at one point), a postdoc (the ostensible catch-all answer) and a professor (there's a party for faculty and their partners, which they attend), all during the same "job." Nor that the movie was pre-PC-level obliviously racist (the black postdoc-ish-thing among her colleagues can't cut it, while the Asian one is psycho, and Hasids are played for laughs for basically existing). Oh, and over-the-top sexist (its message being, a woman who has a higher-prestige job than her dude is an emasculating beeyotch, with a side message about how if a woman has any professional success, it's because her boss wants to sleep with her.) Nor, as someone who did in fact move to the woods to be with my spouse, did I appreciate that Ann Arbor (which I've never been to, but still) is portrayed as some kind of woolly-mammoth-filled forest. And what was up with the side plot that was "Knocked Up," except that Seth Rogen had made whichever micro-morph was necessary to become Chris Pratt? 

It's a bad sign in a rom-com when you're rooting for the female lead to for goodness sake go off with the other dude. Better-looking (this was not Jason Segel at his best), smarter, more enthusiastically into her, better job... The worst thing about him was that he anointed her an assistant professor, which, as bad qualities go, isn't so ethical, fine, but sure beats leaving a loaded bow and arrow for hunting deer out when a young child is around (with predictably gruesome consequences). And, speaking of male beauty, what kind of Apatow movie provides no Paul Rudd whatsoever? Normally, Jason Segel plays sweet with a creepy edge, a Nice Guy who's actually, at the end of the day, nice. But he makes for one lousy misogynist. When the man-child ultimately triumphs (after nobly dumping a sexy, sexually voracious 23-year-old we're expected to suspend extra disbelief to imagine liked him in the first place), the movie announces its commitment to blah.

"Young Adult," however, was kind of great. It's the rare movie that finds a way to make it make sense that the protagonist is being played by someone ridiculously beautiful. Normally, there's this odd thing where you can never tell if the character is meant to be as attractive as the actor in the role. Like, when someone will refer to Emily Blunt's character in "Five-Year" as pretty - is the character as pretty as the very pretty Blunt? Prettier? With theater, it's presumably more definitively about the character than the actor. Whereas in "Young Adult," the root cause of Charlize Theron's character's woes is that she happened to be born looking like Charlize Theron, which is to say looking, in each scene, like a still of it would read "Lancôme," and it's actually an ad for foundation. The movie wouldn't have been the same if it starred a Jennifer Aniston or Kate Hudson, a girl-next-door rom-com type who would, in this role, read as conceited and as perhaps overestimating the burden their beauty placed on them. Whereas a Theron born into a town of non-Therons (which is to say, any town or big city anywhere in the world) will have a different experience from the get-go. 

But what's great is how not-heavy-handed the movie is, how there's clearly something wrong with the protagonist, but you don't get the sense that you're watching a specific DSM diagnosis adapted for screen. Hair-pulling, alcoholism, depression, a quasi-psychopathic inability to feel emotions mixed with some ability to feel emotions... it all amounts to an original character, rather than one who'll simply read as real to those who've known someone with whichever issue (Sheldon's unstated Asperger's on "Big Bang Theory," say.) The only misstep was the overemphasis early on on the fact that the Patton Oswald character was neither gay nor impotent, despite having been gay-bashed and injured there as a youth. Once that's been mentioned, and mentioned again, and mentioned once more, you know he and Theron's character will be getting it on.