Daily Archives: May 15, 2008

So Is What Happens in Vegas a Cougar Flick?

Musings

The $20.1 million opening weekend gross, and second-place finish, of What Happens in Vegas, starring Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz,
could and probably should be viewed as a success. Partly because this
battle-of-the-sexes romp based on a marketing line isn’t very good; its
humor is forced and desperate, and the movie (like Sin City itself) seems
born of the operating philosophy that more is more. While
Kutcher and Diaz generally evince a nice shared chemistry — both have
wide, easy smiles, and Diaz in particular that explosive, inside-out
laugh of hers — one of the interesting things is the manner in which What Happens in Vegas
unfolds, on an almost subliminal level, as an age-gap affair. It’s
something that could be felt in the theater, amidst kids who feel like
they know Kutcher more personally from his television work on Punk’d and That ’70s Show, and who know Diaz, apart from her recent SNL appearance in a “cougar” sketch featuring Kutcher, mainly from cable screenings of There’s Something About Mary… which is now an astonishing 10 years old.

Also contributing to the film’s slippery traction was the general
impression — confirmed by several of my regular, mainstream film fan
friends — that this Vegas pairing just didn’t seem quite
right. Kutcher, who just turned 30, is of course married to Demi Moore,
who is 16-plus years his senior. He seems a bit younger, though, no
matter the facial scruff he frequently sports between films. Diaz, on the other hand, who will be 36 this August, sometimes comes across as a bit older than she actually is. Of course, when A Lot Like Love
came out in 2005, five months before his marriage to Moore, Kutcher was
27 and Amanda Peet was 33 — in other words, more of an age difference
than the one separating Kutcher and Diaz. That film, though, seemingly
faced no such similar silent advance judgment from audiences. For the full piece, from FilmStew, click here.

Bloodline

Film Reviews

Dan Brown’s bestselling The Da Vinci Code popularized, in discussion if not belief, the theory that Jesus Christ escaped his crucifixion, married Mary Magdalene, and had a child, and that the Catholic Church and others have engaged in a conspiracy to suppress this fact. The ample, worldwide commercial shadow of that book and its subsequent film adaptation provide the necessary cover for mushroom cinema like this documentary, which includes interviews with a mysterious, finger-tenting, alleged Priory of Sion member and investigates archaeological proof of said theory in southwest France via amateur English adventurer Ben Hammott.

Directed by Bruce Burgess — whose other credits, it turns out, include movies about Bigfoot, the Ark of the Covenant, and the Bermuda Triangle — Bloodline is unfortunately the type of film that confuses investment of time with insight and evidence. Burgess’s refusal to put Hammott and his many discoveries through the wringer (despite, say, the mostly empty bottle of vodka lingering in the corner of a frame during one morning interview) at first comes across as curious and then just increasingly negligent, finally culminating in a passage which confirms a piece of Hammott’s evidence using … other pieces of Hammott’s own evidence. It’s shoddy filmmaking like this — no matter the high inherent intrigue factor here, especially for docu-philes — that makes Bloodline ridiculous, no matter how much one may want to believe what it’s peddling. For the original review, from CityBeat, click here. (Cinema Libre, unrated, 118 minutes)