LOOK OUT THE SKYS GONNA CRUSH US FILM REVIEWS:


Left La Guardia at 230PM with Heather. On the 7 1/2 hr flight, I couldn’t sleep, so I watched 3 pretty lame movies in a row, all of them dealing with issues of child abandonment. First Juno, a ridiculous comedy about a pregnant teenager who makes unwanted pregnancy look hip and fun. Everyone in the film, from the doctors to the worried parents, talk like they are tattooed Williamsburg hipsters, which makes sense if you consider the film was written by Diablo Cody, a tattooed buxom ex-stripper. This film was plagued by the most irritating of all filmic tropes, the need to put an entire quirky folk or pop song in the background of every scene with about 25 seconds max in between each song. I appreciate that Diablo introduced the mainstream world to the genius of Kimya Dawson, but it was a little nauseating to see Juno and her boyfriend singing her song at the end of the film.
Next up was "August Rush," an unbearable piece of sappy garbage about a classical cello player and an Irish rocker who meet one night in the west village, have a magical night of sex in which she gets pregnant (again with the unwanted pregnancy!) and gives up the baby. The kid turns into a weird starry-eyed musical genius who runs away to new York, gets kidnapped by a homeless gay cowboy played by Robin Williams, and then magically writes a symphony which gets magically picked to be played in central Park, where his two parents magically happen to hear him and meet each other again after all these years. Give me a fucking break, for fuck’s sake. OK, next on to the least shitty of the three, a John Cusack paycheck called "Martian Child" about an abandoned orphan kid (again!) who is extremely weird, hides in a box, and believes he is a visitor from mars. Nobody wants to adopt him, except Cusack, who is an ex-misfit weirdo turned famous sci-fi best-seller novelist, whose wife has died two years ago and is searching for meaning in his life. He decides to adopt this very odd and damaged child (who was played extremely brilliantly by this kid) and accepts him as an oddball. Hijinxs ensue in which they each learn how to love each other and love themselves and blah blah blahblah blblblbla. I was actually very moved by this film, probably because the acting was so strong and it wasn’t poisoned by too-much-music-itis.