Let’s be honest: you either love Rush, or you totally hate them.  I have never met anyone who thought they were ‘okay’, and if I did, I would kick them in the butthole for lying to my face.  Thomas Dolby is ‘okay’.  Molly Hatchet is ‘okay’.  And Wings will always be superior to the Beatles.

Me?  I love Rush SO HARD.  I also love music documentaries.  This movie is basically Jewish Christmas for me.

I don’t know what that means.

This is a really well produced flick.  It packs a surprising amount of footage and information into it’s two hour(ish) running time.  You get a really good rundown of their career with all the major albums (2112, Hemispheres, Moving Pictures, etc.) and their lesser (everything post-’81, Caress of Steel) getting comparable attention.  It also gives a good overview of their personal lives, being raised by wolverines in the Canadian wilderness.  The most inexplicable and fascinating piece of footage is an archival film of Alex Lifeson telling his parents about his dropping out of high school.  I don’t know why in the world this was being filmed, but it’s a lot of fun to see one of the blandest rock dudes ever as a petulant 17-year old.

Lots of random rock dudes pop up to talk about how rad the band is, and it’s kind of cool, but I don’t know that I buy Billy Corgan creaming his pants over Fly By Night.  Most everyone else has some sort of logical link through their music, though.

Like most docs of this ilk, it serves mostly as a fluff piece, made for fans, but it also could function nicely as an introduction to the band if you or some other guy you know want to explore their ouevre.  Because chicks hate Rush.  That’s a fact.  The only women who like Rush are their mothers and wives, and this movie almost goes out of it’s way to reinforce that.  But honestly, I wouldn’t want to date a girl who was totally into Rush.  Or Slayer.  I know dudes who would/do, and it’s not a good scene.

I caught this on cable, but it’s also available right now as a DVD and Blu-Ray, with something like 2-3 hours worth of extra performance and footage, and I bet that’s pretty tits.  The main flick is so good, it even makes a case for mid-period/new wave Rush, that even the dudes in the band don’t like.  All in all, a totally worthwhile movie.

SCORE: Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage gets a 4 out of 5.

This has also made me not terribly fond of stuff with Sarah Jessica Parker in it because she is usually just playing some variant of Carrie. This is true in Did You Hear About The Morgans? and so I should, by all rights, have hated it.

I didn’t. I blame Hugh Grant and a script carrying some decent jokes.

Did You Hear About The Morgans? is about what you would expect – it is a romantic comedy in which one dimensional characters have a marriage on the rocks, and then an improbable situation brings them back together. Grant plays Paul Morgan, a high-rent lawyer, and Parker plays Meryl, the president (of course) of New York’s hottest boutique real estate brokerage. Paul boned some random talent on a business trip three months ago and they’ve been separated ever since. They used to be happy and Paul ruined everything, etc.

Paul talks Meryl into seeing him for dinner, which, as he says later, “was going quite well until the murder.” On the way home, Meryl and Paul witness the assassination of some Eurotrash dude, and the killer figures out who Meryl is because this is the week she’s on the cover of New York Magazine. After Meryl gets made, the guy shoots US Marshall DotCom From 30 Rock in a failed attempt to kill her.

And so the feds take the Super New Yorkers and put them in the witness protection program, sending them to Wyoming to hang out with Sam Elliott, Mary Steenburgen, and – I’m not kidding – Wilford Brimley. Hilarity ostensibly ensues.

Before I start writing about the things I liked, let me be clear: this is not really a good movie. It isn’t terrible or offensive, it isn’t Lucky Numbers bad or anything, but it is mostly run-of-the-mill to below-average RomCom stuff. So even though I have a few nice things to say, don’t expect to find much here.

It also has almost no music at all, which I think works against it, as the pacing isn’t fast enough and the dialog, while decent, is not riveting at all in a way that can suck all the open air out of scene after scene and lessen the need for a decent score. Something western-cartoonish by a James Venable would have been welcome, but instead, most scenes are just speech and silence.

Now, for the good stuff: I like dry humor, and I’ve always liked everything I’ve ever seen Hugh Grant in. I have not seen everything he’s done, and I’m sure there’s some turds floating around in that punchbowl, but if Diana is lobbying for a romantic comedy / chick flick at the video store and Hugh Grant is in it, I will usually buckle and put back whatever sad war documentary or vampire movie I’ve been carrying around. I thought About a Boy and Love Actually were good, entertaining movies. That shit in Notting Hill where he can’t get over the fence makes me laugh every time.

In Morgans, Hugh Grant hits his marks and delivers the deadpan jokes they cast him for, and despite a milquetoast story thesis and his mundane / weird surroundings, he makes it work. Watching Hugh Grant talk to a grizzly bear or try to chop wood is funny. After a few days in Wyoming, Meryl invites Grant’s character outside at night to see the stars. He looks up, gasps slightly, and says, “Dear God, is that right?” His delivery made me laugh out loud.

The fish out of water stuff is fine for the purpose it serves, and I think that if you generally like movies like this (or have a soft spot for Hugh Grant, like me), you will enjoy this one enough to have made it not a waste of time. They only shot for 25 days and it didn’t make much money. Etc and etc. If you can’t normally tolerate movies like this and seek to watch films instead of movies, you will probably think Morgans is utter shit.

One thing of note: The critics beat up on this one pretty hard, and Sarah Jessica Parker got a Razzie for lead actress. I understand the former, but as for the latter I’m not sure why, really. This isn’t a good movie and Sarah Jessica Parker isn’t really a good actress, but I’ve never thought she was obviously or intolerably bad at the one role she ends up playing over and over again. She is that same character in this movie and, for what the movie is, she does fine. Just as my brohug for Grant carried me through the movie, if you tend to enjoy Sarah Jessica Parker, you’ll probably find at least a few things to like here. Also, Peggy from Mad Men plays Meryl’s assistant and has some of the best comedic business in the movie.

SCORE

The story is bad but the jokes are decent. Even with Sarah Jessica Parker being Sarah Jessica Parker, Hugh Grant and appropriately low expectations made me feel like I’d broken even at the end of it all. Did You Hear About The Morgans? gets a 2 out of 5.

Michael Mann has made movies I very much enjoy. He made Heat. Heat is an awesome movie, and it runs parallel to Public Enemies in a number of ways: each had a good cast, plenty of budget, interesting subject matter, and were beautifully shot and edited. Hell, even the costume design was good.

Despite being a Kentucky Colonel, Colonel Depp failed to make anything useful of this film.

Heat, however, was somehow far less ponderous, than Public Enemies. The dialog wasn’t nearly as clunky. The score to Heat was very good, but the music in Public Enemy was a heavy-handed beating.

I wanted to like Public Enemy, but we couldn’t even finish it because it was so boring. It was so boring, my wife started idly studying Arabic and I ended up installing wordpress plugins and making cookies. We skipped to the last chapter, saw that it ended in a moderately historically accurate fashion, and then turned it off.

Also, Universal Studios has terrible Blu-Ray production. Just because my player connects to the Internet doesn’t mean you have to make it do something with that. Also, do you need to advertise for the Blu-Ray format and try to convince me that I need to watch Blu-Rays on a new Blu-Ray player when I am already watching a Blu-Ray?

Score

On the High Five Scale, Public Enemies (Blu-Ray) gets a 2 out of 5.