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.

Morgan Freeman is not always Nelson Mandela.

Morgan Freeman reminds you that he is one of the best actors of his generation in this movie, but the fact that he plays Mandela here is a tiny bit of a let down: this probably means the sturdy biopic we should expect about his life is far off from now, and probably past the end of Freeman’s career. Even so, Freeman inhabits the character here, from the gestures and body language, the walking pace, the speech cadence, and the hybrid-multi-African-language accent heard in Mandela’s English.

Matt Damon is enormous and sounds, at least to my American ears, completely convincing as a white South African. At rest he resembles Francois Pienaar in size and hair color – Pienaar looks more like Sting than Matt Damon – but the action sequences show Damon looking like a real rugby player, and closely resembling the grimacing gameplay stills of Pienaar. His performance goes a long way to show off his chops as an accomplished actor, but in this movie Damon feels more like the backup band for Freeman than a partner in a duet. That isn’t bad or good, but rather just something that happens.

My friend Patrick knows much more about rugby than I do after having played the sport for several years, and he was satisfied with the treatment the game received, right down to the pre-match haka of the New Zealand team. Eastwood does it right: there’s no 20 minute expository rules lesson, but the editing shows what plays and scoring attempts equal what point amounts and how the ball is advanced down the field.

Similarly, the film assumes a certain level of historical knowledge: to really grasp what’s going on, you need to have a basic understanding of what apartheid was, how South Africa changed after it was abolished, how South Africa was before it was abolished, and who Nelson Mandela is and the role he’s played in world history. It isn’t much to ask, but I’ve heard some critics complain about it. Honestly, if you don’t know enough about basic recent history to understand this movie, you’re an awful person to begin with and I don’t want you to enjoy things.

The music choices and the score are goofy, but you get that in a Clint Eastwood movie. At least this time he didn’t write the score himself; rather, one Kyle Eastwood wrote the score. I don’t know if he’s Eastwood’s son or some other relation, but he seems to have inherited his father’s penchant for over-earnest, heavy-handed film scoring.

The only real complaint I have with the movie is that the big sports conclusion finale is in slow motion. As in, almost 10 minutes of slow motion. It’s a little much.

The script is well written, the cinematography is well done (and really shows off what a beautiful land South Africa is) and the story is great, one of those terrific tales about the very real unifying power of sport. Whereas plenty of similar stories are told with an overly saccharin feel, Eastwood shows what a professional craftsman he’s become, trading raw emotion for nuanced storytelling in all the right places. It isn’t high art by any means, but it is high quality film making.

Score

On the High Five Scale, Invictus gets 4 hakas out of 5.