The suburbs are a gateway to hell: RELOADED!

The Movie: Fun With Dick and Jane, directed by Dean Parisot
Recommendation: Dee
Reason: "This movie was hilarious!"

I eagerly anticipate The Number 23. Jim Carrey's dramas are overwhelmingly my favorites of his work, though of course I did spend my childhood giggling uproariously at many of his comedies. He's a good actor, and I really want to see him paired up with Virginia Madsen (who is a previously undiscovered treasure, though 2007 looks like it's her year). She was excellent as The Woman in White in A Prairie Home Companion, and really captured my interest in Candyman. Tea Leoni sucks. She just does. I hate her and I hope she never works again, as unlikely as that is. I hate her almost as much as I hate Jon Heder, and that's quite a lot. Feel free to change my mind, the e-mail's cbkook@hotmail.com.

I am fond of reprehensible human beings as lead characters in movies. Fallible human beings, with faults and flaws, deep or shallow. I loved Lester Burnham. I loved Dae-su Oh. Big fan of Bill, right here. I could only muster a deep and unabiding loathing for Dick and Jane through the entire movie. I desperately wanted them to fail. I wanted the movie to take a hard left into gritty crime, and the pair of them to be gunned down mid-robbery. I was hoping for corporate assassins to come out of the woodwork and destroy them for their pretentious, 'better-than-this' attitude. I wanted blood, and I didn't get it. I didn't care that the CEO of Dick's company made off with millions of dollars of the company's money, defrauding his employees of their well earned paychecks and pensions, because I had my villians in Dick and Jane. I bet Willy the Mailboy didn't decide he was above the law, and I doubt he went on a little robbing spree, taking from people who couldn't even dream of the shallow, hollow existence Dick and Jane were struggling so hard to maintain. WHO THE HELL STEALS A LAWN? Seriously. Yes Dick, you're a master criminal indeed. You and the missus were too good for minimum wage jobs, which would have landed you that 400$ you needed by the end of the month. And yes, I did catch the irony of his shout back to the managers-the entertainment value of that little segue into solidarity with the minimum-wagers was lost, because the whiner-baby didn't even try getting other minimum wage work.

I think where this movie lost me was in having utterly reprehensible assholes as main characters, who completely failed to see anything beyond their little tunnel vision suburban world. Lester, at least, had a struggle towards sanity that he was undertaking. Dae-su Oh was horribly tortured for a crime that was many orders of magnitude less severe than his punishment. Bill died. Sure, Dick and Jane managed to pull off their little coup, but it was meaningless. What did they learn? What did they get for their shallow, pretentious idiocy? They got to be the bearers of good tidings. They got monetary compensation. They didn't even go to JAIL. NEITHER OF THEM DID. Ha. Ha. Ha.

-50/365 down, 315/365 to go