17 April 2010

Best supporting actor of 2010

I went to see "Date Night" last night, which is not a very good movie, but the bit with the Kindle nearly killed me. Explaining it well would necessitate spoiling most of the plot, so I'm going to go ahead and do that in the comments right now. Meet me there if you've seen "Date Night" or don't care about spoilers, and want to talk about why it isn't better (or disagree and argue that it's secretly good, which... I doubt).

Star Tina Fey signed a deal a year and a half ago for a nonfiction humor book, but I can't find anything about when that book will be published or what it will be called. (Hopefully, soon and something funny, respectively.)

But seriously, do not read the comments if you don't want to be spoiled.

1 comment:

Ellen said...

SPOILER LINE STARTS HERE


NO REALLY HERE


TURN BACK HERE BE SPOILERS
Okay, so the premise of the movie is that Carell and Fey (who I love!) are a married couple in a bad case of mistaken identity on a night out in New York. They've been mistaken for a couple who stole incriminating pictures of the District Attorney (William Fichtner, cashing in all his gravitas in one fell swoop) from a local mob boss (Ray Liotta, no gravitas left to cash in), who took them at a strip club called the Peppermint Hippo (get it?) the boss owns.

Two dirty cops are chasing them around the city believing that they have these dirty pictures on a flash drive. Finally, they get the flash drive (from James Franco of all people) but have no idea what's on it, so they jump in a cab to flee the dirty cops and Steve Carell asks the driver if he has a laptop or an iPhone or a BlackBerry they can use to look at what's on the flash drive. The driver says "I have a Kindle." Carell is skeptical. Sure enough, it's in the glove compartment, and Carell uses it to look at lovingly e-inked photos of the DA surrounded by scantily clad women.

It's a very brief joke but I was doubled over laughing in the theater such that my friend Z, who had never been to a movie with me before, looked a little concerned. At that point I really needed to laugh at something. Did I mention that this movie isn't very good? Not Carell/Fey's fault, but what a mess.

There's also a book club joke/payoff which isn't that funny and repeats the improbable one-husband-at-book-club scenario from beer commercials earlier this year, but the cab driver is reading the same book Tina Fey's book club was reading in the beginning about a preteen girl escaping from the Taliban.