Quick Review: Horrible Bosses

For the first movie I've seen in a couple of weeks, I ended up at "Horrible Bosses." I worked for a couple of truly bad bosses in the past, although when you work for the Social Security Administration that's almost a given. But none of my bosses were quite as bad as those that the three friends in this movie suffer with. Nick (Jason Bateman) works for a guy (Kevin Spacey) who treats him like crap and then doesn't give him an expected promotion. Dale (Charlie Day) is being sexually harassed by his dentist boss (Jennifer Aniston). And Kurt (Jason Sudeikis), well, his boss (Donald Sutherland) is awesome, until he suddenly dies and his son (Colin Farrell, wearing a comb-over and given a pot belly), a cokeheaded, womanizing, obnoxious creep, takes over. The three friends joke about killing their bosses, and then decide to actually do it. And that's where the movie, which had me in stitches to this point, went south for a while. There was a decent gag at the end, but for some reason the humor began to fall flat once they tried to hire an ex-con (Jamie Foxx) to commit the murders. Aniston is great playing against her usual good-girl type, though. I will say that although I laughed much less as the film went on, the rest of the audience enjoyed the second half of the film much more. My grade: B.

Quick Review: Going The Distance

Surprise, surprise, surprise. The romantic comedy "Going the Distance" turned out to have both required elements: romance and comedy. Erin (Drew Barrymore) is an intern at a New York newspaper (an intern in her 30s? Really?) who is having no luck getting the paper to give her a job as a reporter. (No jobs in the newspaper business? Okay, this part makes sense.) She decides to move back to San Francisco to finish her degree. Garrett (Justin Long) works for a record company (he has to promote a boy band instead of the indie rock acts he loves? Really? Okay, this is actually believable too). Erin and Garrett meet at a pub, have a fun night that goes into the next morning, and decide to keep seeing each other but keep it casual because Erin's leaving for California in six weeks. Those six weeks, however, are magical, and they find themselves in a long-distance relationship -- lots of phone calls, texts, etc. and the occasional cross-country flight. I have no idea if Barrymore and Long are still together in real life, but they make a nice film couple. The obstacles they face are mostly realistic, and the humor is sometimes raunchy (it earns its R rating) but kept me laughing quite a bit. In supporting roles great work is done by Christina Applegate and Jim Gaffigan as Erin's sister and brother-in-law, and Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis as Garrett's friends. This movie didn't do well at the box office but deserves a better fate. My grade: B-plus.