cinebev

Your Monster is an amateurish mess of a horror-romantic-comedy that is painfully boring by any genre standards. Unimaginative and unfocused yet overly pleased with itself, this derivative indie is a misguided hipster love letter to far better horror, romance, and comedy films. It is almost depressing how underwhelming and lame this story of a woman falling in love with her childhood monster is due in huge part to a lack of talent across the board. The performances are smug and cutesy, the writing is impressively lazy and lowbrow, and the direction is dreary and bland. Conceptually, there is arguable potential because the idea has been explored before by more capable filmmakers. For example, there is a lovely little Hal Hartley film called No Such Thing (2001) that tells a similar story in order to tackle similar humanistic themes. It is funny, tragic, relatable, unique, and, most importantly, entertaining, which is why it is also recommendable. Your Monster is... not recommendable... and not just because of that monstrosity of an ending.

Starstruck is an always engaging, endearingly awkward, and ultimately quite funny screwball nineties comedy masquerading as a much darker movie than it is capable of being. Jamie Kennedy, fresh off of Scream, does a respectable job as the anti-leading man, George Gordon, due to his amusingly overconfident portrayal of the character, which, to be fair, is ill-conceived and lacks depth. As characters go, it is Loren Dean who is given the most to work with. He chews the scenery as washed-up and strung-out actor Kyle Carey, the second lead and facilitator of the, for better AND worse, simplistic plot. Fortunately, the cast is damn good, all acting harmoniously with a satirical edge, and the leads have natural comic timing and chemistry. Additionally, the third act, which plays like a Martin McDonagh crime caper involving the stealing of Faye Dunaway's dog, is, albeit forced, a highlight of hilarious proportions. Overall, there is an amateurish air to the proceedings, but chances are, if you are a nineties brat with a rude sense of humor, you will, at the very least, get a kick out of Starstruck.

As post-Judd Apatow's The 40-Year-Old Virgin raunchy romantic comedies go, She's Out of My League is a safe choice. It is not a 10 by any stretch of the imagination that the screenwriters do not possess, but like slacker, pseudo-contrarian Canadian comedian/actor-ish Jay Baruchel, while the argument can be made that we can all do better, the movie is endearing in a "wouldn't it be funny if my pet ferret could say f*ck?" passing stoner thought kind of way. The laughs are plentiful, even if they just come up shy of being out loud or belly level, and are almost entirely by way of dialogue that results in virtually every other scene running at least several minutes too long. Still, how many points can one really deduct from a mid-2000s comedy for lacking originality and a disciplined editor when it features a leading man who takes to heart the life advice of a guy known only as "Stainer," except for when he is the Daryl Hall of a Hall & Oates cover band?