Green Book

It's fun when you have a job and you get to work with people from around the world.

You get all these fascinating insights into remarkably diverse cultures many of which are quite similar to your own if you make respectful comparisons.

Try new things.

You grow up eating specific foods for instance, and as you age, because you continue to eat these specific foods, it seems like eating them is natural, inasmuch as habits come to culturally qualify the term.

But when you work with people from different countries and begin to realize that they feel the same way about the food they grew up eating, the term natural becomes less organic, or is at least internationally diversified.

If you begin to try all the delicious foods they grew up eating and learn to appreciate the differences, while still enjoying your favourite local dishes, your options succulently expand tenfold, and your palette becomes much more global.

And you can ask questions like, "how do I turn this into a sandwich?", or, "can you melt cheese on this?", etc.

Plus, you're always eating.

I started cooking rice all the time.

Mixing in green lentils and potato.

In Peter Farrelly's Green Book, a gifted African American musician (Mahershala Ali as Dr. Don Shirley) takes his melodies on the road to the Southern U.S., hoping to build bridges of trust.

He hires a feisty bouncer from the Bronx to drive him (Viggo Mortensen as Tony Lip), and the two productively clash along the way.

As refined ethical viewpoints find themselves immersed in worlds where they don't apply, a more practical approach is begrudgingly sought, which, unfortunately, while necessary at points, does less to change hearts and minds.

And also causes serious problems.

The film cleverly embraces this pact and gradually synthesizes gentle and rough pretensions, Tony learning to react less instinctually, Dr. Shirley learning to take more precautions.

They slowly become friends as the film unreels and learn to appreciate each other precisely because of their differences.

Experience having taught them respect.

Green Book also examines the old "chummy" racial slurs that are often built into social interactions.

Tony makes the point that people "don't worry about" these slurs when they hear them but doesn't realize he's speaking from a position of privilege.

When the slurs are directed at him in the deep South he does worry about it and soon winds up in jail.

Different cultures often have different traditions which when appreciated add so much peaceful character to a neighbourhood/city/nation/world.

The casual slurs can make hard times worse.

And may not be as harmless to the people who let things slide.

As people in positions of privilege think.

Dumb and Dumber To

This film's hilarious.

They don't just concentrate on the immediate joke, rather, they breast stroke through calamitous clefts, halting their progress to consider alternative ideas, persevering to find stable solutions which help them achieve their goals, their environments providing complimentary laughs like fleeced lubricated spawn, onwards and upwards, heave, ho.

The pork chop.

Fireworks.

A train.

The drive home.

Couch fort.

In the bathroom.

A return address.

The right thing to say.

Kitty, cat.

Lloyd (Jim Carey) and Harry (Jeff Daniels) take none to kindly to the imposition of authority, harmoniously expressing their grievances, fully aware that they have been wronged, a ludicrous examination, of jocose power relations.

Some of the situations are a bit of a stretch, lol, good ideas that move the plot along and make for ridiculous commentaries, it must be hard to find ideas to so successfully move a plot like this along, but Harry does last a bit too long at the KEN talks, even if he occasionally exposes weaknesses in various experiments.

What impressed me the most is the undeniable fact that Carrey and Daniels haven't played these characters for twenty years and they still play them so well, with the same raw sophisticated juvenile agility, they're brilliant, an improvement on the original in my opinion, they've still got it, how, did they pull this off?

I don't know if I preferred Dumb and Dumber To to Anchorman 2, I'd have to see them both back to back, twice, the first night watching Anchorman then Dumb and Dumber, the next, watching them again in reverse order.

What a potential cross-over.

Limitless.

Hall Pass

Two sex crazed men get a week off from marriage in the Farrelly Brothers's Hall Pass, a mildly entertaining comedy that can't decide if it's a James L. Brooks film or an episode of Family Guy. Some of the scenes are hilarious but their affects don't travel well beyond their borders, which results in a sticky, disjointed, shapeless mess. This mess aptly reflects the psyches of principle characters Rick (Owen Wilson) and Fred (Jason Sudeikis) as their desire continually confuses their conscience. They simply can't decide whether or not they're trying to revitalize their youth, actually want to pick up, or enjoy being married, and having a hall pass (a week off from marriage) tricks them into having to categorize their feelings. The wives responsible for setting this trap (Jenna Fischer as Maggie and Christina Applegate as Grace) find themselves in a similar situation and have to decide if they're going to play it faithful or make some spur of the moment adjustments.

Pot brownies, Nicky Whelan, psychotic baristas, this film could have been so much more. Its principle problem is that it tries to have a point while nonsensically cavaliering. While Kingpin cavaliered nonsensically, the point was secondary to the slop, and the slop was frenetically flavoured and recklessly spiced, never dishing itself out with clumps of thoughtfulness. Some of the thoughtful points, like the lines regarding hiring uttered by Wilson, settle sharply while dispensing suburban grit, and break up the maudlin motivations. But when so many solid scatological jokes are mixed with these attempts to be poignant, I couldn't help but want to throw up, in a bucket somewhere, and then go relax with Ugly Americans. Which is no longer on on Fridays at 9:30 on the Comedy Network. Which sucks.