Review: "Celeste and Jesse Forever"

I really wanted to like "Celeste and Jesse Forever" more than I did. It's a smart, wryly funny dramedy about a divorcing couple who can't quite seem to let go. Rashida Jones is a revelation in it, playing as distinctly drawn a female character as we've seen in a while.

My disconnect is that it's supposed to be the story of two people, when really it's about Celeste. Jesse is certainly in the picture, but his role is more to hold up the frame and let the audience gaze at her. We never get into his head the way we do Celeste's.

Given that this is a pet project of Jones -- she also is a producer and co-wrote the screenplay with Will McCormack -- it's not surprising that the light shines mostly on her. But the imbalanced nature of the way they're presented leaves us with a film that feels only partially complete.

Late in the story, Jesse complains to Celeste that she never saw him as an equal in their relationship. The same can be said for the movie.

Things aren't helped by Andy Samberg's lackluster performance as Jesse. A goofy actor from "Saturday Night Live" and several film comedies, Samberg simply doesn't have the acting chops to pull off something like this, with aspirations toward depth and complexity. He reads his lines as if he's searching for the hidden joke inside.

Although there are plenty of funny moments in the film, its essence veers more toward the somber than the profane. Samberg's presence makes the material seem more lightweight than it wants to be.

The story opens with a typical evening of the pair hanging out, cracking jokes and generally fitting together like hand in glove. These are the rare lovers who are also best friends. Except, at the end of their reverie, we learn they split up six months ago, and divorce proceedings are underway.

Certainly their friends have difficulty grasping the notion. They tell the couple they're just putting off the pain, but Jesse and Celeste insist their friendship will outlive their breakup. That seems a possibility, until they start getting interested in other people and sparks of friction begin flying.

Celeste is the more ambitious of the pair, a professional "trend forecaster" who's co-founder of a successful marketing firm. Elijah Wood has a neat little turn as her partner, who keeps making lame attempts to play the role of the catty gay pal, except he's too much of a business type to be convincing.

Meanwhile, Jesse is a failed artist who's never had a real job or even a checking account. Without it being said directly (at least initially), it would seem their breakup was initiated by doubts about Jesse's fitness to be a father, both hers and his.

The movie, directed by Lee Toland Krieger, is at its best when it's not trying to do too much. The story has a loose, easygoing feel and the characters interact the way real people do (or at least they way we'd like to think we do).

Most every person we meet turns out to be a little more nuanced than our first impression. For instance, Celeste's firm takes on a Ke$ha-like singer as a client, the sort of shallow pop songstress she despises, and finds out there's more to the young woman (Emma Roberts) than she thought. Or the slick business guy (Chris Messina) who tries to pick her up at yoga class.

"Celeste and Jesse Forever" is still a worthy movie, even if it's really more about one-half of a breakup than a whole.

2.5 stars out of four

Review: "The Thing"

Let me confess right up front that "The Thing" has a high bar to hurdle for me -- I absolutely adore John Carpenter's spare, minimalist 1982 sci-fi thriller/horror film. So any remake has to square off with outsized expectations left over from my childhood.

Though "remake" isn't quite right. This new movie from Dutch director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. and screenwriter Eric Heisserer is set in the days leading up to the events in the '82 flick. You may remember it opened with a couple of Norwegians chasing a dog across the frozen Antarctica tundra in a helicopter, trying to kill it. They chase it into an American scientific outpost and are themselves slain in the ensuing melee.

Carpenter's movie was the real remake, of 1951's "The Thing from Another World." Both the '51 and '82 pictures were based on a novella about a shape-shifting alien by John W. Campbell Jr., though the latter of the two is more loyal to the book.

Got all that? So this new movie is a prequel of a quasi-remake of a film adapted from a novella.

Van Heijningen is a feature film rookie, and it shows. He seems to want to channel Carpenter's aesthetic -- even opening and closing his movie with a variation on Ennio Morricone's pulsing theme music -- but abandons it again and again for the convenience of the plot.

For example, one of the great things about the original (which is what I'll call the 1982 film for our purposes) was the sense of absolute and total isolation. Cut off from the rest of the world and unable to communicate, there was a sense of raised stakes -- no rescue is coming, because no one even knows what's going on.

Right away, the filmmakers undermine this by showing Sanders (Ulrich Thomsen), an unctuous scientist, recruiting young American hotshot Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) to come dig something mysterious out of the ice. It seems Sanders has been tipped off by his Norwegian colleagues about stumbling across a whole massive spaceship buried under a glacier.

If word had gotten out to the outside world, there's simply no way it would have remained a secret for long. At the very least, Kate or Sanders or his assistant Adam (Eric Christian Olsen) would've at least mentioned where they were going to somebody.

Another thing I liked about Carpenter's version is that we never really learn anything personal about the motley crew of (all) men, yet simply based on how they're played by the actors and how their characters react to the threat, they're completely distinctive.

Here, there's a huge cast that gets lost in the shuffle. The Norwegians quickly become a flaxen-haired blur. Fortunately, the creature soon starts thinning them down to a manageable level.

Speaking of the creature effects, they're pretty good and pretty gory, for those who are into that sort of thing. But they're not markedly better than Carpenter's flick, which is pretty astonishing considering the nearly three-decade technology gap. The filmmakers stick to physical special effects to a large degree, with some CG animation thrown in.

Joel Edgerton and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (best known as Mr. Eko from TV's "Lost") pop up as a pair of American pilots who could get up in the Euromess. (Funny that, casting an Aussie and a Brit as Yanks.)

The movie doesn't quite know what to do with them, and for a bit we think Edgerton is going to morph into the Kurt Russell role. But that more or less belongs to Kate, who's always a couple of steps ahead of the guys in figuring out the boogums needs to be exterminated, not experimented upon.

Maybe she learned everything she knows about the alien from the last movie.

2 stars out of four