Cut! A story of two movies

On Saturday we rented two movies to take to our cabin: Chris Rock's "I Think I Love My Wife" and Helen Hunt's "Then She Found Me".

I liked Chris Rock in "Head of State" and thought we would have quite a chuckle with this one.  In "I Think I Love My Wife", Rock comes across as a nice, well-meaning guy with a good job.  His problem is that his wife is only interested in sex when she wants to have another baby; they already have two children.  Then Nikki appears from his past, sweet talks him into signing a recommendation letter that he didn't even read, and persuades him to have lunch with her.  Over lunch she starts asking lots of personal questions, including about his sex life.  Cut!

"Then She Found Me" is about a school teacher who marries at 39 to a guy who turns out to be gay and leaves her.  Her grousing adoptive mother dies, and another woman appears who claims to be her birth mother.  The birth mother invites the school teacher to lunch.  The mother starts asking lots of probing questions while bubbling over how glad she was to find her daughter.  Cut!

Why cut?  It was the manipulation.  In "I Think I Love My Wife", we just knew that Nikki was going to draw him into deeper and deeper trouble at home and at work.  In "Then She Found Me" we wondered if this was some scam being played on the school teacher or if it wasn't just a bit too cloying.  Enough!

Oh, the advantage of renting DVDs, especially at senior rates - $1.08 each.  If we had been in a movie theatre or had rented them from Netflix, we would have sat through to the bitter end.  Oh, well, there is probably a happy ending in both cases, but it would have been a tense wait for the happy ending.

I didn't have a clue about a clueless movie

Last night we watched "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World". We kept wondering just what was going on as it went along. My wife gave up half way through, but I stuck it out to the end, wondering why I kept watching.

It was only when it was over that I realized it was poking fun at people who are clueless, including the star and writer, Albert Brooks. Brooks, the character, tries very hard to move his shtick of poking fun at comedy to a land that never saw that kind of comedy. His Indian assistant thinks very highly of him; others completely misinterpret his actions, including governments.

Only two characters criticize Brooks' style in the light of what most comedians do, but even these two characters seem clueless in other circumstances. Only one character really seems to know what he is doing, and his motives are rather sinister geopolitically. Clue: the Pakistani "comedians" didn't seem to be comedians to me.

Unfortunately, it is only on reflection that I understood the movie. Others didn't seem to have the patience. It grossed less than ten percent of its cost. I realized the film was about all kinds of cluelessness in many cultures. People act on their biases rather than getting to know others. That realization almost makes me want to watch it again with that understanding.

If you would like to read more about "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World", see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433116/ and read some of the user comments.