Get Smart's Recent Activity - Spout

Film:Get Smart

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 07:41:30 GMT

Title: Get Smart
Year: 2008
Director: Peter Segal
Plot: 40-Year-Old Virgin star Steve Carell steps into the telephonic shoes of television's most beloved bumbling detective in this big-screen adaptation of the hit 1960s-era comedy series created by Mel Brooks. The evil geniuses at KAOS have hatched a diabolical plot to dominate every living man, woman, and child on the planet, and their plot gets under way as they attack the headquarters of the U.S. spy agency Control. As a result of the attack, the identity of every agent working for Control has been compromised. Realizing that the only way to thwart KAOS' evil plan is to promote eager but inexperienced Control analyst Maxwell Smart (Carell) to the rank of special agent, the Chief (Alan Arkin) reluctantly teams Smart with Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) -- a veteran super-spy whose beauty is only surpassed by her lethality. With no real field experience to speak of and nothing but sheer enthusiasm and a handful of fancy spy gadgets to help him accomplish his deadly mission, Maxwell Smart his new partner, Agent 99, will be forced to faces malevolent KAOS head Siegfried (Terence Stamp) and his loyal army of minions in a decisive fight that will determine the fate of the free world. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, David Koechner, Terry Crews, and Ken Davitian co-star. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
Times Tagged: 25
Number of Lists: 8
Number of blog posts: 18
Number of discussion threads: 5
SpoutRating: 3

Spout Post: Re:Predictions and Commentary, 2009

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 15:02:38 GMT

Post By: seely
Post To: It's a Wonderful Night for Oscar!
Post Date: 1/23/2009 10:02:38 AM
Body: [quote user="JimBell"] Dark Knight--I thought it was powerful, overwhelming. Wall-E--the most over-rated movie of the year. Hackneyed plots, hackneyed themes, etc. It will win. This should not concern us. Rather, look to Bolt, a superb aninmation with a profound theme and lots of engrossing characters. The Visitor--love and hate this film; great acting adn I love the Diredctor's work, but a subtle thme that does not withstand much scrutiny Get Smart--hilarious; also an astute update of the old Get Smart; but who pays attention to comedy when there is a holocaust? I thank the Academy for their nominations. I have added all films to my list. I do not care when I see them. I do not care who wins. Thanks. [/quote] I completely agree on Wall-E... I saw it, enjoyed it, but did not think it was the profound ground-breaking landmark everyone seemed to think it was. The plot was good, and one I resonate with, but all the same it was used and tired. I honestly think the public confused "cute film" with "landmark film" and were amazed at their own ability to enjoy a film with a nearly mute main character. I also think the enamoration had something to do with the robot lead--something that was heavily en vogue in the mid-eighties into the early nineties, but hasn't been seen much since. However, I need to disagree on The Dark Knight. I posted about it over in Top 5 Most Overrated Films but I think I need to say it again. Its a comic-book movie, and a good one at that, but still a comic book movie. The dialogue through out the film was nothing short of pallid and predicatble, Christian Bale was entirely forgettable, Maggie Gyllenhaal is neither attractive or a capable actress, and Heath Ledger's outstand performance and interpretation of the maniacal Joker completely stole the show--however, one good performance does not make an award-winning film. Give Ledger the Best Supporting Actor award, but let's stop the Dark Knight at that. Get Smart I also found a bit tedious. I watched the original series religiously after school as a kid and can to this day recall some of the funnier bits. I was very disappointed with Carrell's performance, which I am going to attribute to the director as Carrell is capable of no wrong in my eyes. The movie started out pretty good and reasonably funny, but became more and more tedious and too serious for a slapstick spy comedy. Carrell didn't 'bungle' enough. Thankfully, I got to look at Anne Hathaway for an hour and a half.

Spout Post: Get Smart is Hilarious!

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 07:33:09 GMT

Post By: stacey042
Post To: stacey042 Blog
Post Date: 12/22/2008 2:33:09 AM
Body: Every once and a while, you'll come across action comedies that have a little laugh here and there, and you'll walk away a little entertained but not quite satisfied. You look for an action comedy that is funny, but not a movie that tries so hard to make you laugh in every scene. You look for an action comedy that has action scenes, but you don't want exploding buildings and cars in every scene with almost no dialogue/story line. Get Smart holds true to its comedic side and does a decent job with the action---a great movie for the days when you just want to sit back, relax, and enjoy a good laugh. If you're looking for a fun action comedy, this movie will having you laughing all throughout the movie. Watch out for the full "Swordfish" scene!

Spout Post: Movie Journal: Get Smart

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 00:00:45 GMT

Post By: ChrisThilk
Post To: ChrisThilk Blog
Post Date: 12/12/2008 7:00:45 PM
Body: It’s not that Get Smart is bad - It’s that it’s just sort of pointless. Steve Carrel is funny, yeah, in his role as Maxwell Smart. And Anne Hathaway certainly performs ably as Agent 99. But the jokes either lie there and don’t amount to much or are so underlined to make it clear that they’re JOKES! that it actually serves to make each one less funny. The story is alright, basically showing Max’s introduction to the world of being a field agent for CONTROL after years of being a detail-obsessed analyst. He of course blunders and bumbles through his assignments but survives and ultimately saves the day, as well as overcoming the initial reluctance of 99 to his methods. But it’s so blatant about its desire to be funny and its desire to be an action film that it forgets to capture any of the spirit of the source TV show. Get Smart is worth watching but you shouldn’t be looking for anything too interesting from it. Originally posted on:Chris Thilk

Spout Post: Re:Weekly Theme for December 8: Good Old Fashioned Espionage

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 22:29:24 GMT

Post By: mercurial
Post To: Weekly Theme
Post Date: 12/9/2008 5:29:24 PM
Body: Jumpin' Jack Flash Definitely a classic espionage themed film. :) I do really like the film, especially Whoopi Goldberg in her element. The Net Almost more of a chase / escape thriller, but the overlying theme is about rogue corporate hackers spying on the government and the American populace. Get Smart I'm just kinda eh about this flick. Didn't really do anything for me. Was a little too Charlie's Angels meets Austin Powers with nothing new to offer. Maybe I just need to take a vacation from Steve Carrell.

Spout Post: Re:What is your favorite major Bill Murray role out of these movies released within approximately the past 5 years?

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 23:06:59 GMT

Post By: Risselada
Post To: Movie Polls
Post Date: 12/5/2008 6:06:59 PM
Body: [quote user="joem18b"] Aren't Lost In Translation, Broken Flowers, and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou sort of regarded as a trilogy? Murray's angst period? Cause that way I can just vote for all three of them as a set. [/quote] It seems like a lot of people are viewing it that way. At any rate, so far no one has voted for Garfield or City of Embers. Which I'm really not surprised by even though I haven't seen either of them. I don't even know if he has a "major" role in City of Embers. 2003's Lost in Translation was the first top billing movie he had since 1997's The Man Who Knew Too Little. And other than Groundhog Day, I'm not sure if he'd had had any major roles that had this high of a ratio of "drama" compared to the "comedy" (if you can really separate those two things when they appear to their fullest extent). I also see he was recently in the movies Get Smart and The Lost City. Niether of which I have seen either. Does anyone know how big of a role he had in these films? And if they are worth watching?

Spout Post: Funny Ha Ha - A Review

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 06:54:00 GMT

Post By: joem18b
Post To: joem18b Blog
Post Date: 11/19/2008 1:54:00 AM
Body: First paragraph of a review that I posted last year:"If I'm in the mood for a Western, I want horses. If I'm in the mood for explosions, I go to a Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay movie. In either case, I don't want, say, Max Von Sydow playing chess with Death in some black-and-white hovel on the rocky shores of Sturnnveggloven. In the same way, if I'm in the mood to watch echo-boomer twenty-somethings filming their friends hanging out with each other in small apartments and on the urban stoop and in the homes and basements of their parents and grandparents, none of whom will ever appear onscreen, then for those of you who haven't seen one such film before, this would be mumblecore."My assigned movie, "Funny Ha Ha," would be perhaps the first film in the mumblecore genre. Did I read something somewhere about how frequently, for some mysterious reason, the first in a genre is also the best? Homer, Milton, and Cervantes were mentioned. Could this be true of FHH? Is it the purest, as well as the first, mumblecore expression of newly-adult American modern life on the hoof, before the mumblecore melodrama of Mutual Appreciation or the variations on a theme in "LOL" or the psychological depth of The Puffy Chair? A question to keep in mind as I watch.Haven't heard much from the mumblecore community lately. What's the buzz? What's the buzz around saying what's the buzz? Stephen Holden called Baghead a mumblecore movie - comedy/horror mumblecore? Are movies like In Search of a Midnight Kiss moving mumblecore into some new merged genre? Was Old Joy really mumblecore, as it's often listed; some genre morphing might have already taken place in that one. Andrew Bujalski, who wrote, directed, and starred in FHH, hasn't made a feature film in years; he's done some acting but not made any movies. Kate Dollenmayer, who plays Marnie, the lead in FHH, appeared in Bujalski's next film and then disappeared behind the camera. There's an album with her name on it; otherwise, she's light on the google.FHH caught me in one of my watching-the-last-half-of-the-movie-first phases. I've recently finished Rules of the Game and War, Inc. that way. Watching those two films backwards helped them, in my estimation. I'm guessing in advance that watching "Funny Ha Ha," starting at the 45-minute mark, will not harm my enjoyment of the film and may help it. But we'll see.Fooey! Now I've slipped up and taken a peek at the first few paragraphs of A.O. Scott's FHH review in the NYT, wherein he tells us that the film is about a young woman's fruitless search for a little love and meaning in her life. Why did I read that? So now why should I bother dropping into the middle of the movie, already knowing that? The adventure and mystery are ruined. Feh. But I'll do it anyway. So. There Marnie is, passed out in a car. Now she stays with a girlfriend and her girlfriend goes on a job interview. Oops, Marnie is the girlfriend, not the drunk in the car. Confusion. Good. That's how I like it to be. No harm done reading a little A.O. Scott. Meanwhile, the theme of the movie is made clear in minutes, middle start or not, once I've got Marnie in my sights. Perhaps my initial excitement was a little attenuated, but now I'm involved, so onward!Marnie is wearing a T-shirt from a Newton grammar school. Newton is an upscale community in the Boston suburbs. Always made me think of fig newtons, not Isaac. I seem to remember a mall there, back in the 60s, out on Commonwealth Avenue. Bujalski was born in Boston. A good place to locate a movie about the just-graduated and I speak as one who swam in that social sea after college for a couple of years. Youth, out of school at last. FHH is the pure unvarnished article. The essence of mumblecore. Absolute minimum script, or so it appears onscreen. The meta experience identical to the dramatic experience; that is, there are two layers working here, carrying the same message: (a) level one, the young woman moving along through her first adult life structure while (b) level two, the actors live their lives for us by acting onscreen, so that, for this viewer at least, the element in FHH most profoundly moving is the sight of these twentysomethings struggling with their craft, new adult members of society, now with the responsibility of paying rent and negotiating car insurance (no small task in Massachusetts!), with the need to discover meaning in the challenges that they face and in their responses to those challenges. Not the characters, you understand, but the actors themselves. A reviewer comments "The semi-improvised performances seem so natural that it is tempting to confuse the actors with their characters," but the point is that these performances highlight the actors not as the characters they portray but as individuals working - that is, acting. Or am I just being fooled into thinking that I'm seeing the actors, not the characters, because of Bujalski's style? But no. I know nothing about the actors; perhaps they have something in common with their characters, perhaps not. There is a signature cadence in untrained improvisation, with its small pauses not heard in everyday conversation, neither conversation between those who know each other nor that between strangers, tiny pauses born of the actor's interior monolog, pauses which replace the verbal overlaps and gaps found in everyday talk. So that as we watch, the actors think about their lines, or the direction just provided offscreen, or the act of acting, anything but the less conscious social drivers propelling the rest of us day-to-day in casual conversation. Each actor steps into the frame with an ineffable sense of innocence, usually with an embarrassed grin, and speaks, and we understand that here onscreen are living reminders of already-came-of-age, struggling with dialog as an instantiated metaphor for the whole all-of-it struggle involved in becoming an adult. I find this evocative in the extreme, a spiritual supermagnet pulling me back to that same time in my own life, with all the memories, nostalgia, speculations, and regrets attendant to it - a time in my own life when I'm more than ripe for that to happen. Could I, would I, do better a second time around? That question forms the emotional core of the movie for my demographic; the same thing happens when we watch our own children in their twenties. Where else can you get that in cinema? Not in The Incredible Hulk, that's for sure.The Boojer, by the way, saves the juiciest scenes in the movie for himself - an excruciating dinner and a later sort-of-extended-date with Marni. Cultural extra credit: compare and contrast the boy/girl dinners in FHH and I Think I Love My Wife.At the end of the second half, I return to reviewland and find:A.O. Scott: "What gives this film its quiet pathos is not so much the relative bleakness of Marnie's circumstances but the modesty of her expectations. At one point, she makes a to-do list, and its lack of ambition - spend more time outdoors, make friends with Jackie, learn to play chess - is both funny and sad."Carina Chocano: "Mainly, Marnie is staying afloat and trying to connect with others who are equally lost."Seems like I've seen a lot of this kind of hangdog vibe around the FHH reviews - negatives about mood and lifestyle - and I am not down with that (although I otherwise agree with the NYT and LA Times FHH review content). Perhaps having reached the top of the mountain makes it hard for Scott and Chocano to see those younger who are still way back down in the foothills. Marnie and her friends in FHH are newly-minted adults living life in that broad, spacious, undefined socioeconomicsphere found in first-world countries, a landscape where middle-class children find themselves free to roam, after emerging from college, if they happen to be situated in the middle of the startingout spectrum: neither at one end on the turf of the cinematically-ever-popular male slackers so often seen onscreen, nor the other end on that of the striving medical-school, law-school, and computer-geek proto-professionals; that is, Marnie and her friends are living the unfocused life that many of us lived in our twenties. I speak as one who stumbled off the college campus for the last time to find myself, at the age of 23, living alone in Boston, working at a job I wasn't interested in, and looking for love after refusing to commit to marriage and being dropped by my intended, who switched to her Plan B awfully quickly, it seemed to me. The quiet pathos for my demographic didn't happen then, it's happening to us now, in our dotage, on the viewer's side of the screen. Where is the pathos in Marnie's freshness and energy and in the potential of youth, for Marnie and her friends with an open and unknowable and limitless future stretching ahead of them, or in the knowledge that Kate Dollenmayer herself has moved on into that future, or in Bujalski's vision? Marnie's to-do list in no way lacks ambition; is in no way funny or sad. The act of making that list metaphorizes the ambition of the young; the contents of the list highlight the innocence of youth; it's a list drawn up by someone with all the time in the world and, interestingly, it is a list quite similar to such a one as made up by someone at the other end of life, without much time remaining.So I asked my daughter about this quiet-pathos thing, her being 23 and a recent graduate and living in Boston, all the same as Marnie; her reply: "As far as waitressing goes, I feel embarrassed about it at times, but I've actually made some valuable connections and now have places to stay and help finding employment if I want to go to South Carolina, Maui, Australia, or Columbia (have business cards/notes/emails from all of these people). Plus I make ok money, work with nice people, take home free food (ok, thats not completely kosher but its not like I get a salary or even hourly pay that amounts to anything after taxes). Plus, Im learning to speak Haitian Creole while simultaneously turning enemies into friends (the cooks didnt like me at first bc they assumed I was racist and told me so, but when I asked to learn their language they are suddenly happy to see me each day). So from my lowly job Im gaining: communication skills, agility training, extreme multi-tasking experience, networking opportunities, and employee benefits (that's the free food). Sounds almost ambitious when phrased correctly. This isnt to say I dont doubt what Im doing because I do, every day, multiple times a day. I get asked time and again by my bosses, co-workers and customers "why are you here if you have a degree from an Ivy League school??" One person even went so far as to say I was being selfish because letting my parents spend all that money to send me to a good school only to "disregard" my qualifications by working in a chain restaurant was just like throwing all that tuition money in the trash. Obviously obtaining "street smarts" and trying to experience different ways of life before choosing the "purpose-driven" one is something only misfits and failures do... So what am I trying to say here? Maybe im just trying to rationalize my own current existence when in reality it is just as ambitionless and lost as Marnie's. But maybe if the reviewers got off their NY Times and La Times high horses and really thought about what it means to EXPERIENCE and LIVE life, they might see things a wee bit differently. Or maybe not. Am I giggly all the time? as my friend Lynnea would say: "HELLS no!" But I dont think Ill look back on this period of my life and see it as a time of just "staying afloat" (my high school years on the other hand...)."One more take on the pathos meme, quickly, before getting on with the movie: Marnie celebrates her birthday quietly. Proactive note to lugubrious reviewers: this also is not pathos. What the heck did I do on my birthdays back in Boston? Who knows? I do remember being in a laundromat at North Station on Christmas Eve one year. It was snowing. Neither the Bruins nor the Celtics were in town, so The Garden was deserted except for me and an old woman. I went back to my room and drank. I still remember that, so I guess it means something to me, but I didn't feel pathetic at the time. I felt lonely but pretty good.Ginormous. I've had that word in my head. I'm thinking that if I write it down here, maybe it will go away.And so on to the first half of FHH.Oh my God. Bujalski saddles Marnie with an unrequited-love jones, up front. Booge, how could you? What were you thinking? This is something a novice twenty-something filmmaker would do. Oh, right. But this is why watching War, Inc. backwards helped the movie so much; the process cut out loads of unnecessary plot points till it was too late to matter. In the same way, I was able to watch the downslope of FHH without these moulting feathers of love annoying me. Hmm. Now Marnie liplocks some dude at the twenty-eight minute mark. I would never have predicted that. Oh, no, and then she osculates again three minutes later with her married-dude friend. I'm so glad I'm coming to this at the end and not at the beginning. Why? Because in the second half she's staring into the future without seeing beyond the walls of her room, locked in her head while her anger percolates unfelt somewhere down there lower in her body - after the drinking and smooching fail her - but I understood that, in the second half of the movie, without the presumptive romance-o-motivation of the first.No. I'm overreacting. Belay that last paragraph. I've been Hollywoodpavlovianized. This is not Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in the last minute of Sleepless in Seattle or You've Got Mail. This is random lowkey young adult semijoyless evolutionary smootching, pebbles in a pond that cause no ripples. Marnie pretends that it didn't happen, isn't happening, and I'll do the same. Romance is a big deal for these kids, perhaps the biggest deal. My twenties were mostly a history of bad dates. Easy to put off career issues to the next decade while getting the living part right. So Booge perforce makes use of that, but not so much that we can't shrug when the lips meet, and then move on. But still, this series of fraught encounters with men, I don't know; quit beating the drum, Booge. This does remind me, though, that I watched the original Forsythe Saga backward. As with Marnie and Alex in the second half of FHH, something heavy had obviously gone on between Irene and Soames, and Fleur's life was constantly perturbed by it, but it seemed more romantic to me to not know what that something was, not to know what had happened - seemed more romantic than watching the first half and seeing whatever it was that happened actually happen. Thesis: nostalgia coupled with imagination is always stronger than dramatic invention, probably because lived experience, including the actual act of imagination, is more visceral than skoptophilia and its milder brethren.New-Age side note: Coincidence #1: Earlier in this screed I wrote a sentence using the word "evolutionary" and then I started FHH up again and watched the last ten minutes of the movie, which I hadn't seen yet (minutes 35 to 45) and Marnie says to Alex or Alex says to Marnie, "You're the most evolved person I know." Coincidence #2: Later that day, I went to Blockbuster to return Get Smart (I'm rating it "j" on a scale of 1 to q) and while there I picked up The Last Request, which somebody somewhere liked a little bit, and while I was checking out, the clerk asked me how I liked Get Smart and I said, Anne Hathaway is no Barbara Feldon, and when I got home and started The Last Request, there Barbara was, in a starring role. The odds of plucking up a Barbara Feldon movie at random? Antiginormous. Coincidence #3: Marnie's shirt has the number 18 on its back. I'm 18b. My daughter, I learned THE SAME DAY, is living in apartment #18 in her building on Concord St. Consult your Jung! These coincidental whorls in the universal fabric happened ON THE SAME DAY as Obama's election and mean that FHH is connected to the core zeitgeist of the planet. You read it here first.Propositions: (1) The first half of a movie is usually better than the second half when the movie is watched in normal order. (2) Watching the second half of a movie first often improves the movie. Sometimes, watching the second half is sufficient in itself. (3) Thus, perhaps whichever half you watch first is the best.I had to ask Wilson, who assigned this movie to me, what the last two spoken lines of the last scene were. They seemed crucial in defining the mood of the movie, but mumblecore being named mumblecore for a reason, I couldn't make out what Alex and Marnie said to each other. Fortunately, Wilson could. And those two lines bear out my contention, or so I think, that Bujalski is a deeply optimistic guy and FHH is, in the end, a celebration, not a paean. In that final scene, Marnie shows some anger, a desire to move out into the world, and a rejection of the feckless Alex. Good for her and good for a society and economy (knock on wood) where youth is able to rattle around a little. I watched a mumblecore movie made by Joe Swanberg a while back, in which the protagonists grow stronger in the face of Swanberg's efforts to render them helpless; Bujalski throws down some marbles in Marnie's path, but his affection for her never lets her fall hard enough to break anything.This film that launched a genre reminds us that being young and being old are two entirely different things. (Bujalski turned 30 this year.)

Spout Post: Get Smart Movie Hype

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:17:36 GMT

Post By: musichyper
Post To: musichyper Blog
Post Date: 11/13/2008 3:17:36 PM
Body: I loved this movie! plenty of silly antics and I think this is out on DVD now which means I can add it to my collection.I HYPED Get Smart on EverHYPE and scored it 87%, which I think is very accurate.http://www.everhype.com/hyper/mikeborgia?X=M671If you get on there rate me a 5 on it and request friendship.Get Smart Movie Hype

Spout Post: A Plastic Face the only Human Part

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 02:47:32 GMT

Post By: kristen
Post To: kristen Blog
Post Date: 7/15/2008 10:47:32 PM
Body: Get Smart (2008, Peter Segal, USA) * Anne Hathaway began her movie career as the ugly duckling in The Princess Diaries (2001). But as we know, the ugly duckling turns into the most beautiful swan. And Presto! A little bit of makeup and beauty coaching completes her transformation. A darling new woman appears on screen and even snags her prince charming. In 2006, Hathaway co-starred in The Devil Wears Prada playing an unfashionable assistant who transforms into savvy fashion queen. That same year she was named one of the 50 most beautiful people by People magazine. But in life did something strange happen to Anne Hathaway's innocent face? Did she feel the need to undergo a real transformation? Don't her lips seem to crinkle in the most unnatural way? There have been rumors of plastic surgery though none have been confirmed (to my knowledge). In her latest movie Get Smart, Hathaway disguised as Agent 99 discusses her (rumored) plastic surgery. In the self-proclaimed most honest part of the movie (Maxwell Smart played by Steve Carell coaxes the truth from Agent 99). Agent 99 confesses that she used to look like her mother and that she regrets having lost that unique feature. This true moment comes out in the most artificial way because the movie is completely devoid of human nature and incapable of inspired human interaction. In Get Smart, Agent 99 underwent a complete cosmetic makeover because her identity was compromised on a mission. And in the process, she took a few years off her face. Now the agent uses her face to complete her missions. She escapes death by kissing a terrorist (who plummets to earth). She seduces evil Russian Ladislas Krstic to gather necessary information. The actresses' looks are constantly referenced. At dinner, Agent 99 remarks on how it seems she can eat all the carbs she wants without worry because she never seems to get fat. Maxwell Smart creates the funniest part of the movie (or the only funny part) when he consciously mimics Agent 99's kiss tactic in order to throw the enemy off guard. Hathaway's career is marked by an obsession with beauty. This is not unique. Most women, especially actresses, feel the pressure to be beautiful. And fortunately for her, many people think she is beautiful (even if her most sexy role is Agent 99 who had complete facial surgery). As Agent 99, every character in Get Smart finds her attractive regardless of her artificial face. The characters accept her altered face the way the audience accepts her new look for this movie. The characters believe that the face she has is the real Agent 99. And that artificial face does belong to her. So what's all this talk of plastic surgery about? Hathaway denies having plastic surgery but in an interview with the Herold Sun she reveals that “When I was growing up, I wanted a nose job because I just didn’t think my nose was good. Now I feel like it’s [acting] what lets me change my face a lot". Isn't acting a little bit like plastic surgery? She changes her face to fit the demands of the audience. And that is the kind of surgery she is talking about through her character Agent 99. In the same interview, Hathaway exclaims, "I can be glamorous as Agent 99, but I’ve just made a movie with Jonathan Demme where I play a recovering drug addict and I look really rough". The face of an actress is always altered to the movie. So in a strange way, Get Smart touches on an issue directly related to Hathaway's life. Unfortunately, the connection is a little too vague and there are no other human parts in the movie. In many ways, Get Smart is like The Love Guru. The comparisons wrote themselves. These two miserable comedies opened on the same day, inviting the fight to the death competition. The Love Guru died though Get Smart is just as dead boring. The Love Guru offended many of the Roger Ebert type with its juvenile penis and defecation jokes. If this sounds promising, its a facade. Mike Meyers regurgitates his old persona's into a careless plot with mind rotting results. Get Smart suffers from the same insipid nature. In Get Smart, the audience was so starved for jokes that they laughed hysterically when Maxwell slams into a wall and exclaims, "missed it by that much!" (a joke we've all seen a mission times in the trailer). The plot of Get Smart is a rehash of action movies like Mission Impossible and the James Bond series, which could provide fertile ground for a comedy. Unfortunately, the movie includes the never-been-done-before parody of Entrapment where the characters seductively weave their bodies through a web of lasers (obviously a hilarious joke). Terrence Stamp plays an unoriginal villain (one bent on destroying the world). Of course the love story is weak, but at least Hathaway is more than a stupid sex toy existing only to sleep with like Jessica Alba (and she always plays this insult to womanhood). The jokes are so stale that both movies fail even to be escapist entertainment. Instead we realize how miserable we are for having nothing better to do than sit through these blunders of cinema. ~Kristen Gorlitz

Spout Post: Get Smart. Best movie I have seen in a while.

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 04:41:50 GMT

Post By: eukey123
Post To: eukey123 Blog
Post Date: 7/8/2008 12:41:50 AM
Body: This movie was AMAZING. Steve Ceroll was hillarious!Anytone who likes random humor will love this movie!

Spout Post: Top Ten Movies I've Seen This Year (Half-way)

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:50:39 GMT

Post By: JimBell
Post To: JimBell Blog
Post Date: 7/4/2008 12:50:39 AM
Body: These are the top ten films I’ve seen at the mid-point of the year. I think it is a good idea to post a semi-annual list because instead of complaining about mundane theatre offerings the list confirms that there are enough excellent films out there to watch. In no particular order: Mother of Mine (2005; Finland/Sweden)—A young Finish boy is torn from his family by WWII and later in life comes to terms with both of his mothers and how they treated him. Gone Baby Gone (2007)-- Dennis Lehane, the author of the novel on which the movie is based, says that we as a society have not figured out how to protect our children. The search for a missing little girl dramatizes his concern. 51 Birch Street (2005; documentary)—Doug thought that in his parents’ marriage, his mother was the loving and approachable one and his father was remote and cold, but when Doug’s mother died and his father quickly married his former secretary, everything Doug thought he know about his family started to change. The Italian (2005; Russia) follows a young, plucky Russian boy’s attempt to escape adoption to Italy and instead find his birth mother. Starting Out in the Evening (2007) develops two complex relationships among New York’s intelligentsia. The course of any kind of love never did run smooth. Sharkwater (2006; documentary) examines sharks’ behaviour, their importance to the planet, and our complex rush to exterminate them. Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) is a high-spirited look at how US politics works, and our tour leader is the extremely complex and always interesting Senator Wilson. Longford (2006) portrays the public struggle and the personal growth of Lord Longford as he visits in prison a woman involved in the murder of several children. Get Smart (2008) may be the funniest movie in theatres this year, and it improves on the original series by creating more well-rounded characters and more serious action. Elizabeth I (2005) transports you to London in the late 1500s and embroils you in Queen Elizabeth’s loves and politics.

Spout Tag:spy

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