They Came Together

Directed by: David Wain

Written by: David Wain and Michael Showalter










I tried to enjoy this movie. I really tried. The movie had a lot of things that I, theoretically, should have enjoyed. And yet, it was almost physically painful to watch this movie from beginning to end.

At multiple points, my wife and I simply looked at each other and said some variation of, "This is stupid."

I'll boil it down: the biggest problem is that the film doesn't know what it wants to be. It tries to spoof the cliche romantic comedy genre, but doesn't have enough bite or satire. It seems like it tries (maybe?) to make the characters likable, but they also exist as caricatures and, as such, lack any real humanity. Some jokes are parody, some are slapstick, and some seem like they were ripped from "Family Guy." In any case, none of these features belong together.

It felt, very simply, like a bunch of funny people got together and decided that it would be really funny to make a movie on this topic. And then they did, with complete impunity from editing or criticism. "They Came Together" would have been much better if boiled down to an extended SNL sketch, but didn't have enough substance to fill an entire movie.

Carriers

Written and Directed by: Alex Pastor, David Pastor

What if, in the future, a disease wiped out most of the population? What would you to survive? What if Hollywood produced a low-budget horror movie with that exact premise?

This movie takes place after a biological apocalypse, where we meet up with the Green brothers Danny (Pucci) and Brian (Pine), who have developed rules to help themselves and their girlfriends survive on the road to an elusive beach paradise.. The rules are constantly bent and broken, though, as they encounter other survivors, such as Frank (Meloni) and his infected daughter (Shipka). The pressure to survive weighs heavily on Brian, who slowly begins to lose his sanity and his humanity.

It's regrettable that the film took such an open-ended (though recently overused) premise and failed to take it anywhere. This movie didn't do anything that hadn't already been done by other films to more effect. The filmmakers' message was hard to pull out, and even then it was rather vague.

One scene in the movie stands out as being a cut above the rest of the movie: the scene at the "emergency hospital" set up at the abandoned high school with the doctor. That single scene managed to be unsettling, disturbing, and filled with tension without the need for graphic gore. The character's interaction with the doctor - and the terrible choice he and the group are forced to make - is fantastic, while there's also great tension with what's going on in the car outside. I can't say enough about how that one scene showed how great the rest of the film could have been.

Overall this movie had too much going on. There were too many settings left unexplored, too many characters left undeveloped, and too many stories that were left untold.

I simply can't recommend this movie. If you do watch it, simply watch it through the scene with the doctor at the high school (you'll know the part), because it's all downhill after that. (And, in my own defense, the only reason I watched the entire movie was because I was over halfway through by the time I realized how bad it was.)