Date Night ***

Director: Shawn Levy
Cast: Steve Carell, Tina Fey
Mark Wahlberg, Taraji P. Henson, Jimmi Simpson, Common
William Fichtner, Leighton Meester, Kristen Wiig
Mark Ruffalo, James Franco, Mila Kunis, Ray Liotta

Hollywood often has the mind of a child; they often team up rising stars and robots or famous legends and musicals, assuming that putting together A and B will always result in a hit.
More often than not this strategy implodes all over them but when they decided to put together the two funniest people in showbiz things actually worked out in the most unexpected ways.
Tina Fey and Steve Carell star as Claire and Phil Foster, a married couple from the Jersey suburbs whose existence revolves around their house, their kids and their jobs.
Watching their attempts at rekindling their sex life-with only five hours of sleep between the forced foreplay and the time their kids jump on them to wake them- is hilarious but also bittersweet.
As funny as they make the normality of their house scenes (you never see them as something other than the Fosters) they also keep the characters grounded and the comedy sometimes gives way to deep sadness.
After they learn a couple they know is getting a divorce, both decide it's time to relight the flame for good. They decide to venture out of their comfort zone and go have dinner on a Friday night in Manhattan.
They dress up, arrive at the hippest seafood place in the city and are sent to the oblivion of the bar until a table becomes available-if ever.
Trying to impress his wife, Phil steals a reservation from a couple that never shows up, called the Tripplehorns and after their fabulously overpriced dinner is over, they are approached by two men (Common and Simpson) who ask them to walk out with them.
Thinking this has to do with the stolen reservation (and an embarrassing moment involving will.i.am) the Fosters are surprised to learn the two men are actually looking for a flash drive the Tripplehorns stole from a big mobster.
Soon they're on the run across the city trying to clear their name and preserve their lives, in the process having the most exciting night of their lives.
Anyone who says they do not know how this movie will end is lying, the plot's predictability is obvious from its title. The one thing that might surprise you is that Fey and Carell create the chemistry one would've deemed too good to be true.
He's a master at his kind of goofy, heartwarming comedy (when he's called "androgynous" by a guy in a strip club his droll stare is priceless!) while Fey's own kind of dorky sexiness serves her to deliver her OCD bitchiness with enough oomph to make her more likable than not.
Together they have no fear of being absolutely ridiculous (scenes with Henson who plays a police detective make one wonder how did the actress contain her laughter with these two around) and awkward (an often shirtless Wahlberg gets the best out of the dynamic duo).
What's so special about Date Night is the fact that despite your best knowledge of how silly and preposterous the situations might get you are always willing to invest into the main characters.
It's not like one of those movies where you laugh against your better judgment, this one doesn't care to steal a random giggle from the audience, it makes your stomach literally hurt from laughing so much.
Even when they are involved in an oh so typical dance with a pole sequence, you won't be thinking "this is so stupid" but "boy, I wish I could bring someone to see this with me".

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button **1/2

Director: David Fincher
Cast: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett
Taraji P. Henson, Julia Ormond, Elias Koteas, Jason Flemyng

There is something unnatural about watching a child die, which is why from the minute this film sets its premise you just know it's headed for a difficult place where you will be either deeply moved or disturbed.
Benjamin Button (Pitt) is a man who is born old and ages backwards, meaning that he will die young. As a baby, his father (Flemyng) conveniently abandons him in a nursing home where he is raised by Queenie (Henson in full Hattie McDaniel mode) who looks after the residents of the house.
He meets Daisy (Elle Fanning) with whom he develops a crush all the way until she becomes Cate Blanchett (who not so curiously gives the film's best performance).
The romance between Daisy and Benjamin is supposed to give the film its epic feel and while it certainly makes for some of the most compelling drama the plot offers it isn't completely able to shake off the awkwardness of the movie.
Penned by Eric Roth as an extension from F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story, the screenplay takes only Fitzgerald's twist and crafts something completely new, a sort of requiem for the 20th century shaped after a classic Hollywood epic.
Roth who also wrote "Forrest Gump" seems to be the go-to-guy for stories about life-through-the-eyes-of-out-of-the-ordinary-men and with Benjamin is never able to justify what exactly makes the world through his eyes seem worthier than through anyone else's.
Why is the story relevant only when the narrator isn't ordinary if later the film will try to convince us that what matters the most is what we have inside?
The suspension of disbelief is awkward because the audience at first takes for granted the fact that nobody seems to make an issue out of Benjamin's situation.
Nobody ever thinks it's weird that a little girl and an old man are hiding under a table or that this same girl will grow old and have feelings for a child. If nobody makes a deal out of it, why to even use the gimmick, why not make Benjamin an average Joe?
Roth aims to make the doomed lovers approach the one that makes the story easy to sell, but with David Fincher directing this never materializes, especially because they never make it through to the fact that if it wasn't for the growing backwards novelty, there isn't much of a story to tell here.
With Claudio Miranda's cinematography which bathes everything in a golden fablesque light, the look of the film makes us view at the cruelty of death under a honey dipped innocence.
The movie also becomes a benchmark for visual effects and makeup (Pitt's entire performance is owed to these departments), as the digital process used to manipulate Pitt's look is pure cinema magic and we never doubt what we're seeing is actually happening.
Production wise, it's a real treat for the senses as every aspect is carefully taken care of, but at the center of it all lies a colliding contrast between what we watch and what we feel, or don't feel.
Fincher who is more cerebral becomes fascinated with the essence of time and visually makes a motif out of the way it passes us by (a beautiful prologue starring Elias Koteas encompasses what the latter two hours and forty minutes never come close to).
The director who is an expert at creating moods goes for the least expected road here and practically obsesses with the need to control time.
When the plot becomes too extensive, it's as if Fincher is so fascinated by controlling the lives of his characters that he just looks for more ways to manipulate their lives.
While in "Zodiac" he practically recreated the frustration of not getting where you want, in this movie his reluctance to accept the passing of time and what can be taken as fear of death makes him completely detach from his material. The film like Benjamin has the wrong soul in the wrong body.
While Roth is giving us conventional, somewhat contrived and lazy, storytelling (including tacky Hurricane Katrina references), Fincher is tackling on to the metaphysical so much that he refuses to even care for his characters.
What is the point if they too will go away once the projector stops running?