Opposites alike

A while back I went to The Best Movie Theater Ever and saw The Pursuit of Happyness. It was good... definitely Will Smith's best work by far. His son plays his son (Jaden Smith) and doess a great job as well.

I still think changing the spelling in the title was a bad idea. It has very little significance in the movie, and the reference to the Declaration of Independence was enough to make the title significant on its own. There's actually a really great line Will Smith has where he is thinking about how it's not just "happiness," but the pursuit of it.

Another thing about the movie, and this isn't necessarily bad, is that it is a complete downer. The ending is happy, but sad. The rest of the movie is just sad the entire time.

I guess what keeps me from really liking this movie is that I'm still not sure of what it's trying to say. To simplify its message to something like, "happiness doesn't come cheap, but it comes" (or simply "hope") would make so much of this movie unnecessary. I have to wonder how much of their objective was just to make the heartwarming tale of a broke man and his son in L.A. There was a point where the movie was just a question of what bad thing would happen to them next, because that was what was happening - a Mad Libs kind of thing where the rest of the sentence never changes, just one word. Also, there was no "bad guy," so that fine line between social commentary and preaching - the movie didn't even approach it.

Last night I watched Bringing Up Baby, which is the opposite of Pursuit of Happyness in many, many ways, but ironically shares the lack of substance. It has everything. Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn star in it, for crying out loud, and both of them are at the top of their game and (duh) have great chemistry. They were fun to watch, but besides that the movie was absolutely ridiculous. It's a screwball comedy on steroids. The hijinks that are standard to the genre are all that ever happens. About thirty minutes from the end I turned to the guy I was watching it with and asked, "Seriously, is this ever going to be over?" and the last scene was just a very painful several minutes of waiting for the dinosaur to fall.

I liked the movie, but not too much. I'm beginning to discover that I tend to be less fond of movies that are strictly one genre. This movie is 100% screwball comedy, which would be okay because of the romance that is usually inherent in the genre, but the love story was barely treated and rushed when it was.