Catch and release! OMG!
Lol! Wtf! Emoticon!
DYLAN FERGUSON STAFF
Catch and Release
♥♥½ out of 5
Have you noticed more chick-flicks lately? It’s no coincidence. Most mainstream movies in the ’30s and ’40s were geared towards a female audience. This was because the studios knew that, back then, women were picking which movie to see when couples went out, so they made sure their product was packed with romance and Clark Gable (or someone equally swoon-worthy). In the ’50s, the balance of decisionmaking power swayed and movies had to be geared towards men, as they have been, generally, up until modern times.
Lately, however, studios have discovered that the wife/mother/ girlfriend is answering the “what should we see?” question more and more often. So to combat the box-office slump of the past few years, the studios have determined to start making cinema more female-friendly. Personally, and speaking as a man, I’m kind of glad. I’d much rather watch Catch and Release than The Marine.
Catch and Release is a betterthan- average chick-flick written and directed by Susannah Grant, who penned 28 Days, Erin Brockovich, and In Her Shoes. It stars Jennifer Garner, who scrunches up her face so much that I was genuinely afraid her eyes, nose, and mouth were going to disappear into a little point in the centre of her head. It also features Kevin Smith’s acting debut outside of the shameless-vanity-character oeuvre.
Garner plays Gray, whose fiancé died before their wedding. Her misery is coupled with the discovery that dead hubby was keeping a secret squeeze on the side (Juliette Lewis) who bore his child. So she takes comfort in her friends Dennis (Sam Jaeger) and Sam (Smith, in a chicken-winggobbling, beer-guzzling, always-enters-a-roomsinging performance right out of a cheap college movie) as well as, yes, a new love. She bonds with hunky Timothy Olyphant as they throw stones into a creek and plucky guitar music plays. Aw.
The soundtrack is awful, and the characters’ emotions run about as deep as the screen they play out on, but Grant is a competent writer, so there is some fun character play, and everyone is amply sketched-out.
Regardless, the characters still exist in the fatalist universe of formula movies where the screenplay is God and, come what may, there’s no escaping the fate He has in store for them. Their God is much nicer than ours, because he always ensures a happy ending. Maybe our God should hold more test screenings.
I have a hard time recommending Catch and Release to anyone when good movies like Children of Men, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Volver are playing in theatres right now.
But your girlfriend will probably want to see it.
