Review of "Seeking a Friend for the End of The World"

Before I start giving my impressions of Steve Carell's mediocre disaster comedy, I'd like to offer an explanation on why I feel it necessary to review the movie now. After all, "Seeking A Friend," come out in the summer, disappointed at the box office, and left barely a ripple afterwards. However, after sitting through a panel in Arisia looking at all of the SFF movies that came out in 2012, I was surprised to this movie didn't even merit a mention. I'm not sure how common that reaction was, but it seemed curious to me. Say what you want, "Seeking A Friend," absolutely poses a speculative question; what would happen if the world learned its end was nigh?

The movie begins with a couple pulled over on the side of the road listening to the final word on a doomed space mission to advert catastrophe from a giant asteroid called Matilda. As the radio pronounces the world's last and only hope dashed, Dodge (played by a glum and taciturn Steve Carell) watches his wife flee their car and run off into the night, never to be seen again. Meanwhile the world begins to quickly fall apart. Riots spiral out of control, the economy grinds to a halt, people start throwing themselves off of high buildings. In the middle of all of this Steve hits upon the idea of reuniting with a long lost flame. Accompanying him is Penny (played by Kiera Knightley) an eccentric young woman fleeing the conflagration of violence engulfing their city. In the true spirit of road movies, Dodge and Penny encounter odd balls and danger (mostly of the comic variety) as they slowly and predictably fall in love with each other.

The basic problem with the movie is that the strong and darkly comedic potential of the first 10 minutes or so evaporates quickly and we're left with a standard, guy meets girl rom com set-up. Romances live or die based on the chemistry of the leads and sadly, in "Seeking a Friend's" case there is almost no chemistry between Dodge and Penny. Dodge, for understandable reasons, is a complete wreck and shambles through most of the movie like he's already dead. Steve Carell does a really convincing job portraying someone bereft of hope. Knightly's Penny is more vivacious but suffers from a terminal case of stupid ray, that annoying trope in these types of movies where all of the conflict and drama stems from one character's daft decisions. KnightlyThe scenes they share are just painful and awkward and frankly unbelievable. Imagine "Garden State" with Louis C.K. filling in for Zach Braff and you'll be close to just how ill-conceived this pairing is.

Which is a shame, because if I haven't made it clear, I found a lot to respect about the movie's set-up and distressingly abrupt final minutes. This is a movie about the end of the world that goes about the task of describing the final days with admirable sobriety. I sort of wish they had scrapped the goofy road trip element and kept with the idea of apocalypse as mid-life crisis writ large.

Reading Response to "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

Reader Response to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Morgan Crooks I once heard Flannery O’Connor’s work introduced as a project to describe a world denied God’s grace. This critic of O’Connor’s work meant the Christian idea that a person’s misdeeds, mistakes, and sins could be sponged away by the power of Jesus’ sacrifice at Crucifixion. The setting of her stories often seem to be monstrous distortions of the real world. These are stories where con men steal prosthetic limbs, hired labor abandons mute brides in rest stops, and bizarre, often disastrous advice is imparted. O’Connor herself said of this reputation for writing ‘grotesque’ stories that ‘anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.’ This is both a witty observation and a piece of advice while reading O’Connor’s work. These are stories about pain and lies and ugliness. The brutality that ha...

Death's End by Liu Cixin

Having recently finished the last book in Liu Cixin's instant classic "The Remembrance of Earth's Past" series, Death's End, I can only report a feeling of total amazement and awe. There is so much about this novel that blew my mind, that offered different and better ways of viewing the universe. This novel did what I wish more novels would, serve up a new universe entire, evoking beauty and horror, nobility and disgust, in a timeless monument to unfettered speculation. Obviously, in discussing the events of the last of a trilogy books, spoilers are to be expected. I am, however, going to try to avoid discussing much beyond the first 100 pages of the third novel. I read the translation of this novel, as ushered into being by the amazing talent of Ken Liu. Ken has written of a certain prickliness when it comes to translating work. He makes an effort not to anglicize the source material, not smudging away the occasional difficulties in bringing Cixin...

With the title World War Z

Early on in the mostly disappointing zombie epidemic thriller World War Z, UN Investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) hides out in a Newark apartment, trying to convince a family living there to flee with him from the hordes of sprinting, chomping maniacs infesting the city. The phrase he uses, drawing from years of experience in the world's troubled war-zones is "movement is life." Ultimately he's unsuccessful, the family barricades their door behind him and they join the ever-swelling ranks of the undead. As far as a guiding philosophy goes for a pop-action thriller like World War Z, 'movement is life,' isn't bad. And for the first half of the movie or so, it follows its own advice. Similar to other recent zombie movies (Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead) the warning signs of what the rest of the movie will bring are subtle and buried until all hell is ready to break through. The television mentions 'martial law,' Philadelphia traffic snarl...

Ancient Logic

Search This Blog