Horrible Bosses (2011)

by Ann Marie

We all have that one boss that we can't stand.

Horrible Bosses, follows three friends, Nick (Jason Bateman, Couples Retreat), Dale (Charlie Day) and Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) who all hate their bosses.  Nick works for a corporation and is seeking a promotion to position of Vice President, but his boss Mr. Harken (Kevin Spacey, 21) takes the position (and raise) for himself and blackmails Nick so he can't quit.  Dale's boss Dr. Julia Harris (Jennifer Aniston) sexually harasses Dale as he's about to get married.  Dale can't quit because he's on the sex offenders list and no one else will hire him.  Lastly, there's Kurt who actually liked his job until his boss Jack Pellitt (Donald Sutherland, The Mechanic) dies from a heart attack and his sleezy son Bobby (Colin Farrell) takes over. After a night of drunken brainstorming, Nick, Dale and Kurt are looking for a way to get rid of their bosses permanently.  That's when they seek the help of a hitman (Jamie Foxx) to help them pull off the the deed.

Horrible Bosses had a lot of big names, Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston, Jason Bateman, Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis. It was interesting to see the big names of Spacey, Aniston and Farrell taking smaller roles than usual to play the horrible bosses, and they were legitimately funny as supporting players.  Spacey came off as a smarmy jerk who would slit your throat to make sure you kept quiet just after he had you file a TPS report in triplicate. Farrell's antics as a drug addict was the perfect, hammy role for him.  He carried his lines and grabbed the audience as coke fueled trust fund bum.  However, Aniston wasn't making it on the big screen as a boss that would sexually harass her co-worker. She's too much of a girl next door type personality and the scenario as a whole was kind of unrealistic. As for Day, Bateman and Sudeikis, they worked well together, but jokes would frequently go on for too long, particularly rants from Day.  After awhile some of the bits became more annoying than funny, especially during attempts to create new foul mouthed catch phrases, out of which maybe 1 of 4 were funny.  Bateman plays yet another variation on his serious minded, upper middle class manager and Sudeikis, I think, stole each scene from the other two as a result.

The Constant Gardener (2005)

It’s summertime – that usually means big, stupid movies on the Big Screen.  Beyond the Films, however, has scoured local DVD clearance racks to try and find an intelligent contemporary film at a cheap price.  Read on to find out if The Constant Gardener fits the bill.

Reviewed by James Ryder

Defining The Constant Gardener is a tricky thing.  It contains elements of a standard British spy thriller, corporate intrigue that might have been considered sci-fi decades ago, a dramatic love story, and lots of frantic editing and ambient “mood setting” location sequences.

Of all the various threads in the film, the love story at the center is probably the strongest.  The film follows British diplomat Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) as he retraces his wife Tessa’s (Rachel Weisz) final days, partly out of fear she was having an affair with one of several other men, and partly to finish the investigation she was working on.  Tessa’s death may be linked to the unethical testing of a new drug on Kenyan civilians and its subsequent cover-up.  The film bounces back and forth in time showing Justin retracing the steps and the events that led up to her death.  Justin has long wondered about the exact details of Tessa’s work, though he rarely brought it up to her, gardening away his worry.  Thus the title.

The thriller aspect of the film is interesting, but fails to be exciting in the ways that a full on genre picture might be.  In fact, the thriller really doesn’t get started until 45 minutes into the movie.  It’s fairly easy to see who the “good guys” are and who the “bad guys” are from the beginning, and some of the individual plot points remain murky as the film concludes.