Day: November 5, 2011

Restitution. I have hard time spelling that word sometimes. Not at all relevant to the movie, just figured I’d let you know.

This is a weird low budget movie.

Featuring all of the stars of yesterday! Mena Suvari, of American Beauty, and Tom Arnold, of Tom Arnold.

Is it just me, or does he always look confused nowadays?

The main character however is played by Mark Bierlein, who I am ashamed to give the IMDB for. But the dude is a writer, actor, and producer. He was an actor in this movie and Street Boss. He was a producer in this movie and Street Boss. He was also a producer, in this movie and Street Boss. At least he does what he loves, I guess?

At least his movies seem to be set in Michigan.

This movie was super low budget. Blood looked bad, and I cringed when I heard the potted plant crashing noise. Just a dumb sound effect. As for the story. Eh. Dude gets framed for murders at the beginning of the movie. A year later some other dude comes to investigate it for a book. Turns out lot of people in the town are in on the conspiracy, and more people die because of his search.

His neighbor is Tom Arnold. The other dude’s lover is Mena Suvari. And yeah.

I hated the ending. There was a lot of unexpected action scenes at the end, which felt stupid as well. The explanation for everything, I thought was dumb. But for reasons I can’t explain without spoilers. Most of the movie was slow too.

They were going for this big “Whoa! Twist!” stuff near the end, but really, just felt dumb. I will note that an actor in this movie is named Jimmy Doom. How awesome is that name?

He played the role of “Hillbilly”.

The Change-Up is the R-rated attempt to make an enjoyable “change bodies” movie. Most of the time these sort of movies are family oriented and always have the same message. Always.

Your life is better than you think it is, switching is a bad idea, and don’t do drugs.

Presumably the last message is implied. The Change-Up offers the same morals, minus the drug part. It might condone them, actually.

“Drug use?! By golly gee wizz, that is bad stuff!” – How I think Ryan Reynolds actually talks.

So, the beginning of this movie is pretty bad. We have to get through the parts where they are all, rawrr my life sucks. Even a dumb poop joke scene. Gross and unnecessary. Adult oriented shouldn’t have to mean lamer jokes, but eh, they happen. The “Change Up” part is equally ridiculous, but pretty much anything they could have came up would have failed too, so that doesn’t matter.

Reynolds is friends with Bateman. Reynolds likes to party, lives alone, sex all the time, actor/model. Bateman has a family! Daughter and twin babies, married to Leslie Mann, and works in a law firm. Pretty smart, trying to make partner. Olivia Wilde is his assistant, who he kinda wants to bang.

For some reason.

After the change, there is some pretty funny stuff that happens. You can probably guess a lot of it. Each person screws up the others life, tries to coach them on how to be successful. Unfortunately Reynolds also has some dad issues, and Bateman has marriage problems, so with their powers combined, they are able to help fix both. By the end, they yes, learn to love their life, and make appropriate changes in their lives for future successes.

At least in the Unrated version, there is a lot of boobs. Some are creepy boobs though. Leslie Mann is naked in this movie a lot though, which was very surprising.

I really couldn’t tell if I wanted to give this a 2 or a 3 rating. It had parts enough to annoy me for the 2, yet some very funny parts for a 3. So I think in cases like this, I tend to just go the higher rating route. It still could have done a lot of things better though.