There are many movies with fine casts that fail because the script was mauled somewhere along the way. Friends with Benefits pulls off the rarer "this would have been a much better film if they had better actors as the leads."
I didn't look at the Netflix description, and so didn't recognize the leads. I spent the first half of the movie thinking that the male lead was a bastard crossing of Matt Morrison and Neil Patrick Harris who spent a lot of time in the gym, then finally gave up and looked at the IMDB. Oh, so that's what the agent of the introduction of "wardrobe malfunction" into the English lexicon looks like at 30. Sarahmac bested me by honestly asking who Justin Timberlake was. Touché. In any case, he has little on-screen charisma and we liked the guy who was awful as Green Lantern better.
Once we identified Mila Kunis, well, she's a slightly different story. We liked her in Black Swan; she's not actually a bad actress, so this is more a problem of her not being right for this part. We need someone with more NYC cred, but I'm blanking on anyone in the right age range. Maybe Blake Lively, or maybe I'm just wishing she weren't also in the awful Green Lantern movie.
(backdated to 12/8 when this was mostly written, but finally posted on 1/24/2012)
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Cutting the land line
Wireless service at our house is now good enough** that we moved to a family cell phone plan and cut the land line, a little more than 10 years after we initially planned on doing this, but discovering that cell phone service was terrible here. So I made the call to Vonage this morning, and they took it surprisingly well, only trying to sell me on keeping my number (no, thank you, everyone who needs to know our new number either has it or knows how to reach us via e-mail, and we're happy to ditch all the junk calls***).
Vonage, in turn, had replaced Verizon and Opex back in 2005 (separate local and long-distance carriers? oh, my!), once we were sure that Adelphia's (now Comcast) cable internet connection wouldn't cut out so often that using VoIP as our sole phone service would be untenable. The great thing about Vonage, from a data collection standpoint, is that it has been easy to collect all calls placed *and received* for the last 6 years****. I only have long-distance placed calls from Opex prior to then. Nothing from our Evanston days with MCI (aside from an angry letter contesting their charging of "peak" rate minutes for the entirety of calls that began at 6:56pm), and just the billed amounts from grad school (because we all want to relive the few $200 phone bills from that year Sarahmac was in France, when only students in the engineering school had e-mail -- most of the time we snail-mailed each other letters. We still have those. I don't remember the phone calls, except for a lot of protracted silences and sighing at $1/minute; still better than dialing a 1-900 number, I suppose).
** though I use Google Voice to dial in to conference calls at work. Their audio quality is better than Vonage's was, and free for now.
*** places that I do business with now get my Google Voice number. I'm actually going to enjoy putting junk callers in my spam filter.
**** I hope to have something to say about analyzing that data, but need to anonymize the numbers first. Even then, I'm worried what the call patterns would show about when we're home and when we're not. Another good thing about cell phones.
Vonage, in turn, had replaced Verizon and Opex back in 2005 (separate local and long-distance carriers? oh, my!), once we were sure that Adelphia's (now Comcast) cable internet connection wouldn't cut out so often that using VoIP as our sole phone service would be untenable. The great thing about Vonage, from a data collection standpoint, is that it has been easy to collect all calls placed *and received* for the last 6 years****. I only have long-distance placed calls from Opex prior to then. Nothing from our Evanston days with MCI (aside from an angry letter contesting their charging of "peak" rate minutes for the entirety of calls that began at 6:56pm), and just the billed amounts from grad school (because we all want to relive the few $200 phone bills from that year Sarahmac was in France, when only students in the engineering school had e-mail -- most of the time we snail-mailed each other letters. We still have those. I don't remember the phone calls, except for a lot of protracted silences and sighing at $1/minute; still better than dialing a 1-900 number, I suppose).
** though I use Google Voice to dial in to conference calls at work. Their audio quality is better than Vonage's was, and free for now.
*** places that I do business with now get my Google Voice number. I'm actually going to enjoy putting junk callers in my spam filter.
**** I hope to have something to say about analyzing that data, but need to anonymize the numbers first. Even then, I'm worried what the call patterns would show about when we're home and when we're not. Another good thing about cell phones.
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