Movie Time Capsule Blog #10- "The Ex"

Sometimes movies fade into obscurity quite rapidly. There are movies out in theatres at this very moment that could very well be forgotten about in less than a year. This could include movies that you maybe even wanted to see, but never will because you forgot about them. Then, one day, you see that film practically levitating in front of you on the shelf in the public library; incorrectly filed behind that copy of “The Bourne Ultimatum” that you really wanted in the first place.

“Hey Andy! It’s me! ‘The Ex’!”

Zach Braff seemed to be smiling back at me while Jason Bateman looked like the smug, self-serving prick I think he must be in the real world. I had wanted to see “The Ex” when it first came out in theatres last May, but between “Spiderman 3”, “Pirates of the Caribbean 3”, and “Shrek 3” (which I admittedly didn’t see) there was just no room in my life for a movie that admittedly looked suspect to begin with.

Zach Braff began to speak to me directly. “Come on, man. Don’t tell me you don’t remember me. You loooooooove me. Look at my foppish hair and impish grin. You love me in ‘Scrubs’ and you are one of the few people who hasn’t gone and changed your mind about ‘Garden State.’ Take me home. It will be fun.”

“I don’t know, Zach. This movie sat on the shelf for over two years. I even saw commercials for it a year before it came out when it was still called ‘Fast Track’ and the film suddenly vanished from the Weinstein Company release schedule for no reason at all, and on top of that...”

“Hey, nerd boy,” Jason Bateman was now interrupting me, “Look at the names on the box. You still want to see this. You might not really like how I act in real life by telling fans at awards shows that they should die, but (a) you are supposed to hate me in this movie and (b) you deep down still think I am funny.”

“Very true. What do you say co-star Amanda Peet?”

“I don’t give a shit what you do.”

I liked this movie’s spunk. It spoke to me on so many levels and the question at the core of the movie always intrigued me: if you were being bullied by someone who was disabled would you fight back or continue to cower in fear and shame? A great black comedy can be made from such a question. It would certainly be rude and tasteless, but it could also be bitingly funny. “The Ex” had just the cast to pull this off. In addition to Braff, Bateman, and Peet it had Amy Pohler, Donald Logue, Fred Armisen, Mia Farrow, and it brought Charles Grodin out of a 14 year long retirement. What could go wrong?

Two days later I finally decided to watch “The Ex,” thinking that it would be a great idea to cover it for the movie time capsule blog. It was a glorious sun-shiny day when I awoke to face the day as I usually do: singing a show tune while throwing open the curtain to say hello to the world right before eating a healthy breakfast. I was ready for anything and I had “The Ex” to look forward to. Noting was going to harm me today!

I put the DVD in and even gleefully watched the trailers before the movie. I also noticed that the sky outside was growing darker. Animals were running away from the house in a mass exodus, while the pets inside the house were clawing at the doors and whimpering for an escape. I just shrugged it off as a tornado warning. By the time I had selected the “play movie” option on the DVD menu, lightning filled the skies and Lake Ontario turned to blood. The screams of the damned and dying began to emit from the television screen as a wall of fire formed around me sealing me off from any escape routs.

Something was not right. Something had gone very wrong.

Later that afternoon when Jenna’s mother came home the house was in shambles. The phone was off the charger and bleating with the sound of a dying battery and a dial tone; a blood stained hand print on the back of the receiver. The walls had been charred black. The pets sat on the lawn, perfectly still and thankful to be alive, but still in a state of shock. The television emitted the only light in the room. Marilyn gingerly walked across the room to find me gently rocking back and forth in the corner with my eyes clawed out by my own hands repeating “The Ex” over and over again.

Alright, I made up everything after the ring of fire part. Also, I never eat a healthy breakfast in the morning, but I truthfully hated this movie on a level that is usually only reached when Roger Ebert reviews a late period Rob Reiner film. I have not seen a worse comedy that didn’t have “Joe Dirt” in the title or have Carrot Top starring in it. The fact that it came at the expense of the biggest waste of talent in Hollywood history makes it even more inexcusable.

Braff and Peet play a married couple who are having a child. Peet has just quite her job as a paralegal in order to become a stay at home mom (which she insists no fewer than three times in the film’s first five minutes is not the same thing as a housewife). Braff has just been fired from his job as a chef by his boss, played by Paul Rudd.

When I saw Paul Rudd, my heart lifted slightly. Paul Rudd is usually good for a laugh or two even in his worst movies. This movie gives him nothing to do in his brief cameo other than having him slap Braff in the face with a pork chop. Any movie where Paul Rudd slaps anybody with anything and I am not laughing has serious problems.

Braff’s firing causes them to move from New York City to some unspecified really white Ohio suburb (that still manages to have a lot of New York scenery and keeps the same licence plates and phone numbers) so that Braff can take an office job (which the movie gleefully points out eighty bajillion times that his slacker ass would never stoop to doing) offered to him by Peet’s father, played by Grodin.

Grodin runs an advertising agency (in suburban Ohio?) with an office that only exists in the movies. Everyone is ridiculously happy-go-lucky and engage in new-agey exercises like throwing around a metaphysical “yes ball” or forcing everyone to write apologies out on post-it notes. None of this matters in the end, it is all just window dressing and parts of missed opportunities to really make the jokes in the film work, but instead add nothing but a level of discomfort attained only by desperate stand up comics who threaten to slit their wrists on stage if you don’t laugh at them.

Braff is assigned to work directly under Bateman, who is not only an aggressively passive aggressive jerk, but is also confined to a wheelchair and just happens to be the titular Ex. All this despite the fact that even though it is implied that Peet and Bateman’s characters once had (amazing) sex, they are never once referred to as ever having even been a couple in the first place. The movie really only tells us that we shouldn’t pity this man because he has a huge dick and can still use it despite his disability.

27 minutes into the movie I was begging for it to end and I just stopped taking notes. It had already annoyed me so greatly that if I were in a theatre or had paid for it in any way I would have stopped watching it and started a Jay and Silent Bob type crusade to go to the doors of everyone involved in the making of this movie to punch them in the stomach. I should have shut the movie off, but I needed to pinpoint exactly where this movie went wrong and how it could have failed so spectacularly. Luckily I was watching the “unrated” version (despite there clearly being a rating on the package for both the U.S. and Canada) that was only one hour and twenty seven minutes; ten minutes shorter than the theatrical cut. But wait! There is even another cut of this movie that is mercifully even shorter. The Canadian theatrical version was only 77 minutes long. I’m in Canada so why can’t I see that version and wrap this shit up quicker. In the end, I did find an answer to why this movie failed. It failed because it managed to get every possible thing wrong. If you made a movie that is the exact opposite of this one, it would be the funniest movie ever made.

The script is horrendous. Lines of dialog are repeated so many times it makes you think that the writers needed to remind themselves every few pages what was going on and decided to keep it in the movie. All back-story is filled in by the characters themselves rather than having someone actually show us what happened, making the proceedings boring and tedious. Entire characters (like Pohler’s) in this movie exist solely to move the plot of the story along to fill in key details. These people are like the villagers you meet in an RPG. You see them all the time, they all look the same, but you talk to them anyway in hopes that they have something relevant to say.

The directing and editing are atrocious. Jesse Peretz directs everything like he is out of synch with his entire movie. Everything is done at such a languorous pace that the wanna-be punch lines just hang in the air like the hydrogen atoms floating in front of the actors faces. The man also can’t frame a shot to save his life. I hated “Freddy Got Fingered” as much as I hate this movie, but at least Tom Green pulled off a few shots where I could say, “Oh, at least that came out well.” The editing makes the movie incoherent. You get the sense that three quarters of the movie is in a garbage bin somewhere. The movie is assembled about as well as “Pootie Tang” and that movie was notoriously released in an unreleasable state. “The Ex” is the “Manos: The Hands of Fate” of modern comedy.

As for the acting, I will break it down for you as quick as possible so we can all get back on with our lives and put this whole sordid affair behind us. Braff is hopelessly miscast, and he seems to know it. His role requires someone with more of a mean streak than he seems willing to provide and you never buy him for a second.

Bateman does what he can, but most of his best moments seems to have ended up on the cutting room floor because as a villain you never get to hate him enough to make his comeuppance sweeter. It doesn’t help that in the theatrical version it turns out that he isn’t handicapped and is just an asshole and in the “unrated” DVD version he really is handicapped. Would someone please make up their mind? Did you just film every possible scenario for this movie and just slap it the fuck together to see if it would fly?

Peet looks pissed that she even had to wake up for this. Her role is so thankless she should demand reparations. Grodin is the only person who emerges from this mess completely unscathed. He knows what his role requires and being the ever consummate professional, he gives it his all. Grodin has the only moment in the whole movie that made me chuckle and it is a complete throwaway moment. I will share it here with you in the hopes that you never see this movie.

Chances are, if you are reading this. I am probably already dead. Either that, or I have gone on a quest to rid the world of every copy of this movie. The infection seems to be spreading. According to IMDB, a lot of people think this movie is actually somewhat decent. This has to end sometime. This has to end somewhere. What better place than here? What better time than now.

Verdict: I would sooner watch “My Demon Lover” again.