Okay, I’ll try to keep my thoughts away from fried foods for a while as I believe I’m beginning to sound like I have OCD.
In the meantime, I’ll let you know some of my thoughts on the film “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” If you haven’t seen the trailers (or somehow have missed every tabloid cover for the past several months), the film stars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie who play a somewhat estranged married couple that, unbeknownst to each other, are both assassins and then one day they get contracts on each other and the cat is let out of the bag.
It is difficult to do black comedy well as it is very easy for a film to tip the scales too much towards absurdity. Luckily for this film, its stars are magnetic enough that I didn’t mind the need for suspension of disbelief although I believe that many people will take the film too literally and not be able to find the humor. I saw this film with a girlfriend in our local movie theatre and I don’t think the local population that was in the audience with me was enjoying the ironies of the film as I was. I found myself snickering through many scenes that were quite funny in a good-black-comedy-sort-of-way, but I noticed that the people in front of me just kept tilting their heads to the side, the way puppies do when they don’t understand your commands. (Not that these people are dogs. I know it’s a poor analogy, but that is what it looked like!)
One’s eyes rarely stray from Jolie when she is onscreen as she is quite captivating and believable as an assasin. With Jolie’s hard stares and ease in handling various weaponry, I can see her as a more believable “Aeon Flux” rather than Charlize Theron who has the title role in the upcoming big screen adaptation. Brad Pitt handles himself pretty well in the action scenes, but one can only conclude that Mrs. Smith could kick Mr. Smith’s butt at the drop of a hat.
I appreciate how the story addresses the distance that can slowly grow in a marriage, secret assassins or not. The audience I was in seemed to identify with this and I saw that several couples grew a bit uncomfortable during some scenes — perhaps the subject hit too close to home. In the end, if there is a moral to this film I believe it is that honesty goes a long way in keeping a marriage together or perhaps that friendship has to be the foundation. Doing things together as a couple is important too. Killing people in a giant spree is a strangely romantic and unifying event for the Smiths although I don’t think the film endorses that as therapy for the general public.
It was a fun film and I’m going to see it again today with Randy. I’d like to see it another time just to get a better look at the Smiths’ house –amazing bathroom and kitchen for that movie set. Maybe HGTV could do a special.