Serious Moonlight.

Review #1259: Serious Moonlight.

Cast: 
Meg Ryan (Louise), Timothy Hutton (Ian), Kristen Bell (Sara), Justin Long (Todd), Nathan Dean (Detective), Andy Ostroy (Police Officer), Kimberlee Peterson (Trashy Girl), Derek Carter (Man #1), and Bill Parks (Man #2) Directed by Cheryl Hines.

Review: 
Some movies are just meant to stay in the movie bin. This isn't even a case of just being dreadful - this is a movie is too lame for even ironic watching like someone could do for Troll 2. The film can be summed up through three questions: Where is the comedy? Who thought this would be a good idea? Why is the film predictably pathetic? The best answer I have for any of these questions is this: Someone really thought this was going to work. This was written by the late Adrienne Shelly, who had written/directed/co-starred with Hines in Waitress (2007), with her widow being one of the producers of this film. This was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival in early 2009 before being acquired by Magnolia Pictures, who released it through their Ultra Video on Demand program one month before theatrical release. I am curious to wonder how many people decided to check this out on the streaming platform (barf) out of curiosity and how long they lasted before shutting it off. It amazes me that one can make an 84 minute movie seem interminable to go through. This is evidently a black comedy, and I say evidently in the loosest sense because it is roughly at the enjoyment level of lemon juice squeezed right onto your face in terms of humor. It is a film that is filled with contrivances in order to drive a romance angle that never really takes off - maybe there could be something funny about taping up your husband until he is persuaded that he still loves you and not his mistress, too bad this isn't the one to do it with. I shouldn't have been surprised that this scheme actually works, but maybe I really thought someone facing consequences for something so stupid could actually lead to a laugh. Obviously I should know better from a film with a title not to be confused with a David Bowie concert tour.

Who does one blame for such a blandly derivative film? You really can't blame the quartet of actors saddled with this material, who either got a memo to scream in every other scene or just really thought this was the way to go. Ryan (years removed from mediocre rom-coms like Sleepless in Seattle) is stuck in such a thankless position, where the dubious honor of trying to serenade her husband with a guitar is compounded by him being taped to a toilet after being knocked out (again). She is meant to have some sort of high-strung energy, but it never really comes out in a useful way to make me care. Hutton (spending most of his time acting from a toilet, a sentence for which I have to compose myself before I collapse from laughing) is similarly stuck with either having to shout or trying to be snide, which could be funny if the film wanted to do so. After all, it is just these two for over half the film. To say nothing of Bell, energetic yet not in the film enough to make more laughs. Long playing a robber sounds like a punchline already, but he mostly spends his time either hitting Hutton or lazily robbing them with his friends, which isn't as fun as it sounds. It gets stuck between the gear of sentimentality and cynicism and never gets out, where the direction and the script harmonize into ridiculousness that disappoints and irritates the audience at once. Nothing ever feels like it matters, with no real sense of consequences in any sense to be found. Why should I care about this loveless marriage and the attempts to revive it? Why should I care about them being tied up in their own house? Why make an implication with the ending about the couple seeing the robbers in the street after reconciling if you won't actually go anywhere with it? Is this really a film that needed to end before it even reached 90 minutes? As the questions ride over my head like a never-ending drumbeat, I can only say that this is the weakest kind of terrible movie - a whimpering and pathetic piece that can be mocked to oblivion and still have the insolence to linger there in its defeated state until the magnifying glass is taken off. The best thing to say for this film isn't to yammer about how awful it is for an essay longer than needed - if you see it sitting somewhere on a shelf or as an option on a streaming service (again, barf), just ignore it. By not watching it, you've saved those minutes for something better. Whether spent alone surfing the Internet, or spending time at work, or spending time with friends (whichever seems realistic), Serious Moonlight makes the case for appreciating doing those things more often as opposed to seeing the film more than zero times.

Overall, I give it 2 out of 10 stars.