Worth Mentioning - Well, That Was an Interesting Christmas

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Cody is still watching Christmas movies.

TRAPPED IN PARADISE (1994)

Writer/director George Gallo’s Christmas comedy Trapped in Paradise was given a theatrical release on December 2, 1994 – the perfect timing to be my choice as the movie I wanted to go see on my 11th birthday a few days later. The showing started late in the evening and my mom and I got to the theatre about an hour early, so we killed some time playing video games in the arcade section of the theatre lobby. Once it was time for the movie to begin, it was 45 minutes or so after my official time of birth. So the first movie I watched as an 11 year old was this one... and because of the fond memory I associate with it, I have always had a place in my heart for this movie, even though it was a box office failure that was torn apart by critics and didn’t fare very well with other members of the audience. (According to CinemaScore, viewers gave it an average rating of C+.)

Nicolas Cage stars as Bill Firpo, a man who is struggling to live a good, honest life... but when his brothers Dave and Alvin (played by Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey) are released from prison after serving time for theft and robbery, it doesn’t take long for Bill to lapse into a criminal life right alongside them. Dave and Alvin emerge from the slammer claiming a fellow inmate has asked them to travel from their home state of New York to the small town of Paradise, Pennsylvania so they can check it on his daughter. Of course, this is all a ruse, as they’ve actually heard that the local bank in Paradise is lax on security and they plan to rob it. Once Bill sees this lack of security, it doesn’t take much convincing for him to get it on the plan. 

The brothers carry off the robbery and attempt to go on the run with the $275,000 they got from the bank vault. But their progress is hindered by a blizzard and a series of accidents, so they end up – as the title promised – trapped in Paradise. They have plenty of trouble to deal with, like the presence of a team of FBI agents headed up by Richard Jenkins and Vic Manni as Dave and Alvin’s former inmate Vic Mazzucci, who told them about the Paradise bank and is angry that they pulled off the robbery before he could. But the more time they spend around the Paradise locals – including Mädchen Amick and Donald Moffat - the more they realize how good these people are and start to regret robbing them. In its second half, Trapped in Paradise gains a pleasant classic Christmas movie feel.

This movie isn’t nearly as bad as its reputation implies, and that’s not just my nostalgia talking. It has its issues with tone and structure, the humor doesn’t always work, and it’s longer than it needed to be at 111 minutes, but it also has its fun moments and heartwarming elements. Cage, Lovitz, and Carvey... who turns in a bizarre performance that mixes Mickey Rourke style impressions with a high-pitched voice, so it’s like he’s doing an impression of a helium-huffing version of Rourke... all provide some laughs along the way, and it’s just the sort of “nice” movie that’s good to watch during the holiday season.

JUST FRIENDS (2005)

Just Friends is another film I caught on the big screen with my mom – not on my birthday, but probably not far off from it, since it was released less than two weeks before I turned 22. Unlike Trapped in Paradise, this is not a movie I had seen since that theatrical viewing, so I hardly remembered anything about it. All I could really recall is that it involved Ryan Reynolds wearing a fat suit for a portion of the running time, then romancing Amy Smart. Which are both things that can be gleaned from looking at the posters. I didn’t even remember that it was set around Christmastime... but once I was reminded of that fact, I made sure to include it in this year’s seasonal viewings.

The story begins in 1995, which is the section of the film where Reynolds wears a fat suit to play the teenage version of his character Chris Brandner. Chris has a crush on his best friend Jamie Palamino (Amy Smart) – but after his attempt to express his feelings for her at a graduation party goes terribly wrong, he leaves town. Jump ahead ten years and Chris has become a successful record producer with Reynolds’ Blade: Trinity and The Amityville Horror era body, which he uses to get a steady stream of women into bed. He’s assigned to get pop singer Samantha James to sign with the record company... and this is another element of the film I had completely forgotten about: Anna Faris plays Samantha and delivers the funniest performance in the movie as her totally bonkers character. Faris is the comedy MVP of Just Friends and the movie is worth seeing just to watch her in action. Her performance might have been too much for some movies, but given the fact that most of the characters in this one are nuts to some degree, she fits right in here.

Chris catches a flight with Samantha, whose dimwitted actions force the plane to land in New Jersey – not far from Chris’s hometown – just in time for Christmas. So Chris takes Samantha home to stay with his mom (Julie Hagerty) and teenage brother Mike (Christopher Marquette from Freddy vs. Jason), who happens to be infatuated with the singer. During his time in town, Chris crosses paths with Jamie again and sets out to finally get out of the friend zone with her – although he has to compete for her affections with womanizing paramedic Dusty Dinkleman (Chris Klein), who also had a crush on Jamie in high school but found that she was out of his league. She’s not out of his league anymore...

There are some good laughs to be found in Just Friends, which was directed by Roger Kumble from a script by Adam 'Tex' Davis, so I’m not going to wait another eighteen years before watching it again. The weak point of the film is the Jamie character, as she’s rather bland and sometimes pretty crappy. There’s really nothing to her, other than her looks, to explain why people like Chris and Dusty are so intensely drawn to her. So the romantic angle doesn’t quite work, but everything around Jamie is so funny that it doesn’t make much of a difference.