My Super Ex-Girlfriend
Little Man
My Super Ex-Girlfriend
In the comedy My Super Ex-Girlfriend, Jenny (Uma Thurman) is a geeky, emotionally unstable woman who falls for regular guy Matt (Luke Wilson). Jenny also happens to be G-Girl, New York's local superhero who flies through the air preventing accidents, putting out fires, and deflecting missiles. Feeling that Jenny/G-Girl is both weird and emotionally dependent, Matt breaks up with her. But hell hath no fury like a superwoman scorned, and G-Girl's fits of jealous rage include throwing a great white shark into Matt's apartment when she catches him with a female colleague. The whole story feels like it was hatched in a script-writing workshop for Beavis and Butthead. Beavis: "Dude, let's make Superman a desperate single chick, get her laid, get her dumped and then get her some sweet, super-powered revenge." Butthead: "Dude, Super idea!" Beavis and Butthead may well have inspired the dialogue as G-Girl utters memorable lines like "Say you'd rather have a chainsaw shoved up your ass than tell [my identity]," and "You know how you tried to steal my boyfriend by being such a big fat whore?" How hilarious. Although directed by Hollywood veteran Ivan Reitman, this film is amateurish and a super waste of talent for its two stars.
( Sherwin Das )
"My Super Ex-Girlfriend" is a genuinely odd little film. Jenny Johnson (Uma Thurman) is a shy, bespectacled art history expert by day and glamorous super-heroine G-Girl by night. Both incarnations fall in love with shy, bumbling architect Matt Saunders (Luke Wilson) after he gives chase to a thief who grabs her bag on the subway. But it soon turns out that G-Girl is a rampaging neurotic with a murderous jealous streak. Freud would have had an absolute field day with this film. The script is positively seething with ambivalence and even outright hatred toward women, with G-Girl alternately terrorizing her boyfriend by tossing a live shark through his apartment window and begrudgingly saving the city from missile attacks. But it's not all bad. There's an amusing turn by Eddie Izzard as G-Girl's arch nemesis Professor Bedlam and it occasionally really hits the spot as a spoof on the whole superhero genre. There are worse ways you could spend your time than watching this but, then again, there are millions, no billions of better ways too. They should have cut to the chase and called it "My Super Sex-Girlfriend." As ever, that's what it really comes down to.
( Tim Ochser )
Little Man
Writing a movie column improves your active vocabulary. As I watched "Little Man," I tried to think of as many synonyms for "repugnant" as I could. The film is about an ex-con dwarf and his dim-witted accomplice who steal a diamond and then, while being pursued by police, stash it in the purse of an unsuspecting woman. Overhearing how much the lady's husband wants to be a father, our pint-sized protagonist comes up with the ingenious idea of posing as a baby in order to retrieve the gem. When the unsuspecting couple takes the baby in, hilarity apparently ensues. The idea of using computer-generated special effects to transpose a comic actor's face onto the body of a dwarf to make a midget comedy is disturbing enough. Even more distasteful is watching a licentious, foul-mouthed "baby" in diapers punch people in the face, grope women's breasts, rub food in his private parts, and sneak into the couple's bed at night to copulate with the oblivious wife. It's an endless series of crude and unfunny gags that scrapes the very bottom of the humor barrel and shovels it into a movie which is infantile, pathetic, despicable, repulsive and just plain godawful.
(Sherwin Das )
I really have no words for this film so I'll just have to improvise instead. Some simple-minded people hold the philosophical belief that every man has a "big" brain and a "little" brain. The "little" brain is believed to be located in the penis and due to its littleness is generally held to be less objective and insightful than the "big" brain. The "little" brain is therefore frequently forgiven for behaving with reckless stupidity, while the "big" brain gets burdened with all the blame. This supposed anatomical difference in cerebral size is, of course, an inverted metaphor for male attitudes toward penis size, in which "little" really means "big." And it is this perverse logic which brings us back to "Little Man." The little man in question is a dwarf criminal (Marlon Wayans) who poses as a cute baby to get adopted by a family holding the key to his hidden loot. The little man then proceeds to behave very much like a "big" man with every woman he meets by lunging at silicon-enhanced breasts and generally going gaga at the slightest whiff of sex. Even the notoriously little-brained pigeon generally behaves with more dignity when it comes to courtship.
( Tim Ochser )
