A Top Ten for Tuesday: Best Renee Zellweger Facial Expressions in Case 39

I don't want to put too fine of a point on it, but this blog entry is perhaps my finest moment. My crowning achievement! I am sure you'll all agree once you've finished processing just how great it is. Really.

No, but in all seriousness... have y'all seen this movie? Case 39 isn't as dreadful as I had heard and had hoped. Instead it was not much more than a mediocre scary child movie. Although, most disappointing of all, there were several moments when I actually thought it could have been something more and yet went nowhere. I think back particularly to the moment when Renee Zellweger's character of "Emily Jenkins" decides her recently fostered child (16-year-old Jodelle Ferland as "Lily") is the devil, and upon bringing this up with Ian McShane's policeman character as he walks out of Sunday morning mass she says "you'll believe it in there, but now out here?" But, as I said, it doesn't do anything with any of the possibly interesting questions it raises and instead just makes Bradley Cooper grow a hornet's nest inside his skull. So nuanced.

Nevertheless, the most entertaining aspect of Case 39 is Renee Zellweger's face. It's a bizarre mix between botched chemical peel and a serious case of bee sting puffiness (I've heard of "bee-stung lips", but this is ridiculous). It's not like Zellweger's face looks so nipped and tucked that she can't show expressions, but something has gone seriously wrong there as of late and now all her expressions are chucklesome and/or outright hilarious. Let's count down my ten favourite, shall we?


10. The Look: "I know what you're up to you evil child, but I can't let you know that."

It's also her "maybe if I look like Dianne Wiest I will be as respected as Dianne Wiest" look, I think.


9. The Look: "My character is a real person. See! This is all the character development I need!"

I love how they've tried to be like the opening credits of How I Met Your Mother by creating a shorthand bond with the characters with one photograph. She's all "yes! somebody cast me in a movie!!" and he's all "what?"


8. The Look: "Sometimes I pretend I'm a fish on drugs."

Perhaps unfair since her character is emerging out of the water after driving her demon child into the river, but it's quite an unfortunate look, no?


7. The Look: "I'm a sexy woman who goes to bars to meet men, won't you hit on me please? *flirt*"

Her love interest in Case 39 is Bradley Cooper. Just think about this for a second, okay? And then remember that Bradley Cooper actually dated Renee Z in real life. Just think about that for a few seconds, okay? Doesn't compute, right? Yeah.


6. The Look: "I just saw you shove a young child into the oven. Also, my hair is really bad."

I'll give Renee this, her character had just seen a small child get put into an oven to get roasted so this expression is quite appropriate.


5. The Look: "Hi, I'm Lindsay Lohan - you may remember me as the star of Mean Girls and I Know Who Killed Me."

Seriously. I can't be the only one who thinks this shot of her makes her look like Lindsay Lohan and that is not a good thing to be reminding anybody of.


4. The Look: "I am Renee Zellweger, apparently, and I am Amish, apparently."

If you showed me this image out of context and told me it was Renee Zellweger, I'm not sure I would believe you. Honestly. Also: What's with all the brown?


3. The Look: "When confronted by an ancient evil demon child always remember what you learnt in lamaze class."

"LOL"


2. The Look: "I am Margaret Cho's mother."

Seriously, whenever I look at this image I think of this...


That is not a good thing since Renee Zellweger is neither Asian nor an old stereotype joke (albeit a funny one).

Oh, yeah, Renee isn't all that funny these days either. had you noticed? Unless, of course, you're talking about...


1. The Look: "My child is a spawn of Satan, plus she smells bad."

Does this not send you into fits of laughter like it did for me? DOES IT NOT?!? I can recall the situation in which this scene takes place and I can't quite figure out how Renee managed to pull this face. Every time I glance at it I laugh and, I guess, that's bonus points for the film. I just wish the film as a whole hadn't have been so stony faced with its ridiculousness.

Review: Limitless

Limitless
Dir. Neil Burger
Year: 2011
Aus Rating: M
Running Time: 105mins

There is a scene right smack bang at the start of Neil Burger’s Limitless that zooms in on a dishevelled and raggedy-looking Bradley Cooper crossing the street. His voice-over intones that the reason he looks so homeless is because, wouldncha know it, he is a writer. Not necessarily a struggling one – a small, but convenient, New York City apartment with a sink of overflowing dishes that suggests he can at least afford food, plus a book deal with cash advance suggests otherwise – but a writer nonetheless. Being a writer, for Hollywood, means depressed, untidy and a general mess in the whole life-having department.

Cooper’s Eddie Morra walks the street looking alternatively drug addicted or in need of shelter. He stumbles about in tracksuit pants and with long, greasy hair trailing down from his scalp. As a writer myself, I can say that I have never looked like this. In fact, despite the precarious financial position that many of us find ourselves in – including the adult ones who have grown up, don’t include take out as their dietary staple and maybe even married – many of the creative types that I know are some of the most stylish people I know. I, for one, would never walk to the shops in trackies and smelling of canned fish, let alone around New York City.


Of course, this is all a rather silly sticking point to centre a review of Limitless around. Especially since this film features stuff like: the positive side of drug addiction; Bradley Cooper drinking blood and stabbing people in the eye with hypodermic needles; bizarre going nowhere subplots about a murdered skank (both this and Barney’s Version, out next week, feature a murder mystery subplot that literally goes nowhere); Abbie Cornish using an eight-year-old girl as a weapon and all sorts of other silliness you could only ever expect to see in a movie.

And yet Limitless doesn’t go far enough for my liking. When the absurdity really hits the fan in the final act, I couldn’t help but wish the entire movie had been as loopy. The sounds of horror and hilarity at the aforementioned blood-drinking scene by the crowd I saw it with was amusing in itself. The hyperactivity suggested by the wonderful opening credits sequence is there throughout the film’s entirety, but it strikes me more as a film that realised its inherent silliness a bit too late into production.


With his first solo lead role, Bradley Cooper makes a good enough go at being another in a long line of hunky, if not exactly rangey, actors like Matthew McConaughey and Ryan Phillippe (both of whom are, against time and space, starring together in an upcoming movie). Cooper has a bit of a brighter spark than those two and it must be said that he looks great in and out of a suit, so there is that too. Abbie Cornish is, surprisingly, the film’s greatest asset, no matter how underutilised she is. Cornish hasn’t been this bright eyed and beautiful yet, having usually been stuck with portraying miserable or quiet and introspective types in the past. With Limitless and the upcoming Sucker Punch, perhaps she’s coming out of her shell a bit, and for that I would be very thankful.

Audiences likely won’t overdose on Limitless - it is not a never-ending series of ridiculously entertaining absurdity like, say, The Green Hornet - but what’s there is perhaps just good enough to get a slight buzz. C+