(The poster, if it were honest)

It’s been a while since we played this game, so here’s a refresher. The way it works is, we take a movie none of us are probably going to see (say, a Miley Cyrus tear jerker, a J. Lo rom-com, or in this case, a high-larious laffer about Carrie Bradshaw juggling family and career), and try to recreate the plot using quotes from the sad-sack critics forced to sit through it. Because great art comes from limitations, we restrict ourselves to only expository quotes (NO ANALYSIS!). But of course, the thinly-veiled hatred still seeps through, and therein lies the fun. Today’s subject is I Don’t Know How She Does It, starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Greg Kinnear, and Christina Hendricks, based on Allison Pearson’s clit-lit bestseller of the same name. You might be shocked to learn that an SJP vehicle with a condescending title and a script that looks like it was written in 1978 was not a critical darling. Oh I know, I was as shocked as you are, she’s such a hit with the commoners.

Sarah Jessica Parker plays Kate, a harried Boston banker who spends the entire movie warming up leftover working-mom gags. -NYPos

She’s usually a mess: shirt partially untucked, hair uncombed, a splotch of that morning’s breakfast lodged in a crusty clump on her blazer. -AP

Her job as an investment banker has her traveling frequently. -Film.com

We first see Kate, who’s Type-Triple-A, as she desperately repackages a store-bought pie for a bake sale to make it seem homemade. -Chicago Tribune

She narrates the film for us, Carrie Bradshaw-style, letting us know how much she misses her 6-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son when she’s away. -Film.com

“This pie was going to be home-made if it’s the last thing I did,” vows Kate as she hastens to the bake-sale. -Guardian

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As you’ll see later today, I often write film reviews.  But since my site isn’t all film reviews, I have the freedom not to review every film, such as the ones I can tell ahead of time aren’t my cup of tea, and will serve only throw off the curve when I’m trying to form an opinion about something I actually care about later.  Have you ever read an aging critic who’s had to suffer through every Larry the Cable Guy armpit fart and Katherine Heigl queef balloon (or their earlier equivalents) for the last 30 years?  Even the good ones eventually go crazy, just look at Peter Travers.  Last I heard, the man was trying to hail a cab with his own feces.  In any case, this idea eventually gave birth to this game we play, where we take a movie most of us will never have to see, and try to recreate the entire plot using only expository quotes from the poor-bastard critics forced by hateful editors to suffer through it.  We try to use only their faux-neutral summary sections, but the beauty of it is, their utter disdain often still manages to shine through.

Today’s victim is Something Borrowed, starring Kate Hudson.  If you’ve ever seen a movie before, you should know the entire plot of a movie called Something Borrowed starring Kate Hudson ahead of time, but these poors sons of bitches went anyway.  Here’s a cross section of their screams as Kate Hudson spike heeled their testicles (or ovaries).

Ginnifer Goodwin stars as Rachel, a lonely, insecure flibbertigibbet with a knack for getting herself into embarrassing situations. Kate Hudson plays Darcy, her best friend since childhood, but the two have grown into very different people: Goodwin a shy, steady, humble professional and Hudson a bubbly, narcissistic party girl. -AV Club

Darcy and Rachel, both lawyers, live in New York — a place, as rendered by the director, Luke Greenfield, from which anyone seeking diversity and glamour would surely flee for Omaha. -NY Times

(At one point we do see an extra on a park bench engrossed in “Something Blue,” by Emily Giffin, who also wrote the best-selling novel on which “Something Borrowed” is based.) -NY Times

“Something Borrowed” introduces us to Rachel, on the night of her 30th birthday. She’s quietly freaking out about the passage of time because she’s still hopelessly single, the clichéd trademark of so many chick-lit heroines. Meanwhile, her closest pal is about to marry Dex (Colin Egglesfield), Rachel’s good friend from law school. -AP

…a hot rich guy as passive as he is handsome. -EntertainmentWeekly

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Ben Stiller and Robert Deniro’s embarrassing paycheck movie, Little Fockers opens this weekend. I took one look at the trailer and saw that filmmakers thought the fact that “Focker” kind of sounds like “F*cker” was a strong enough joke that they re-used it five times in two minutes and figured it’d be okay for me to sit this one out.  Many of my film critic colleagues, however, aren’t content with simply assuming that hitting one’s penis with a framing hammer will be painful, and had to find out the boner way. I mean hard.  But thanks to those heroes, we can now play the Plot Recreated with Reviews game.

You know how this works: we recreate the plot using only expository quotes — NO ANALYSIS! — from the poor sad bastards who had to sit through it.

ACT I

Nothing much has changed in the household of Gaylord Focker except that everyone is a few years older. [StarTribune]

Jack, who now suffers from serious heart palpitations, is obsessed with finding a successor to his “throne.”  [WashingtonPost]

“Are you ready to be the GodFocker?” he demands. [StarTribune]

Jack decides Greg is having an affair with pharmaceutical rep Andi Garcia… [FilmSchoolRejects]

…[with whom] Greg is working closely peddle Sustengo, an erectile dysfunction pill… [WashingtonPost]

… and who we’re supposed to believe becomes instantly smitten with Stiller after helping him give an anal probe to an elderly patient. [JoBlo]

She shows up at male nurse Focker’s hospital, inexplicably signs him up to give speeches on her erectile-dysfunction drug, then strips down to her undies and jumps him. [NYPost]

Bernie Focker (Dustin Hoffman), struck with a bout of “manopause,” has fled to Spain to study flamenco dancing, while Dina Byrnes (Blythe Danner) is experimenting with kinky role play in hopes of spicing up her and Jack’s sex life. Greg has to impress the headmaster of a snooty private school (Laura Dern) where he wants his children to go. [WashingtonPost]

Owen Wilson hangs around again as the golden best friend to flirt with Greg’s wife again (accidentally, he got a giant back tattoo of her). [NYPost]

"Baby, this is serious: when's lunch?"

For the unfamiliar, there’s this game we like to play.  We take a crappy movie we’re probably not going to see, and try piece together the plot using only exposition (NO ANALYSIS!) from the bored critics forced to suffer through it.  Usually the best targets are Nicholas Sparks-y type movies, with all their sea turtle nests and sailing scholarships to Stanford.  We haven’t had any of those in a while, but this weekend did see the release of Paul Haggis’ The Next Three Days, and what’s Paul Haggis if not a Hollywood Baby Boomer version of Nicholas Sparks?  You’d figure a movie from an Oscar-winning director starring an Oscar-winning actor would’ve gotten more attention than The Next Three Days, unless the studio really thought it sucked, and… well, let’s find out, shall we?

“Crowe plays John Brennan, a Pittsburgh community college literature teacher whose life is upended one morning when his wife, Lara (Elizabeth Banks), is arrested for the murder of her awful boss. The night before, Lara was ranting about how much she hated the soon-to-be-dead woman, so it’s tough to explain away the blood on her coat and her fingerprints at the scene.” -NY DailyNews

“There is just one “fateful” night where everything goes wrong. There’s a dinner, and Lara goes all postal about whether the friction at work is because her boss is a woman.” -LA Times

“Later, in the car, John and Lara enjoy an illicit moment of post-catfight sex. The next day, she’s charged with having murdered a co-worker just moments before arriving at the restaurant.” -Washington Post

“Flash forward to the cops breaking down the door to arrest Lara for the murder. Flash forward again to prison doors slamming. Flash forward yet again to the appeal being denied and her attorney saying to John, ‘Just look at the evidence.’” -LA Times

“But John, raising their 6-year-old son alone, hopes to win Lara an appeal even after three years. When her attorney tells him it’s hopeless, John devises a plan to bust Lara out himself.”  -NY Daily News

“John decides to plunge into the world of drug dealers and meth labs.” -Washington Post

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Clockwork Orange kitty can't unsee Saw

I had fun recreating the plot of Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls with quotes from the reviews, but lest we forget that no race nor group of people has a monopoly on crappy torture porn, I’ve gone ahead and given Saw 3D the same treatment. Turns out Caucasian torture porn involves less rape and slam poetry, but more eyeball drilling and disemboweling. (*More You Know music*).  But before I get to that, my favorite quote, from the NY Times:

The “Saw” franchise has always produced meretricious garbage, with a claim to moral complexity that serves as a fig leaf while we enjoy the sight of limbs being hacked off and heads exploding. (The standard reaction in theaters to these payoff scenes is laughter and cheers.) The one distinctive thing about the films has been their Dadaist quality, brought about by a concentration on elaborate, self-referential game-playing at the expense of story and logic.

“Mmm, yes, Dadaist.  Exactly,” I thought as I farted into a coffee can to save for later use.  Anyway, LET’S PLAY A GAME.

We see Dr. Gordon (Cary Elwes), in the moments after his foot amputation from the first Saw (2004), dragging himself along the floor, then cauterizing his bloody stump on a hot steam pipe. -EW

In a very early sequence, a young woman is suspended above a buzz saw. Her crime was having two lovers, who now have the option to kill one another or agree to raise the saw up and eliminate her. -Boston Globe

Two hunky dudes and the (two-timing) hottie wake up, bound and dazed, in the middle of one of Jigsaw’s vintage torture setups. Each of the dudes faces a circular saw, and the girl is suspended from the ceiling, a third saw poised beneath her bare midriff. Instead of being imprisoned in a disgusting dungeon, they’re on display in an airy glass chamber in the middle of a crowded outdoor mall. As they struggle to get free, spectators gather to watch and even snap cellphone photos. The dudes must decide if they want to save themselves or the girl, which turns out to be not much of a choice. -EW

Then the slaughter commences, with a vital organ or two spurting out at the audience in 3D. -EW

Not much later a gang of racist punks has been rounded up and rigged for group destruction in a rusty garage. -Boston Globe

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