Ted

Ted is a hilarious 10-minute sketch crammed into an excruciating 106-minute movie.

Here's the sketch: a lonely boy wishes that his teddy bear would come to life and be his best friend forever. The wish comes true and the boy and his bear grow into two lazy, irresponsible, couch-bound weed monkeys. The bear says and does lots of vulgar stuff, which is funny coming from a teddy bear. That's about it.

This makes for an amusing first act. Mark Wahlberg is game for just about anything as the grown-up slacker, and the animators who created the bear do phenomenal work. The joke wears thin by the second act, however. By the third, we're checking our watches and wondering if we have any socks that need folding.

What's bad about it? First, Wahlberg is horribly miscast as the aforementioned couch-bound weed monkey. While he's a fine actor who's willing to work for a laugh, the fact is that he looks like a bodybuilder. I submit that it's impossible to be both a lazy, irresponsible, couch-bound weed monkey and a bodybuilder. Bodybuilding requires dedication, discipline, and a work ethic. Every time the movie showed me Wahlberg's character sprawled out on the couch, with a beer to one hand and a bong to the other, all I could think was, “Shenanigans. This guy looks like he spends his time drinking protein shakes and doing hammer curls. I'm just not buying it.”

And the love interest? I felt actively sorry for Mila Kunis in this picture. Not only was she trying to play a character wholly in love with an unlovable man, she looked so thin that I wanted to shout, “Hey, Wahlberg, how about sharing one of your protein shakes with this poor woman? She looks like she's about to collapse!”

The score is boring. The cinematography is boring. The direction is lackluster. While watching this film, I felt that I was making a conscious choice to fritter away my precious time on this earth. Yes, I laughed during the first act, and I think Ted's premise would make for a terrific “Funny or Die” short. But as a feature film? Ted is worse than bad: it's boring. I feel cheap just for taking the time to write about it.

Alien

Oh, Alien is so good.

Here’s a movie that takes its time in the setup, and it pays huge dividends in the second and third acts.  When the crew members of the space cargo ship Nostromo awaken to a distress call from an alien world, we get to know them.  We get to know their ship and its layout.  These things matter, because the Nostromo’s world is one that has been lived in for quite some time, and we need to feel that it’s commonplace, that these are ordinary Joes doing an ordinary job.

Because when Hell breaks loose, we’ve become keyed up and ready.  When people start dying, we know who they are and have become invested in their fates.  When the alien’s acid blood starts eating through decking, we know what that means and can figure just how close the ship is coming to catastrophic hull breach.

This leads me to wonder: why is this so hard?  Why do so many filmmakers not seem to understand that the key to narrative film, even genre-type horror and science fiction, lies in the characters and their environment?  If we don’t believe in the characters and their world, we won’t believe in their predicaments or their heroism.  If we don’t believe in the characters, all we have is light and sound. 

Alien believes in its characters, and it makes us believe.  That’s what makes the film so effective, so scary, to this very day.  When many of the films we know have passed out of memory, audiences will still watch Alien.  If they’re smart, so will filmmakers.  This film has much to teach them.