Vintage

I sat through another romantic comedy flick the other day during a marathon I am ashamed to call “All Aniston All Day” or something like that on the Lifetime network.  If I need to tell you this is all and only because my wife likes these sorts of feel good romantic romps (as opposed to some reason I might actually go out of my way to watch one), then we should promptly engage in a Tarantino-esque Mexican standoff.

Management starts off as a fairly interesting chick flick, so far as one a dude might like to sit through this feel reel with his broad at his side.  It involves a hapless and unassuming dude Mike (Steven Zahn) who runs the family motel business as life checks in and out all stemming from the outside Interstate of people with real jobs.  One fine day, Sue (Jennifer Aniston) checks in for a business meeting.  Mike is immediately smitten.  He devises a plan to win her attention.

First, he brings her a bottle of wine compliments of “management”  Ah, now, you know why the movie is called what it is called.  He lingers a little longer than he should and she studies him oddly, like a lost puppy with his tongue dangling.  Still, she she gets back to her work.  The next day, the puppy, ah, Mike, is back with a comp bottle of bubbly. Now Sue begins to suspect he has other thoughts more so than just delivering comps and lingering like a moron in her hotel room.

At this point in the film, it has the potential to be a halfway decent flick.  Perhaps the film’s most memorable moment is when Sue lets Mike touch her butt.  This is quite comical and both Aniston and Zahn have good chemistry.  Anniston has a nice butt too.  
Unfortunately, all hope is lost for Management when Mike really turns out to be just about as dumb and optimistic and mentally challenged as Forrest Gump.  Still, they do the nasty and inevitably Sue decides to leave against her inner soul’s sense that this village idiot is her true love.

Now the movie gets quite awful.  Sue leaves Mike for Jango (Woody Harrelson) who is an ex-punk now rich because of some yogurts he sold.  I felt this was totally out of left field and not believable at all, that Sue would like a wild douche bag like Jango.  I think it would have been more believable and just as  good as of a comedic canvass if Sue was not happy with a boring lawyer or something like that.  They set sue up as sensible and wanting something more.  I could see her bored with a middleclass lifestyle motivated by materialism.  This Jango was a machination of some screen writer who thought the weirder the better.   Speaker of which: Woody Harrelson?  This is a guy who wants so badly to be cool but who for the most part is a douche bag.

Anyway, Mike travels across the country with virtually no money to find Sue.  He gets a job in an Asian restaurant where he befriends a young Asian American.  This guy helps him make really stupid contraptions on bicycles on which they mount a keyboard.  In what the filmmakers clearly thought would be a scene to mimic Say Anything, Mike serenades Sue with a rendition of Bad Company’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love…”   The scene came across as retarded.

This movie was confused.  It wanted to be both a Forrest Gump and a Dumb and Dumber at the same time.  It was neither.

It gets worse.  Mike becomes a Buddhist monk (no joke).  Takes a hanggliding class or two.  He finally calls Jango toward the end of the film at which point he discovers that she left  his ex-punk lifestyle.
Moreover, Sue actually claims to have gotten knocked up during the film by Jango and that she wanted to keep the baby.  You see Mike and Sue did the nasty in the motel earlier.  I was convinced then the baby would surely be Mike’s at the merciful end of this flick.  However, the child, so far as I can tell, was merely forgotten about completely by the end of the film.  

In the end, Mike wins over Sue with his plans to convert the motel to a homeless shelter with recreational facilities, where they can serve soup, live happily ever after and grab each other’s asses.  I say grab the remote.