Burying the Lede

We came to watch Burying the Ex (2014) out of Joe Dante love - we wanted to see his latest. It turned out to be very timely.

It stars Anton Yelchin (we'll get to that in a minute). He is kind of a chinless dweeb, with a weedy goatee and a super-hot sexy girlfriend Ashley Green. At least he's not as bad as his half-brother, Oliver Cooper, a repulsive Jonah Hill type we first meet having a kinky 3-way with two beautiful girls. Yes, it's another Hollywood movie about schlubby guys and the way-too-hot for them girls who love them.

Not that Ashley Green is perfect - she is a controlling vegan recycling fanatic who goes from zero to bitch in seconds, especially when Yelchin talks with another woman. So he decides to break up with her, but she is killed before he gets a chance.

All Yelchin wants out of life is to run his own horror-themed giftshop, instead of working in someone else's horror-themed giftshop. And although he feels pretty bad about his dead girlfriend, that girl at the horror-themed ice cream shop seems pretty interested in him (in fact, she won't really take no for an answer). So it's a shame that his dead girlfriend shows up as a zombie.

We enjoyed this movie a lot, although I was constantly annoyed by what a skeevy loser Yelchin and Cooper were and how they were nonetheless inundated with women. That just seems to be an unfortunate reality in modern movie making, like pervasive cigarette smoking in older movies. you just have to factor it in and tune it out. The movie has that Joe Dante look, as if it takes place in a 10% fairytale land, in a town with multiple horror-themed giftshops, a horror-themed ice cream shop ("I Scream") and at least one Goth bar. The horror is mild (the way I like it), and it's mostly pretty funny. Not Dante's best, but a fun watch.

Now, Anton Yelchin. Two days after we watched Burying the Ex, Yelchin was killed in a freak auto accident at age 27. I didn't recognize him when watching this movie, but he plays Ensign Chekov in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot. Once I realized that, I realized that he isn't really a chinless dweeb, he was just playing one in this movie. In fact, we queued up his earlier horror comedy Odd Thomas right away. Then we found out about his death.

It's a darned shame. I'll write up Odd Thomas soon.