Review of The Joneses (2010) by Tim T — 08 Apr 2011

This review has spoilers. But I wouldn't recommend watching it anyway. The preview is much better than the time it takes to watch the movie, which would've been better off as a short.

From the preview the Joneses seemed like it would be a smart, entertaining movie about the pressures of shallow consumerism.

In a sense that was the core premise, but who knows who got their hands on the script, which possibly started out brilliant, to add Zirconiaesque facets of trainwreck drama: the slutty daughter banging one of the sleezy married men, the secretly gay son involved in the drunken car crash injuries of his counter culture girlfriend, the suicide of a desperate neighbor going way too deep into debt to satisfy his wife with household baubles he can't afford--what a steaming truckload of downer city.

Aside from that, David Duchovny's romantic, former almost-golf-pro/car salesman-dadguy character, and his whole moral conscious being compromised business, was asinine. He knew what he was getting into, but he falls so hard for his fake wife Demi Moore, who's stiffer than starch on a taxidermy weekend, that his nagging conflict of self-destructive second thoughts regarding the whole "pretend we're a family to sell bullshit to these vapid materialists sales rep game" decimates everything.

And I'm thinking more than a few times while watching this movie--do any of these people even want to be here? Because they all look like they'd rather be somewhere else, like in the past, making halfway decent movies, like Ghost.