Hand Coding

Full disclosure: Grace Hill Media offered bloggers a free screening pass in exchange for writing an entry about In Good Company; I participated in that offer.

I saw In Good Company last night. I’d been seeing commercials for it on TV for weeks and a few ads appeared in my TiVo as well; and, it looked pretty good from those ads. To be honest, you probably already have an opinion about this movie, one way or another. And, if you liked what you saw in the trailers, you’ll like this movie.

One fault of the trailers is that they portray this as a fish-out-of-water story, which is only partially true. In short, 26 year-old Carter Duryea (played by Topher Grace) suddenly becomes the boss of Dan Foreman (played by Dennis Quaid) as he takes on the role of head of advertising at a sports magazine. However, that scenario is only a major plot device for about the first half hour.

Past that, it gets into personal and personnel relationships. In particular, Dan’s daughter Alex (played by Scarlett Johansson) becomes romantically interested in Carter. On top of that, Carter has to adjust to his new position within the company.

Really, I knew what I was getting into when I walked in to the theater — one run through the trailer clearly defines the scope of the film. All the same, this isn’t another paint-by-numbers romantic-dramedy. You may think you know what’s going to happen, but it doesn’t always work out that way.

At one point, I was even hoping for the ever-elusive Accountants Ending. (For those unaware, the “accountants ending” is the prototypical unexpected ending for a fictional work: Two men face off at the end, about to kill one another. Then, one interjects “Do you think we should just become accountants?” to which the other replies “Well, right-o. Let’s do that.”)

I enjoyed the characters and the film as a whole; and I also found the set design notably charming. In the scenes taking place within Dan’s house, the furniture, lamps and bookshelves all seemed authentic to a man of his position in life. The sets within the office-oriented scenes were also good, though I did notice an annoying tendency to use underlighting — such as from podiums and even conference tables — that I couldn’t imagine any actual office having.

Some critics describe a movie's worth in terms of whether it’s worth seeing in the theater, as a rental, or not at all. And, as I was walking out of the theater, I was trying to ask myself that question. I was generally leaning towards “maybe a rental”, but I think I’ll qualify that. If you liked the trailer and you like Topher Grace as an actor, you can’t go wrong with seeing this in the theater — it may not be high literature, but you’ll have a good time.

I do have a few minor gripes about the movie, primary of which is that the director and/or score composer didn’t always trust his audience to “know how to feel”. For the most part, the script could have stood on its own; but, there were times where I’d notice a sappy acoustic guitar piping in as if to say “See? You’re feeling all mushy inside, right?”.

In addition to that, Johansson’s lips looked swollen throughout the flick. I've seen her in other works, notably Lost in Translation, but her lips just seemed to big for her own face here. Really, in her first scene, I thought that the make-up artist had just done a shoddy job — that he/she had not “colored within the lines” when applying Johansson’s lipstick.

Another nit was Carter’s Porsche 911 Carrera. One of the first scenes clearly establishes him buying an automatic — as he drives out of the dealership, the camera cuts to a view of his hand putting the car into “D” or such. However, a running joke throughout the movie is that he can barely drive this car. Now, setting aside the cliche that is the Can’t Drive A Manual joke, the joke isn’t even relevant with an automatic transmission. Driving such a car is just a matter of pressing one’s foot down on the skinny pedal towards the right ;).