Chasing Liberty (2004)

Director: Andy Cadiff

Cast: Mandy Moore, Matthew Goode, Jeremy Piven, Mark Harmon

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. I did watch First Daughter (2004) all the way through, for obvious reasons. I feel like that should count for something.

Did I Like It: Sometimes your wife has a bad day, and you say, “We can watch whatever you want.”

And she picks this.

And you already agreed to it.

So we watched it.

And there’s nothing terribly wrong with it. 

The locations are nice and varied. The extended sequences in Prague use several of the same locations from Mission: Impossible (1996), one of my favorites. The scenes in Venice bring to mind films like Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019), and I’m more than a little embarrassed that was the only film shot in Venice which I could reach for in this moment... Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)! There, I found another one.

Mandy Moore is likable, and that will paper over a lot of blandness in a romantic comedy, and there is more than enough to go around here. I was starting to call out plot points for the film long before they came to pass. 

The film is a McDonald’s cheeseburger. It has no inherent value on its own. It is an imminently predictable experience. But in the end, it’s fine. Damning with faint praise? Sure. But I could damn it with other things, so maybe the film should take the win.

But let’s get to my real criticism: Mark Harmon plays the fatherly President, and that’s fine. I probably prefer him as a Secret Service agent, but that’s what happens when you steep yourself in The West Wing. First Daughter, on the other hand, has Michael Keaton as the President, so frequent visitors to the site will know which film I give the win.

...yes, the reason, I watched First Daughter was because Keaton was the President. Obvious reasons.

Saved! (2004)

Director: Brian Dannelly

Cast: Jena Malone, Mandy Moore, Macaulay Culkin, Patrick Fugit

Have I Seen it Before: Several times. It’s one of my wife’s favorite movies, so it ends up being a movie I see roughly once a year.

Did I Like It: It’s charms cannot be denied. It could have been like any other number of teen comedies, especially of the era, but it manages to transcend.

Most teen movies are going to have the same general structure. Characters fall in and out of love. Misunderstandings abound. It all ends in a prom or other dance. To my mind, only John Hughes could eschew this format, and he only did so some of the time, and only when he tightened the focus of his adolescent epics to the timespan of one day. Even that most perfect of all movies, Back to the Future (1985) can’t quite pull out of that particular orbit.

So it is, too, with Saved. Many movies in the genre are content to hit those same beats and offer nothing new. They are quickly forgotten. What separates those special stories—like Saved!—that live within the trappings of a genre and manage to transcend things. For one thing, it’s the setting. While some version of Christianity is probably still prevalent in America, most can’t say they went to a private Christian academy for their High School.

Even I can’t say that, and I tragically got all of my education in the state of Oklahoma. Even if the setting is alien and interesting, the characters are familiar, or at the very least feel real. The writing is certainly critical to this quality, the performances cannot be ignored. Mandy Moore—long before she established her acting bonafides in NBC’s This Is Us—paints a villain that is both blindingly frustrating and totally human in her hostility. Mary-Louise Parker normally plays knowing and shrewd characters, but here plays largely oblivious but ultimately decent with the same level of believability. The relationship between Macaulay Culkin and Eva Amurri—despite coming from what on paper appears to be supporting characters—is the emotional heart of the film, as they are the true strangers in this strange land, but still manage to cut through any artifice they might have needed to survive only to believably wear their pathos on their sleeves. Other movies would be content to have cookie cutter characters lurching to something akin to life by actors either too bored or too unwilling to bring anything interesting to the proceedings.

That may be the secret to any film that exceeds expectations. Just tell a story using a familiar structure, in a completely unusual setting, with interesting characters. It must also be perfectly cast.

That easy, right?