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I watched the movie “Yes Man” last night, starring Jim Carrey. The story, for those who aren’t familiar, is about a man, Carl, who has been closed off and has purposely isolated himself from his friends and work ever since his wife Stephanie, divorced him. He blows of his friends, he is extremely conservative at work (he works as a loan officer in at a bank) and doesn’t go to any of the parties his boss throws. Then one day, an old friend shows up to him and tells him that his life would be a lot better if he comes to this “Yes” seminar.

At first, Carl is resistant to going, but after he misses his best friend’s engagement party, he realizes that he needs to start making some serious changes in his life. At the seminar, he is convinced into making a “covenant with himself” where he promises to say “Yes” to everything. He is warned that the universe would punish him if he said no to anything, but he’d find out then when he said “yes” to things, good things happened.

(Mild Spoilers After the Fold, but really, not anything you couldn’t have seen in the previews)

His first try at saying “Yes” to things at first seems like an epic fail. He gives a homeless person a ride, and gives him the use of his cell phone and all of his money. This means his car ends up out of fuel, and his cell phone runs out of batteries. He must then walk to a gas station quite a distance away. But this actually turns out to be the best thing, because he meets Allison, a cute girl on a Vespa that offers to give him a ride back.

Carl then opens up his life to all sorts of possibilities; learning to play the guitar, speak Korean, and do all sorts of other things that he wouldn’t have done otherwise. Of course, this isn’t all sunshine and roses; his friends, who are a little miffed at how much he was blowing them off lately, do abuse this new found “yes” to have him buy drinks, which leads to him getting into a fight. But generally, his whole “yes to life” has really opened him up to new possibilities.

Even more spoilers now, stop reading if you don’t want to hear them.

The movie, for being kind of a popcorn flick, had some really interesting points in it, and some really disturbing points. When Mr. Allen becomes open to saying “yes” to things, he comes under the watch of Homeland Security, for among other things, buying last-minute tickets to Lincoln, Nebraska with cash (and a whole series of events, you really need to watch the movie to get the gist of it). I found that to be an interesting social commentary about how when you become a “non-conformist” you immediately get labeled “terrorist” in the eyes of the government.

It was also sort of interesting that the movie writers seemed to think that not enough people were getting loans, particularly personal loans. In the movie, when Carl started to approve everyone, not only did a lot of these business really take off, but he gets a promotion for his work, because as his boss puts it “He has a 98% repayment rate” on nearly 600 loans.

There was one disturbing scene where after hanging some shelves for his “sweet” elderly neighbor, she asks if he would like some “sexual release”. He at first says no, but after the universe “punishes” him by having him fall down some stairs and be face-to-face with an attack dog, he says “yes” to the opportunity and apparently has the best blow job ever. This scene was a little bit too close to sexual assualt for my tastes. Yes, it wasn’t technically rape; he did have every ability to say no, and she was going to leave it at that (plus, had no knowledge of his “say yes to everything” thing). But, it seemed a little twisted.

And that’s when I realized; this movie could have never been played by a female-lead. She would have had to do at least 3 sex acts in the first 20 minutes of being at any bar, and she would be labeled as a slut nearly as fast. Not to mention, giving a homeless guy a ride to the middle of nowhere would have been considered extremely stupid, and probably would have ended up with her being berated by her friends, and then accepting a ride from an unknown stranger would have been even dumber. This movie would have been a horror if played with a woman saying “yes” to everything.

I also then realized the very real money aspect to this flick. It was all well and good for Carl to up and decide that he should start taking all of these really interesting classes and pulling all-nighters; but most people don’t make 65,000 dollars a year and have no family to take care of. The whole movie just screamed “class based” from the get go.

So, not a terrible film, all in all, with a pretty good message: be open to new possibilities. But, a little unrealistic, and completely gender-and-class based.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Punkass!, Entertainment, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.