Keep up with The Joneses (movie reviews!) by visiting this page of RottenTomatoes.com. The Joneses currently enjoys a “fresh” rating.

FROM VANITY FAIR: As you read this, you’ve probably learned to tune out any advertisements along the perimeter of your computer screen. So many of us are inundated by advertising nearly everywhere we go these days that we’ve become fairly adept at recognizing it, and deciding in the blink of an eye what’s important and what we can ignore. If we took every word and image offered to us at face value and assigned it equal importance we might go crazy, and surely and quickly go broke. Marketers are aware of our growing ability to tune out though, and as we become more adept at doing so, they become more adept at finding ways to subvert our “Ad-dar.”

First-time director Derrick Borte toys with these ideas in his upcoming film The Joneses (April 16). Into the tony suburbs moves a family of beautiful people, the Joneses (David Duchovny and Demi Moore as Mr. and Mrs. Jones, accompanied by Ben Hollingsworth and Amber Heard as their teenage son and daughter). Fun to look at, fun to be around, the Jones family is a well-oiled machine of self-possession—and actual possession. They quickly befriend the neighbors, and send a ripple that reaches the more moneyed fringes of the community. It’s contagious. People are drawn to them, and to the seemingly endless river of fantastic material goods that flows freely through their hands, house, and yard. It isn’t long before the inevitable happens, and everyone is literally doing their best to keep up with the Joneses.

This is exactly what the Joneses want, but not because they’re a family in possession of grossly large egos. The Joneses aren’t really a family at all, but a team of expert salesmen put together by a stealth-marketing group to virally hawk luxury goods.

Borte, who has a background in advertising (both as a graphic designer and a commercial director), sees the idea as a natural progression from the tactics that advertisers are already employing to sell products. “I’m fascinated by the resourceful ways advertisers use to get products into people’s minds,” he says. “Many people know about the models hired to sit at bars to smoke certain brands of cigarettes. I was very curious about how far advertisers might go to sneak their product into our brains. Instead of the girl at the bar, I placed a family in a McMansion setting, and the Joneses were born.”

When asked how much he thought about product placement in a film that, in a sense, revolves around it, Borte said, “I had to make a creative decision regarding fake versus real products. I felt like fake brands would be too stylized and take the film too far into satire. I really wanted to use real brands wherever possible to help get the natural and disarming quality I felt the film needed.”

Another authentic element to the film is the chemistry between Duchovny and Moore as the faux couple who struggle with a very complicated co-worker relationship. Duchovny, in particular, shines as a man who knows his moral compass is on the fritz, but isn’t quite sure how to fix it. Both actors were drawn to the script for its complexity. “The general concept of the script was fascinating,” Moore said. “I love my role, but I love the dynamics probably even more.” They also jumped at the chance to work with Borte, who not only wrote and directed, but produced as well. “Nobody was going to let me direct unless I controlled the material,” says Borte, “and seven years of putting this together made it inevitable that I would produce as well.” Will he wear this many hats again? “I enjoyed all three jobs, but directing takes enough energy as it is. So I’ll be strictly focusing on that for my next project.” Up next for Borte is a film adaptation of Jess Walter’s novel The Zero, a darkly comic thriller whose title references Ground Zero, the site of the demolished Twin Towers post-9/11.

The 411: Writer and Director Derrick Borte brings us a family movie with a twist starring Demi Moore and David Duchovny. They all seem like a pretty normal all-American family, with their kids played by Amber Heard and American newcomer Ben Hollingsworth. But looks can be deceiving and they all have a few tricks up their sleeves that will help them in their mission but also destroy one of them.

The Good: This is one of the most original movies that I have ever had the pleasure to watch! It’s an original idea with a normal setup where you fall for the main character. It also added something that I personally have never experienced in a movie before. That would be to feel — for real — for the secondary characters. Then, hidden in this non-family film, comes a plot point that wasn’t expected but will surprise a few people.

The Bad: It’s a movie that doesn’t hide trying to be an advertisement for products, such as Audi cars, as you see their logo on the cars that the family drives as well as those of other characters later on in the movie. I really didn’t see the point in Amber Heard’s topless scene. I saw it as just a way to see her nude.

The Last Word: This has the most original plot and story of any movie right now and it is a breath of fresh air to see something new.

Theater, DVD, or Cable: I would recommend that you see the matinee screening.

Source: http://blogcritics.org/video/article/reviews-in-brief-the-joneses/

A brash satire on all-American consumerism, The Joneses takes a smart idea and develops it into an entertaining, modern morality tale. There is an obvious conclusion that the accumulation of material goods does not guarantee happiness and the preachy ending grows a little soft around the edges. Neither David Duchovny nor Demi Moore have a strong box-office track record in recent years but positive reviews for their performances and the film’s exploitable zeitgeist vibe should provide the elements of a successful theatrical release for this enjoyable, thought-provoking fare.

The Joneses begins as a family of four move into a palatial suburban mansion that appears to have stepped straight from the pages of a Sunday supplement. Mom Kate (Demi Moore) and dad Steve (David Duchovny) ooze wealth, happiness and the dream lifestyle.

Their children Mick (Ben Hollingsworth) and Jen (Amber Heard) are no less perfect but it soon becomes clear that this is all too good to be true. Kate and Steve don’t eat together or sleep together and Jen’s behaviour towards her father is not that of a normal daughter.

You begin to suspect they may be a family of serial killers but the reality is much more original. The Joneses work for a mysterious company that pays them to become the coolest people in a community owning all the gadgets and goods that everyone else will want to purchase. They are sales people working on a whole other insidious level.

Derrick Borte’s screenplay keeps you smiling as the family beguile their new circle of friends and neighbours with everything from the latest golf clubs to the flashiest cars, the best diet pills and a Tokyo toilet that becomes the new must-have accessory.

The whole concept is nicely sustained and believable throughout, never tipping into pantomime or feeling it needs to nudge the audience in the ribs with its own cleverness.

Inevitably, the complicated realities of human relationships intrude on this world of Stepford-like perfection. Everything turns messy as feelings start to get in the way of good selling opportunities and some members of the family develop concerns about the ethics of their profession.

Keeping the film to a trim running-time, debut feature director Borte also reveals real flair in casting. Duchovny’s dry humour and easy manner are well suited to Steve’s blandly manufactured charm. Demi Moore’s stern, strictly business demeanour makes for a very convincing Kate, turning her into a latterday equivalent of Faye Dunaway’s monstrous, ratings-obsessed television executive from Network.

The Joneses even has distant echoes of a Paddy Chayefsky screenplay although one in which the bile and anger have been replaced with a general air of bemusement at what has become of the American dream and why people feel the need to define themselves by the possessions they own.

The hopeful ending is something that a Hollywood filmmaker of the 1970s might have avoided but perhaps that’s the price we have to pay for a promising stab at 21st century satire.

Source: http://screendaily.com/

TORONTO — A self-satisfied satire about a quartet of salespeople posing as your average affluent American family, “The Joneses” certainly had a workable premise at its disposal.

But in the hands of first-time writer-director Derrick Borte, what could have been a biting black comedy taking product placement to the logical extreme instead is so obviously predictable that even a savvy cast led by David Duchovny and Demi Moore can’t sell it.

Emerging from the Toronto International Film Festival without a domestic-distribution deal, the film can’t help but draw comparisons to “Confessions of a Shopaholic,” another ill-timed comedy about raging consumerism that few found funny given the current economic climate.

From the get-go, there’s something a little too perfect about the Joneses, the attractive, confident brood that recently moved into their fabulously furnished home in a decidedly upscale suburb.

As it turns out, Steve (Duchovny), Kate (Moore) and their teenaged kids, Jenn (Amber Heard) and Mick (Ben Hollingsworth), aren’t a real family at all but a grouping of slick shills assembled by boss Lauren Hutton with the intention of getting the neighbors to lust after their cool stuff.

They would include the highly acquisitive Larry (Gary Cole) and his wife (Glenne Headly), who turn out to be seriously overextended as it is, and you don’t need a sales manual to see where things are headed.

Borte, who comes from the world of commercials, signals every intended plot twist and turn so far in advance, it’s way too easy to keep up with “The Joneses.” One expects a subliminal message of some sort, but it’s all on the surface.

It still works up to a point, largely because of the persuasive qualities of its cast, notably Duchovny’s raffish charm and Moore’s spirited hustle, which in tandem generates a palpable chemistry.

Or maybe that’s just what they wanted you to think.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

From The LA Times:

In some ways, it’s difficult to tell who is more sex obsessed: David Duchovny, or the rest of us.

The 48-year-old actor issued a statement in August, saying through his lawyer that he’d voluntarily entered a facility for the treatment of sex addiction, and asked for “respect and privacy” as he and his family dealt with the issue. Then again, you already know this by now, because we in the media (and, admit it, you at home) bypassed the whole respecting-his-privacy bit and ran with this story like dogs with a bone.

It was too easy, after all. Duchovny had by this time gained much notoriety –- and a Golden Globe -– for his portrayal of Hank Moody in “Californication,” the Showtime series about a writer who happens to have lots and lots … and lots … of sex. And so it came to be, all of us thinking about it, talking about it, sending it to each other via texts and e-mails that read something to the effect of, “Have you heard!?” The phrase “life imitates art” shot out of us like a tick. News features asking, “What is sex addiction?” followed.

But perhaps herein lies the beating heart of “Californication,” the reason why it stands a real chance of sticking around for a very long time -– that is, if Duchovny is in fact willing and able to return. That reason –- however obvious or ludicrous as it may sound –- is that we’re the ones who should admit that we can’t get enough.

After all, how better to explain the obsessive, non-work-related media coverage that has at one time or another plagued the likes of a Hugh Grant or a Jude Law? (I’d mention their offenses, but something tells me you already know them.)

And we ate up “Sex and the City” for six seasons, didn’t we? And “Gossip Girl” seems to be doing OK. And “Melrose Place” hung around for what seemed like forever. Call me crazy, but when I think of those shows, I think sex. (Ok, I haven’t actually seen “Gossip Girl,” but the advertisements I keep seeing around town -– the ones with the girl looking quite pleased alongside the letters “OMFG” — well, I think I know what they’re trying to sell me.)

Meanwhile, here in L.A., a man named Tom Kapinos has sat back in amusement for the last year, curious by all the fuss that has followed “Californication,” the show he created. The project really began as nothing more than an act of Dawson-cleansing, if you will, and to explain that we should delve into the Kapinos backstory.

Originally from Long Island, he dropped out of film school at NYU and moved to Los Angeles in 1996 to pursue dreams both big and small: He wanted to be a screenwriter, and he also really, really wanted to work at the Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard.

Ironically enough, he wasn’t good enough for Tower –- the store took his resume but never called. He was, however, good enough for the almighty Creative Artists Agency (CAA), which gave him a job as a script reader. He eventually wrote a spec of his own, got it sold (but never made), and soon after that found himself in the writer’s room of “Dawson’s Creek,” where the big question loomed: Should Joey end up with Dawson or Pacey?

” ‘Dawson’s Creek’ was misery at every turn,” he remembers. “It was all about the sanctity of friendship and all just kind of (crap). … Within two years I was running the show, and I was making a lot of money and learning how to run a TV show, but it was miserable.”

When he closed the book on Dawson is when he opened it up for Hank Moody. Why? Because he kept getting offers to do more teen dramas, which was the last thing he wanted to do, and so he turned out “Californication” as a feature-length script to show people a different side of him and his writing. His wife (yes, he’s married, and with kids) persuaded him to turn the feature into a TV pilot, and soon after, Showtime and Duchovny were interested, and then the pilot aired, and then the people talked, mostly about the sex –- Have you seen what Agent Mulder’s up to now?

“My parents are very proud of my success, but they probably wish it was with something more palatable,” Kapinos says. “My mom’s a librarian on Long Island.”

The reviews that have followed “Californication” all seem to fall into the love or loathe category, rarely anything in between. “People who hate it really hate it,” he says, and vice versa. “Quite frankly, I’d rather have those two extremes than, say, ‘Yeah, I watched it, it was fine, but it didn’t have much of an impact on me.’ ”

But what people seem to be missing, he says, is that the sex on his show is there more for comedic effect than for plot. And yes, it does come often and casually, but where many a critic has pointed to that as a flaw, Kapinos says it’s exactly the point.

“One of my goals with the show was to treat sex between consenting adults as matter of fact,” he says. “Because I look around this city and I see a lot of people hooking up and having sex. Sometimes they love each other, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes it means something, sometimes they’re just passing the time.

” ‘Californication’ is a show about a guy who’s trying to find the proper balance between decadence and responsibility. I know it makes a good headline, but the show is not about sex.”

Nor is Hank Moody, he says, a sex addict. “He’s not addicted to sex any more than he’s addicted to cigarettes or booze. Sex just happens to be one of the many vices he’ll indulge in if it happens to come his way.”

And indeed, it comes his way often. In the first season, while unsuccessfully trying to win back his ex-girlfriend, Moody found sex at nearly every other turn, but interestingly enough it was the woman who nearly always initiated the act. That trend continued Sunday night –- Moody was propositioned multiple times but was always forced to decline.

For one thing, he’s got the girl now, having finally won over his ex in last season’s finale. And two, well, he’d just had a vasectomy. Both of those facts made us cringe -– we’re just not used to seeing Happy Hank, or Relationship Hank, or Icing-Down-The-Genitals Hank, but thankfully for us “Californication” fans, he still got himself into plenty of trouble on Sunday, and how this Hank-Karen storyline plays out should be an interesting and fun thing to see.

“I like the thought of having them in this happy place and then leaving them to explore what that means,” Kapinos says about the current season. “A lot of movies end in happy endings and I’ve always thought it’s kind of (bull). We never see the next morning and dealing with that happy ending. If you get what you want, what do you ultimately do with it?”

Hank, it would seem, is bound to let it somehow unravel. And as we did on Sunday night, we will sometimes cringe and sometimes laugh, but rarely have it in us to actually look away. Duchovny as Hank is just too good, too charming, too fun -– so much so that it’s practically impossible to imagine any other actor actually being able to pull this off. And, selfishly, that makes Duchovny’s off-screen problems all the more concerning for us viewers on two different fronts: For one, watching Hank the character and falling into the reality of the storyline is sometimes difficult when many of the scenes now so easily remind us of Duchovny’s personal issues. And related to that, those off-screen issues may make it difficult for him to actually return to the show, given what so often happens on screen.

As for the latter, Kapinos says that in the limited conversation he’s shared with Duchovny since the news broke, the actor hasn’t expressed any indication of not wanting to return. “We’ve been in touch -– not so much right now because he’s deep in the middle of some kind of treatment. But we talked via e-mail when it first went down and he sounded good, sounded like he was on the road to being a happier and healthier person.”

Nevertheless, some people are bound to continue to dwell on just the sex, but “Californication” does in fact have other things going for it, like the heartfelt dialogue between its characters and a sometimes too-honest protagonist.

“Have you been drinking, sir?” a police officer asked an at-the-wheel Hank in Sunday night’s episode. “Hours ago,” he said. “But not to excess. I don’t do that anymore. I mean I do, but not nearly as often as I used to.”

“Have you been smoking marijuana, sir?” the cop later pressed, to which Hank replied, “One hit. One!”

It’s moments like those that make us want to follow Hank Moody wherever he goes. As for how audiences might be affected by the off-screen troubles of David Duchovny, well, “To be honest, they might be more intrigued,” Kapinos says. “Everyone loves a scandal.”

Yes, yes we do.

The film critic I trust the most movie-going dollars? Mr. Roger Ebert. And this is what he has to say about The X-Files: I Want to Believe:

By Roger Ebert

“The X-Files: I Want to Believe” arrives billed as a “stand-alone” film that requires no familiarity with the famous television series. So it is, leaving us to piece together the plot on our own. And when I say “piece together,” trust me, that’s exactly what I mean. In an early scene, a human arm turns up, missing its body, and other spare parts are later discovered.

The arm is found in a virtuoso scene showing dozens of FBI agents lined up and marching across a field of frozen snow. They are led by a white-haired, entranced old man who suddenly drops to his knees and cries out that this is the place! And it is.

Now allow me to jump ahead and drag in the former agents Mulder and Scully. Mulder (David Duchovny) has left the FBI under a cloud because of his belief in the paranormal. Scully (Gillian Armstrong) is a top-level surgeon, recruited to bring Mulder in from the cold, all his sins forgiven, to help on an urgent case. An agent is missing, and the white-haired man, we learn, is Father Joe (Billy Connolly), a convicted pedophile, who is said to be a psychic.

Scully brings in Mulder, but detests the old priest’s crimes and thinks he is a fraud. Mulder, of course, wants to believe Father Joe could help on the case. But hold on one second. Even assuming that Father Joe planted the severed arm himself, you’ll have to admit it’s astonishing that he can lead agents to its exact resting place in a snow-covered terrain the size of several football fields, with no landmarks. Even before he started weeping blood instead of tears, I believed him. Scully keeps right on insulting him right to his face. She wants not to believe.

Scully is emotionally involved in the case of a young boy who will certainly die if he doesn’t have a risky experimental bone marrow treatment. This case, interesting in itself, is irrelevant to the rest of the plot except that it inspires a Google search that offers a fateful clue. Apart from that, what we’re faced with is a series of victims, including Agent Dakota Whitney (Amanda Peet) and eventually Mulder himself, who are run off the road by a weirdo with a snowplow.

Who is doing this? And why does Father Joe keep getting psychic signals of barking dogs? And is the missing agent still alive, as he thinks she is? And won’t anyone listen to Mulder, who eventually finds himself all alone in the middle of a blizzard, being run off the road, and then approaching a suspicious building complex after losing his cell phone? And how does he deal with a barking dog?

I make it sound a little silly. Well, it is a little silly, but it’s also a skillful thriller, giving us just enough cutaways to a sinister laboratory to keep us fascinated. What happens in this laboratory you will have to find out for yourself, but the solution may be more complex than you think if you only watch casually. Hint: Pay close attention to the hands.

What I appreciated about “The X-Files: I Want to Believe” was that it involved actual questions of morality, just as “The Dark Knight” does. It’s not simply about good and evil but about choices. Come to think of it, Scully’s dying child may be connected to the plot in another way, since it poses the question: Are any means justified to keep a dying person alive?

The movie lacks a single explosion. It has firearms, but nobody is shot. The special effects would have been possible in the era of “Frankenstein.” Lots of stunt people were used. I had the sensation of looking at real people in real spaces, not motion-capture in CGI spaces. There was a tangible quality to the film that made the suspense more effective because it involved the physical world.

Of course, it involves a psychic world, too. And the veteran Scottish actor Billy Connolly creates a quiet, understated performance as a man who hates himself for his sins, makes no great claims, does not understand his psychic powers, is only trying to help. He wants to believe he can be forgiven. As for Duchovny and Anderson, these roles are their own. It’s like they’re in repertory. They still love each other, and still believe they would never work as a couple.

Or should I say they want to believe?

The movie is insidious. It involves evil on not one level but two. The evildoers, it must be said, are singularly inept; they receive bills for medical supplies under their own names, and surely there must be more efficient ways to abduct victims and purchase animal tranquilizers. But what they’re up to is so creepy, and the snow-covered Virginia landscapes so haunting, and the wrong-headedness of Scully so frustrating, and the FBI bureaucracy so stupid, and Mulder so brave, that the movie works like thrillers used to work, before they were required to contain villains the size of buildings.

The reviews are starting to come in! So far, so good! Visit RottenTomatoes.com to read them

Visit RottenTomatoes.com to read reviews of The TV Set.

“It’s a sheer pleasure to watch David Duchovny as a desperate househusband in the romantic comedy TRUST THE MAN. With flawless timing and a sly smile, the former X-Filer steals the show – impressive, considering he shares the screen with Julianne Moore, Billy Crudup, and Maggie Gyllenhaal.”

-OPRAH WINFREY

The reviews are starting to come in and they are good! Trust the Man is currently enjoying a 100% FRESH rating at RottonTomatoes.com.