Get ready to sizzle with “One Hot Summer,” the story of a beautiful Cuban-American lawyer who is torn between her husband and an old boyfriend as she and her two best friends try to follow their hearts to love and happiness. The cast includes Vanessa Marcil, Casper Van Dien, and Jon Seda.
I have copies to give away! Send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com telling me what you love most about summertime and you may be a winner.
NOTE: DVDs provided by the production company; all opinions are my own.
Jackie Chan, the most graceful and acrobatic of men when it comes to action scenes, is also one of the most clumsy when it comes to dialogue. So it is clever to cast him as a man who is awkward and unsure of himself in any situation that doesn’t involve his unique combination of tumbling, gymnastics, martial arts, and defying gravity.
In “The Spy Next Door,” he plays Bob Ho, a Chinese agent on loan to the CIA, investigating a Russian bad guy named Poldark (Icelandic star Magnús Scheving). With Poldark captured, Bob has another target in mind, his beautiful next-door neighbor Gillian (Amber Valletta). They have been dating for three months, and he would like to marry her. But there are three problems — her children. Oh, and he has not told Gillian what he does for a living. She thinks he has a nice boring job selling pens.
Gillian has to go away to care for her father just as Poldark escapes. And Bob has to take care of the kids and stop the bad guy. At any given moment, it is hard to say which is the more challenging, or more dangerous. As someone says in the movie, “Spying is easy; parenting is hard.”
Yes, it’s silly, but it is the kind of entertaining silliness that is aimed squarely at eight-year-olds who are old enough to enjoy the action and young enough to think an adult saying “poop” is funny. Chan is a long way from his best years as an action star, briefly glimpsed in the opening credits to depict his character’s career as a spy. But he can still dazzle with stunts that are part ballet, part juggling, and part magic. It is fun to see him flip a folding chair with his foot, making perfection look easy, but it is just as much fun to see him in the traditional closing credit-sequence outtakes, showing us that it is even harder than we guessed. Kids, don’t try this at home.
The film does a good job of keeping things light on the good guys vs. bad guys part of the story, with bad guy Poldark repeatedly confounded by being forced to wear clothes that do not meet his standards of elegance and fashion. He and his partner are more silly than scary, clearly inspired by Boris and Natasha with their thick Cold War accents, wacky schemes, and pratfalls. As Bob has to find a way to win the hearts of each of the kids the movie finds some unexpected sweetness and even a quiet moment or two amid the mayhem. The very appealing Madeline Carroll (“Swing Vote”) plays Gillian’s step-daughter who is still hoping that her father will come back. She does a particularly nice job as the sulky teenager who does not want to admit even to herself how much she depends on Gillian. She is such a natural that she even makes Chan seem to relax when the two of them sit companionably on the roof together.
Kids will relate to the parallels between espionage and parenting, especially when Bob has to find a four-year-old in a princess costume in a mall filled with girls in shiny pink dresses and when he uses his spy gear to spot contraband like snacks being taken upstairs. And the movie wisely shows Bob refusing to use his skills to take on the bullies who are preying on Gillian’s son, encouraging him to deal with them himself. It may not be especially fresh — there is a lot of the “Mr. Nanny” and “The Pacifier” in the concept. And I did not care for the inappropriate “pick-up” line Gillian’s son (Will Shadley) tries out on a middle school girl (at least he learns quickly that it was a mistake). But Chan in action is still magic. Valletta brings warmth and good humor to the role of the mother who has to be something of a super-spy to stay on top of three children. Carroll continues to show promise as an actress and has a very natural screen presence. And the movie has some nicely reassuring thoughts about blended families. The intended audience will enjoy the action and humor and families might even find something in it to discuss on the way home.
After the success of The Game Plan, Dwayne Johnson (nom de wrestling: The Rock) has become the go-to guy for movies about taming the gentle giant. So once again, the fun is seeing Johnson playing an arrogant jock who is schooled by just about everyone.
This time, Johnson is a hockey player named Derek who has been knocked down to the minor leagues following an injury. His nickname is “The Tooth Fairy” because his blocking is so aggressive that it sometimes knocks out the opposing player’s teeth. He is proud that he leads the league in penalty time. But he is cynical and disappointed in his life, and when a young fan says he hopes to play professionally, Derek bluntly tells him that it will never happen.
Derek is dating Carly (sweetly played by Ashley Judd), a single mom with a cute little girl and a sulky middle school boy. Derek impatiently almost tells Carly’s daughter that there is no tooth fairy. That night, under his pillow, he receives a summons. Suddenly, he has sprouted wings and is wearing a pink tutu. For the crime of failing to believe, he has been sentenced to two weeks of duty as a tooth fairy. With guidance from an administrative fairy (the towering Stephen Merchant of the UK’s “The Office” and “Extras”) and the fairy godmother (a regal Julie Andrews), Derek is outfitted with all of the necessary equipment (including a male version of the uniform) and sent out to retrieve some teeth and tuck money under some pillows.
This turns out to be quite a challenge. Breaking into people’s homes for benign reasons is still breaking and entering, and Derek will need his shrinking gunk, amnesia powder, and invisibility spray. And there will be times when a tooth fairy emergency will come at the wrong moment, and misunderstandings will have to be straightened out. The film has a number of screenwriters who seem to have missed a meeting on consistency in the tooth fairy rulebook and the wings themselves are not very attractive. But everyone is game, the silly humor is good-natured, and Merchant is not the only one who has some fun making Johnson seem small.
Forget the accents. Forget the anguish, the steely resolve, the iambic pentameter. All hail Meryl Streep for what she is best at — comedy. She spins screenplay straw into movie gold, turning yet another fungible Nancy Meyers saga about a beautiful and accomplished middle-aged woman triumphing over a womanizing man into a miracle of warmth, heart, and wisdom just from the power of sheer acting genius and being the truly and deeply glorious person that she is.
Meyers does have a talent for, in the words of one of her movie titles “What Women Want.” She knows that there is an eager audience for a story about a middle-aged woman who is so universally adored that even her ex-husband, the hound who left her for a gorgeous young woman (cue the slo-mo stroll in the midriff-revealing sarong) can’t get enough of her and admits that he was crazy to let her go. What could be more satisfying than that?
One of the wisest and most entertaining books ever written about movies is Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, where he discusses the power of movie romances that bring estranged couples back together. As beguiling as it is to think of the freshness of first falling in love and the pleasures of learning everything about one another, there is something even more deeply satisfying about the idea of falling in love with someone with whom there are no illusions, and especially having that someone fall in love with you. Anyone can fall in love with what we think we know or with someone we’ve seen at his or her best. But when it’s someone we’ve seen at his or her worst; that’s got to be love for sure.
Or, it can be something satisfying in a different way — payback.
Streep plays Jane (as in plain?), divorced for ten years from Jake (Alec Baldwin, perfecting the art of the appealing but infuriating male) finds herself in bed with him following a tipsy dinner when they are in New York together for their son’s graduation. She can’t resist the chance to feel pursued, validated, desired. The spark they once had is still there. And she would be inhuman if she did not feel a little triumphant about his preferring her to his beautiful young wife.
But there are (grown-up) children to consider. Being back together frees Jane to admit that she was not blameless in their break-up. It allows her to allow Jake to see her (literally) as she is, not as he remembers. And it opens her heart to some other possibilities, including the shy architect working on the addition to her house — including the dream kitchen to replace a kitchen already pretty darn dreamy.
Meyers, astutely profiled by Daphne Merkin in the New York Times Magazine, seems to be the only person in Hollywood today interested in and capable of connecting deeply to an audience of women who want more from a movie than frothy rom-coms or sex and shopping. Rare in the world of chick flicks, there are no trying-on-clothes montages or makeovers. Her movies feature capable women with good friends and loving families. The most preposterous fantasy in her films may not be the gorgeously decorated settings or even the swains in pursuit but the unequivocally devoted friends and especially children and even the prospective son-in-law — take another look at the way Jude Law’s little girls fall into instant love with Cameron Diaz in “The Holiday.” Like Jane in this film, who considers and then rejects the idea of a little cosmetic surgery, Meyers’ women start out fine with who they are and then get even more so.
Streep is what Meyers’ women want to be — supremely warm and nurturing (watch the way she keeps feeding everyone exquisite but apparently completely non-fattening meals), self-aware, and able with a little adorable struggle, to impose some boundaries in a very familiar way. She fills in what Meyers’s slightly calculating formula leaves out and makes this movie as guilty a pleasure as those chocolate croissants she whips up that make her date fall for her as we already have.
The players get played in a romantic buddy comedy with one important distinction — one of those players is the resident of an assisted living facility who gets some assistance he was not expecting when a frisky fellow resident slips him some Viagra. And that resident is played by Andy Griffith. Opie, I don’t think we’re in Mayberry any more.
Paul Campbell (“Knight Rider,” “Battlestar Galactica”) plays David, a car salesman whose standard operating procedure is spin, whether with the customers or the ladies. The one true thing in his life is his relationship with his grandfather, Joe (Griffith). David visits Joe regularly and makes sure he is well taken care of. And since David’s idea of being well taken care of includes female companionship (and more than companionship), David starts to coach his grandfather on how to get as much action from as many ladies as possible. Joe is not the quickest of studies. It has been a while since he dated. But he has one thing going for him — numbers. Most of the residents of the home are women, and it seems that almost all of them are very interested in some companionship themselves. And more than companionship. At least one of them, Edna (played by “Seinfeld’s” Liz Sheridan) is quite frisky. But we know she will not be The One because she has a funny old-lady name. Rose (“Everybody Loves Raymond’s” Doris Roberts), on the other hand, has a pretty name. And a pretty grand-daughter.
She has a pretty name, too — Julie (Marla Sokoloff of “The Practice” and “Dude, Where’s My Car?”). David tries his best maneuvers on her. But she manages to evade them and he finds himself caring about her.
It all feels thin and sit-com-y, in part because its quintet of performers are all associated with television. It slides uneasily from frothy rom-com to raunchy ew-fest, with sexual references and situations so explicit the film would have qualified for an R-rating without Griffith’s disinfectingly innocent line readings and the MPAA’s automatic assumption that geriatric sex is more comic than erotic. The plot twists are awkwardly handled. And Campbell is bland. But the film shows promise in its writer-director Marc Fienberg, whose affection for his senior citizen characters is palpable and whose commitment to making them real characters is appealing. Too often, older characters are one-dimensional, on screen just to pass along life lessons, usually involving their deaths. But even with the heightened rhythms of a broad comedy, these are vibrant, engaged, real people. Campell is bland by comparison. But Sokoloff is a find, and she makes Julie so appealing we can see how she has David wondering if he’s been playing for the wrong team.
, where he discusses the power of movie romances that bring estranged couples back together. As beguiling as it is to think of the freshness of first falling in love and the pleasures of learning everything about one another, there is something even more deeply satisfying about the idea of falling in love with someone with whom there are no illusions, and especially having that someone fall in love with you. Anyone can fall in love with what we think we know or with someone we’ve seen at his or her best. But when it’s someone we’ve seen at his or her worst; that’s got to be love for sure.