27 Dresses

Posted on January 17, 2008 at 7:40 am

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for language, some innuendo and sexuality.
Profanity:	Some strong language (s-word, b-word)
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking (as liberating and empowering), characters get tipsy
Violence/ Scariness:	Comic violence including slaps
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	January 18, 2007

27%20dresses.jpg Jane has a special closet in her apartment filled with 27 dresses so ugly that only two things can be true: (1) they were all bridesmaid’s dresses, and that means (2) all 27 brides assured her that they could be shortened and worn again.
Jane (Katherine Heigl of “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Knocked Up”) is a natural caretaker. After her mother died when she was a child, she took care of her sister. She has taken care of 27 different brides, helping out with wedding details that have her over-stuffed day-planner bristling with yellow sticky reminders. In her job, she takes care of her boss, George (Edward Burns), the too-good-to-be-true mountain-climbing CEO of an impeccably politically correct corporation. She makes sure he gets his breakfast burrito and picks up his dry cleaning. In her few spare moments, she sighs with love for George or sighs with hope over the weekly write-ups of the most romantic weddings in the Sunday paper. Her dreams are of white dresses, tossed bouquets, and big cakes with lots of icing. Her reality is…dreams.
Just as she decides to let George know how she feels, urged on by her best friend Casey (the marvelous Judy Greer, wasted in an underwritten role as the movie’s designated sleep-around friend), Jane’s globe-trotting model sister Tess (Malin Akerman) arrives and she and George immediately decide to get married, with guess who taking care of all the cake, flower, and decoration details. All of this is so distracting that Jane barely has time to notice the killer smile of Kevin, a cynical reporter (the marvelous James Marsden, almost-wasted in an under-written role that seems left over from an old Clark Gable character). For no reason except the demands of the increasingly flimsy plot, Kevin is required to keep a couple of obvious secrets.
Heigl is the real deal, with girl-you-wish-lived-next-door imperishable but accessible beauty, appealing, endearing, vulnerable, with understated comic timing. Marsden, too, has charm to spare. Both hold our interest and keep us rooting for them even when the script does its best to get in the way. Do we really need yet another scene with characters letting go by getting tipsy and singing 80’s songs? Akerman (“The Heartbreak Kid”), in her second role in five months as a selfish, irresponsible, and all-around nightmare bombshell who impulsively gets engaged, struggles with an impossible task as she tries to be both over-the-top obnoxious and sympathetic at the same time. What does work is Heigl and the dresses and the fact that, like Jane, most of the audience loves to get misty at weddings. Watching this film is like waiting to catch the bride’s bouquet, more anticipation than fulfillment.

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Good Luck Chuck

Posted on January 15, 2008 at 8:00 am

At age 10, following an awkward Spin the Bottle encounter, a little goth girl puts a hex on Charlie so that he will be surrounded by love but never find it himself. But it is the audience who will feel cursed. It is hard to tell which is more painfully difficult to sit through — the awful premise of this film or the dull filler that occupies the rest of the time onscreen.

Charlie grows up into stand-up comedian Dane Cook and becomes a dentist. When word gets out that sex with him is a quicker path to marriage than eHarmony, every gorgeous woman in town wants to sleep with him so that she can find her one true love as soon as it is over. His best friend Stu (Tony award-winner Dan Fogler), a plastic surgeon specializing in breast enhancement, disgusting, sex-obsessed conversation, and having sex with citrus, persuades Charlie that this is practically a public service, helping women to find love while having lots and lots and lots of sex. Charlie gives in and has sex with just about every unattached female in the state.

And then he meets the adorably klutzy Cam (Jessica Alba), who runs the penguin house at the local equivalent of Sea World. But he worries that if he has sex with her, she’ll meet the man of her dreams. So he has to find a way to romance her without sex.

Cook is an observational comic who thinks that referring to something is the same as making a joke about it. He is physically energetic but intellectually lazy. His appeal comes from his utter lack of embarrassment and complete absence of boundaries, making college kids feel understood and connected. His stand-up routine is the equivalent of a Facebook page. This movie is like one of his jokes, all set-up, and then a lot of energy in the hopes the audience won’t notice there is no real pay-off. We get that it is supposed to be funny that Charlie has a lot of sex with pretty girls. But they drag the joke on forever, showing Cook in a dozen different positions, not because it is particularly funny or sexy but because they have 90 minutes to fill and hope we will be distracted by all those breasts. Any movie that has to fall back on a climactic race to the airport for drama and having sex with food for comedy has run out of ideas before it began. Oh, and please don’t bother to stay for the last little improvised “joke” over the credits.

One more aspect of this film that is particularly troubling is that it is an extremely raunchy R-rated film but its humor is so juvenile its most likely audience is young teenagers, the only group likely to find it funny just because it has naughty words and naked ladies. Anyone old enough to see this movie is likely to be too old to find much to laugh at.

Parents should know that this film has extremely explicit and crude sexual references and situations and a great deal of nudity that would rate an NC-17 if in anything but a comedy. Characters use very strong and vulgar language. There is comic violence (no one badly hurt). Characters drink, including one who drinks to deal with stress, and one character is a pothead, a frequent source of humor.

Audiences who see this movie should talk about which time-honored techniques the film uses to keep Charlie a sympathetic character, despite some crass, selfish, and exploitive behavior. What made him see Cam differently?

Audiences who enjoy this film will also enjoy The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up.

Related Tags:

Comedy Romance

Stardust

Posted on December 18, 2007 at 12:14 pm

This is an enchanting story that lives up to the promise of a “once upon a time beginning,” filled with romance, adventure, magic, and wit. It has witch sisters who need to find a fallen star to make the potion that gives them eternal youth, prince brothers who want to find it because the jewel that knocked it out of the sky will determine which of them will be king, cloud pirates who sail in a flying ship, and a unicorn.

Tristan (Charlie Cox) promises to bring back a fallen star to win the hand of the girl he loves. To find it, he must cross the wall that divides his village from the magical land of Stormhold on the other side. It turns out that he has a connection to Stormhold that he did not know. And it turns out that the fallen star is not an it but a she — the star has a human form, a woman named Yvaine (Claire Danes). And so begins a journey that will include sword fights and transformations, captures and escapes, bickering and kisses, encounters with rascals, villains, and imprisoned princesses, and reunions with unexpected lost connections.
Director Matthew Vaughn (“Layer Cake”) blends romance, action, and comedy with brilliantly imagined visual effects, seasoning fairy tale enchantment with a splash of modern sensibility. Peter O’Toole as the dying king, Robert DeNiro as the pirate captain with a surprising hobby, and Ricky Gervais as a dealer in stolen goods, and Rupert Everett as one of a Greek chorus of murdered princes are high-spirited but never wink at the audience; the film is as sincere as its appealing lead characters. Pfeiffer has a blast as the witch, whether cooing at her restored beauty or blasting through its disintegration as she pursues the star.

Modern without being post-modern, ironic without air-quotes, romantic without apology, this is a fairy tale for our time because it takes us beyond time and reminds us that happily ever after is still a dream worth having.

Parents should know that this film includes fantasy violence, with characters injured and killed in a variety of ways, everything from having their throats cut to being thrown out of windows, poisoned, and drowned. There is some mild language and there are some mild sexual references and non-explicit sexual situations. A strength of the movie is unexpected acceptance of and support for a cross-dressing character.

Families who see this movie should talk about what drew Dunstan and Tristan to the other side of the wall. What is the difference between being a shop boy and a boy who works in a shop?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy sumptuous fantasy classics The Princess Bride, Labyrinth, Time Bandits, and Ladyhawke (also featuring Pfeiffer). And they will enjoy the graphic novel by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Charles Vess.

Atonement

Posted on December 4, 2007 at 4:07 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for disturbing war images, language and some sexuality.
Profanity:	Some very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking and smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Wartime violence with some graphic images
Diversity Issues:	Class differences
Date Released to Theaters:	December 7, 2007

Little toy jungle animals are lined up on the rug. Typewriter keys bang like gunshots. Briony (Saoirse Ronan) is writing a play called “The Trials of Arabella.” It is 1935 England, a dream of a summer afternoon on a sleepy but grand estate and Briony is the much-loved youngest daughter of the house. It feels like the biggest problem she will ever have is whether her young visitors will cooperate in putting on the play. She is already trying to impose her story on people. Briony is more imaginative than perceptive and that will lead to terrible betrayal, when the story she imposes is fictional but its consequences are very real.

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Love in the Time of Cholera

Posted on November 15, 2007 at 3:03 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Adult
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for sexual content/nudity and brief language
Profanity:	Brief strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Some violence including (offscreen) murder
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	November 16, 2007

In the most incongruous mismatch of literature and movie treatment since Demi Moore flounced around in “The Scarlet Letter,” director Mike Newell has taken a lyrical meditation on love, patience, devotion, loss, betrayal, and fever and turned it into a South American version of a Hugh Grant movie. He seems to think it is supposed to be a lightweight romantic comedy. The result is not without its pleasures, but every so often there is something so out of synch, so dissonant that it takes you out of the movie entirely.

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