Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Posted on September 15, 2010 at 12:00 pm

Roger Ebert launched a thousand blog posts with howls of protest by asserting that a video game could never be a work of art. I don’t say “never” when it comes to art, but by all evidence to this point, a video game does not make a movie. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who improbably turned a theme park ride into a phenomenally successful movie franchise with the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, has not done as well by the Prince of Persia game, omitting the two elements that made the Pirates movies sensationally entertaining: a very good script and Johnny Depp.

Jake Gyllenhaal, newly bedecked in long hair, buff bod, and English accent, plays Dastan, a former street kid adopted by a king and raised as brother to his two sons. When he is framed for the murder of the king he must run. And since he has taken a special dagger that belongs to a princess, she has to come with him. She is the keeper of a sacred dagger, which gives everyone something to chase after, steal from each other, and almost lose many times.

The movie is about two-thirds action and one-third bickering banter. The action scenes are fairly good; the banter is below the level of chit-chat from Oscar presenters. There are winks at the game, with a lot of leaping between ledges and rooftops and the ability to rewind time. The story also has several distracting winks at current or near-current events, with complaints about taxes and a fruitless search for the ancient equivalent of weapons of mass destruction.

The settings are glorious. As swords are being wielded in a kaleidoscope of quick shots, we keep hoping for more of a chance to enjoy the scope and sweep and sumptuousness of the re-created ancient world of walled cities, palaces, and desert. Instead, it just serves to remind us of how undeserving the story that takes place there is by comparison.

Letters to Juliet

Posted on September 14, 2010 at 8:56 am

Two bad signs. One is when you spend the entire movie thinking that a couple of Google searches would have made it possible for everyone in the story to save a week’s effort and everyone in the audience about an hour of viewing time. Another is when the B couple is twice as interesting as the A couple and sets off ten times the romantic electricity.

But the Italian scenery is very pretty.

Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) is a fact-checker for the New Yorker who dreams of being a writer but is too insecure to insist on a chance. She and her restaurateur fiance Victor (Gael GarcÃa Bernal) go to Italy on a pre-wedding vacation, but he gets caught up in work and leaves her on her own to explore.

In Verona, best known as the setting for “Romeo and Juliet” and the real-life story that inspired it, Sophie finds that a small group of women gather up the letters left in Juliet’s wall by lovers looking for help. And then they write answers providing sympathy and guidance. She finds a letter that had been inside the wall for 50 years, from an English girl who lost her nerve and went home instead of meeting the boy she loved to run away with him. And she decides to answer it.

The letter-writer turns out to be Claire (Vanessa Redgrave), who arrives in Verona with her grandson, inspired by Sophie’s letter to try to find the man she left behind half a century before.

Can Sophie come along? Can this be the story that will move her from fact-checker to writer? Is Claire’s grandson, who initially appeared to be so arrogant and unlikeable, in fact a hottie and a sweetie? Will someone end up on a balcony? Naturalmente, senza dubbio!

Redgrave is radiant as the woman who is hoping for a romantic miracle. Claire never stopped loving the boy she met in Italy but she did not let her regret interfere with a life of purpose and loving relationships. Still, the encouragement from Sophie’s letter has her hoping for a miracle — that she can find her lost love and that he still cares for her. Redgrave shows us Claire’s resolve and her vulnerability, her practicality and her optimism. She is pure magic and she makes us want to see Claire find some magic, too.

But she is so good that she casts a spotlight on the weaknesses of the rest of the movie. Her grandson Charlie (a bland Christopher Egan) is rude and dull. Of course the first thing he will do on accompanying his grandmother to Verona is take time out to track down Sophie so he can yell at her. Yes, we like to see lovers begin with antagonism so we can enjoy the delicious moment when they make a deep connection and have to admit to themselves that they like each other. But the antagonism is so arbitrary it makes Charlie unlikeable. And that moment? They smash ice cream cones into each other’s faces. That doesn’t exactly get us rooting for them to get together. Too much in the movie makes too little sense. Why do they have to drive around to ask dozens of men with the same name whether they are the one? Why is Bernal playing such a stock character (and yet still showing more chemistry with Seyfried than Egan)? Why, why, does there have to be a last-minute fake-out to drag things out further?

Juliet, if you’re out there, I’d welcome a letter in reply.

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Just Wright

Posted on September 14, 2010 at 8:07 am

If you’ve seen the trailer, you know exactly what’s coming here, but there’s nothing wrong with that. After all, you know what’s coming when you combine eggs, flour, sugar, and vanilla to make a cake, and you still enjoy eating it. It is as predictable as, well, you’d expect, for a movie cake made from the Ugly Duckling crossed with Cinderella and a little bit of Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” must be. But appealing performers, a heart-warming story, and some genuine on-screen chemistry make this movie the best romance of 2010 so far.

Queen Latifah plays Leslie Wright, who has a weakness for fixer-uppers. She drives a banged-up car. She buys a house that needs a lot of work. She works in rehabilitation as a physical therapist. She takes in Morgan (Paula Patten of “Precious”), a friend who has no job or family. Leslie is comfortable with who she is and it may be in part the ease she projects on dates that keeps her in the friend zone. She just feels too safe.

Leslie is a big Nets fan. One night, after a game, she sees the team’s star, Scott McKnight (rap star Common) at a gas station trying to figure out how to open his gas tank. They hit it off and he invites her to his birthday party. Leslie brings Morgan, who is going after her dream of being married to a player in the NBA the way Sir Edmund Hillary went after Mount Everest.

It works at first. But when Scott is injured and needs physical therapy, he gets a chance to discover what we’ve known all along, and not just because she is being played by the movie’s star and producer, that Leslie is a very special woman. The plot has the standard ups and downs but an always-likable cast keeps us rooting for Scott and Leslie to realize what we’ve known from the gas station — that they are just right. Common is not an actor, but like most musical performers he has superb timing and the on-screen confidence to let us see Scott thinking. It is his willingness to be quiet on screen that establishes Scott as a sincere and decent man who loves to play basketball and is committed to his team but never lets the glamor go to his head. He has some moves in the basketball scenes and a bunch of real-life athletes show up to give the game scenes some authenticity and make Common’s acting skills look Oscar-worthy by comparison. The lovely Pam Grier and Phylicia Rashad play the moms and both create real characters who are warm, smart, strong, and loving.

Queen Latifah is also completely at ease on screen and she is utterly endearing as Leslie, a woman who knows who she is and just wants someone who can understand how much she has to give. The film doesn’t think it needs to start with the couple disliking each other; it is captivating that Leslie and Scott instantly like each other as friends. The connection is so strong that we look forward to seeing them discover it for themselves. When they sit down together at a piano, we know they will be in tune. And knowing it only adds to our pleasure in watching it unfold.

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Killers

Posted on September 7, 2010 at 8:59 am

This is not just a bad movie. It is three bad movies. “Killers” is trying to be a romantic action comedy and it fails all three times.

Katherine Heigl plays Jen, on vacation in the French Riviera with her overprotective father (Tom Selleck) and over-drinking mother (a wasted — in both senses of the word — Catherine O’Hara) in after being dumped by her boyfriend. She meets Spencer, played by Ashton Kutcher, who also co-produced, thus explaining the cameo appearance of the camera he sells on TV as well as the loving attention the camera pays to his chest. We know what Jen does not: Spencer is a spy. He kills bad guys but longs for a quiet “normal” life in the suburbs. And Jen, with Heigl delivering a generic “I may be stunningly beautiful but I am insecure and immature so that makes me accessible,” seems just what normal looks like. A little banter and then three years later, they are living happily in a suburban neighborhood, commuting to the office, attending block parties, and making peach cobbler.

And then Spencer’s past catches up with him again when he hears from his old boss and finds out there is a $20 million bounty for anyone who kills him. Spencer and Jen have to go on the run, bickering along the way as though being married to an international assassin was somewhere around the threat level of forgetting to take out the garbage.

The banter is leaden but the bickering is worse. Heigl and Kutcher have anti-chemistry. They seem to repel each other. And then there are the action scenes, soggily staged and with a way over-the-top body count for the movie’s attempt at a light-hearted tone. There’s a flicker of interest in the idea of a complacent suburban community hosting a battalion of killers, but the script fails to take advantage of it. And the ending is so haphazard it seems to have been arrived at by dartboard and so sour it seems contemptuous of its characters and its audience.

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Action/Adventure Comedy Romance Spies

MacGruber

Posted on September 7, 2010 at 8:13 am

A one-joke “Saturday Night Live” skit based on a television series that ended in 1992 has been turned into a no-joke movie that ended 99 painful minutes after it began. It is of interest only to people who think that 80’s references like mullet haircuts, Blaupunkt removable automobile cassette players, soft rock, and many many many potty jokes are always hilarious.
“MacGyver” was a television series about a secret agent who could take a gum wrapper and a bottle of nail polish remover and make it into some very clever device to defeat any threat from any enemy, no matter how high-tech. The series emphasized problem-solving and science over weapons. And now the little boys who grew up watching MacGyver think it is hilarious to trash him by making him into an arrogant idiot.
The SNL skits invariably and tediously show MacGruber (co-writer Will Forte) trying to defuse some bomb with household items only to fail and have it blow everyone up. The movie draws not just from the skits but from a range of 80’s action film conventions. MacGruber is a one-time action hero who has retired to a life of spiritual contemplation after his bride (Maya Rudolph) was murdered at their wedding. He gets a visit from Colonel James Faith (a steely Powers Boothe) and Lt. Dixon Piper (Ryan Phillippe), asking him to return to service to go after a bad guy played by a beefy and ponytailed Val Kilmer whose character name happens to sound like an extremely crude term for the female anatomy.
MacGruber swings like a pendulum between grandiose self-aggrandizement and humiliating self-abasement. Both are excruciating. He rounds up a team of very big men (played by WWE stars) but accidentally blows them to smithereens so has to work with Piper and his late wife’s best friend Vicky St. Elmo (Get it? Another 80’s reference!), played by the divine Kristen Wiig, who is the movie’s only bright spot. Even the blue eyeshadow and feathered blonde hair can’t hide her brilliance and beauty.
Those for whom the 80’s were not epochal will be bored when they are not being grossed out. Or both at the same time. On the other hand, those who find the idea of a man sticking a stalk of celery in his butt and walking around with his pants off so hilarious that they want to see it twice will be delighted.

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