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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Date movie Romance

Legendary

Posted on September 9, 2010 at 6:07 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for suggestive material, brief partial nudity and some fighting scenes
Profanity:	Some crude high-school insults
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Character abuses alcohol
Violence/ Scariness:	Some fights, bully
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	September 10, 2010

A skinny teenager wants to wrestle in this unpretentious film with a predictable storyline (it even gives away the ending in the first minute) but benefits from some sharp dialog and the always watchable Patricia Clarkson.
Cal Chetley (Devon Graye) has a lot of spirit and a great relationship with his widowed mother (Patricia Clarkson) — until she finds out that like his late father and estranged brother he wants to join the wrestling team. She points out that he’s a beanpole while his brother Mike is “built like a car.” But he has been picked on by a bully and would like to be able to defend himself physically as well as he does verbally. And joining the team gives him a reason (and an excuse) to try to repair the connection to Mike (the WWE’s John Cena).
It’s your basic sports plot. There’s the meet where he fails miserably. There’s the secret hold he has to be ready to learn. The wrestling and the relationship between the brothers seems to make progress and then hits some obstacles on the way to the big meet.
It may satisfy wrestling fans but it is unlikely to make the sport compelling to anyone who is not already knowledgeable. It is more likely to make some new fans for Graye, who is instantly likable as he stands up to a bully, gently teases his mother about her date, and even more gently helps his friend Luli (Madeleine Martin in the film’s weakest performance) understand that she is not valuing herself enough. Cena is well cast as a big guy who keeps a lot inside, and Danny Glover plays a helpful guide who somehow always shows up when he is needed, though no one ever sees him but Cal. Clarkson makes the mother real and touching, bringing a wry affection and touching pride to her moments with Cal and a fierce urgency to the family tensions. Her scene with Martin, as two women living in male-dominated households, is a highlight that reminds us where the real victories are.

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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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The Rocker

Posted on September 6, 2010 at 8:00 am

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for drug and sexual references, nudity and language.
Profanity:	Strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Adult character drinks a lot, some drug references
Violence/ Scariness:	Comic and slapstick violence, no one badly hurt
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	August 20, 2008
Date Released to DVD:	January 27, 2009
Amazon.com ASIN:	B001E95ZHY

Emma Stone’s breakthrough role in next week’s “Easy A” makes this a good time to look at some of her earlier work. She is terrific in this story of a high school rock group.

Pete Best, who was famously kicked out of The Beatles just before they brought on Ringo Starr and rocketed to international superstardom, appears as himself in this movie about a drummer who was kicked out of an 80’s hair band before they went on to such heights of international superstardom that they now speak with cheeky lower-class English accents, even though they came from Cleveland.

“The Office’s” Rainn Wilson plays “Fish,” the drummer still stuck in Cleveland, where the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame seems to be there just to remind him of how much he has lost. Fired from his job, dumped by his girlfriend, he is living in his sister’s attic when, 20 years after he last sat behind a drum kit, he gets one more chance to live the dream. His nephew’s band needs a drummer for the prom.

A video of Fish rehearsing in the nude becomes a viral sensation on YouTube and suddenly the group of three graduating high school seniors and a demented and bitter burn-out is on tour.