Trailer: The Love Punch
Posted on February 15, 2014 at 8:00 am
Emma Thompson and Pierce Brosnan star as ex-spouses turned thieves in “The Love Punch.”
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I Don’t Know How She Does It
Posted on September 16, 2011 at 8:21 am
This film takes the most wrenching and universal dilemma of family life and turns it into a sitcom-y love letter to Sarah Jessica Parker. Not the character she plays, the whippet-thin, stiletto-wearing financial whiz with the adorably mussed hair, but the actress herself, whose appeal as a performer continues to diminish in direct proportion to her increasing need to make us love her and expectation that we must. Carrie has been very bad for SJP.
Parker plays Kate Reddy (the names are thuddingly on the nose here), a Boston mom of two, married to an architect (winningly played by Greg Kinnear), and trying hard to cope with both the intensely competitive professionals at the office (Olivia Munn and “SNL’s” Seth Meyers play work-obsessed underminers) and the even more intensely competitive stay-at-home moms (one asks plaintively whether a birthday cake is made with organic flour and another sighs sweetly and explains that she just couldn’t allow anyone else to raise her children as she spends all day at the gym). These are cheap shot caricatures with little wit and less heart. If the film had a smidgen of sympathy for anyone else in the story or any convincing moment with Kate and her children when they were awake it would not ring so hollow. It’s hard to connect to a character who is feeling judged when her point of view is itself so petty and judgmental. Even Kate’s one friend (a dishy Christina Hendricks) cannot be permitted to be at Kate’s level. She’s a single working mother, so points off for her.
Kate and her husband both get their professional opportunities of a lifetime and shift into higher gear, missing their son’s first haircut and neglecting his delayed speech and a dangerous hole in the carpet on the stairs. Up all night making lists that never end, Kate promises everything to everyone and discovers that sometimes jugglers drop all the balls at once. Sometimes you get a call to fly out of town for a big meeting in the middle of Thanksgiving. And sometimes you get the message that your child has lice just as you walk into the big meeting. Infestation turns out to be just an opportunity to dish at the delousing salon with a friend (compare that to the more realistic hazmat treatment of the same problem in last year’s “The Change-Up”), another example of the gap between the way this film makes everything about Parker, I mean Kate.
I understand that motherhood seems fresh and new and unfairly not communicated about properly for each new generation of women who wonder how they got from the snarky authenticity of their post-college years to searching for a presentable outfit that (1) has no spills or spit-up on it and (2) fits (this is a problem grey-hound thin and beginning to look stringy SJP does not have). It will feel a bit stale to anyone who has either lived through it or seen any sitcom or family comedy of the last decade. Even the derided “Motherhood” with Uma Thurman felt more authentic than this. A mis-sent email with a crude joke? That’s so 2008. And when Kate’s colleague (Pierce Brosnan) starts signing his emails “XO” and, despite her denials, Kate just manages to keep all those balls in the air to the breathless admiration of even those who once failed to appreciate her, we can’t help feeling that we do know that in fact she doesn’t do it very well.
Oceans
Posted on October 19, 2010 at 8:00 am
Forget about “Star Wars” and “Aliens” — there are creatures living beneath the waves on this very planet that are far weirder and more exotic than anything Hollywood has conjured up.
Huge, swooping creatures with bright speckles; shape transforming beasts that pounce and gobble up crabs; gelatinous monsters that glow; all this and more is captured in “Oceans,” from Disneynature.
The documentary is accompanied by a narration by Pierce Brosnan which sometimes gets overly flowery, but at its best adds an element of poetry to help young audiences understand that there is a larger significance to the images they are seeing. “Oceans” also offers a message of concern about pollution and the environment (appropriate for its Earth Day release). But the star of “Oceans” is clearly not the words but the pictures, and they are worth the price of admission many times over.
Scenes of the predatory side of ocean life are kept to a minimum, and are usually shot from a tasteful distance. There are cute moments — a sea otter floating on it back in the sunshine at Monterey bay keeps a rock on its stomach, to use in cracking open the shellfish it gobbles up– and tender moments– an ugly mother walrus sweetly nuzzles her even uglier baby walrus, or a mother seal coaxing her baby into the water for the first time. The cameras of directors/writers Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud do a good job of conveying the vast range of the ocean, by contrasting the powerful crashing of immense waves in a storm with quiet glimpses of delicate life forms suspended in the tranquil depths; they contrast huge whales with tiny one celled creatures.
Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief
Posted on June 22, 2010 at 8:45 am
A teenager feels like he doesn’t fit in anywhere. It all comes together when he finds out that he has inherited some special powers from the father he last saw when he was seven months old. And he soon finds himself in a special school with other kids like him, where they can learn to make the most of their powers.Sound familiar? It does have something in common with Harry Potter, including a successful series of books now made into a movie. They even share a director; Chris Columbus did the first two Harry Potter films, and so he is an old hand at translating a beloved series of novels about kids with special powers on screen. Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman) loves his mom (Catherine Keener) but his step-father is obnoxious and abusive. He has a loyal friend named Grover, but he is dyslexic and has ADHD so school is difficult. He is most happy and comfortable in the pool. On a field trip, the gray-haired substitute teacher turns out to be a fury. As in a shrieking flying monster. And the teacher in the wheelchair (Pierce Brosnan)? He turns out to be a centaur, half man, half horse. Grover (Brandon T. Jackson), who walks with crutches, is a satyr (goat-legs) assigned to protect him. And Percy is the son of Poseidon, the God of the Sea. He is to water like Popeye is to spinach, and then some. Water gives him strength and healing powers and he can also control it. Someone has stolen the lightning bolt from Zeus (Sean Bean). And he suspects his two brothers, the gods of the sea and the underworld. He thinks Percy is hiding the bolt — and so do a number of other creatures. Percy has to find the bolt and return it to Zeus before the summer solstice. He gets a bit of training at demigod boot camp and is soon off on his quest with a shield from the son of Hermes, and a pen from the centaur, accompanied by Grover and Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario), the swashbuckling daughter of Athena. Writer Rick Riordan is not in J.K. Rowling’s league when it comes to inventiveness, intricacy, imagination, or heart. But he has a good sense of the way a young teenager sees the world. I like the way that the things that bother Percy most in his old life turn out to be strengths in his new life. He is dyslexic with English because his brain is hard-wired to read classic Greek. He is ADHD because he has the reflexes of a warrior. And his mother stuck with the odious step-father because, well, I’ll just say because it was the best way to keep Percy hidden. I like the overlay of Greek mythology. But the attempts to bring a modern sensibility to the adventures sometimes feel forced and awkward. Lerman is a bit bland, leaving Grover to capture much of our attention and interest.But the main thing this movie seems to be missing is classically trained British actors. Brosnan is nicely majestic in a brief role and Steve Coogan brightens things up considerably as Hades. But we realize how much the Harry Potter movies benefited from top performers like Maggie Smith and Michael Gambon. Uma Thurman re-creates her all-time weakest performance by making Medusa into a snake-headed version of Poison Ivy and the usually-terrific Rosario Dawson seems lost as Persephone. We need a bit more “Clash of the Titans” and a bit less of “Circus of the Stars.” (more…)
The Greatest
Posted on April 15, 2010 at 7:47 pm
B-| Lowest Recommended Age: | Mature High Schooler |
| MPAA Rating: | Rated R for sexual content, some language, and drug use |
| Profanity: | Strong language |
| Alcohol/ Drugs: | Drinking, drug abuse by a teenager |
| Violence/ Scariness: | Shocking fatal car accident, sad death, themes of grief and loss, character in coma |
| Diversity Issues: | Diverse characters |
| Date Released to Theaters: | April 16, 2010 |
Two gifted young women whose best work will be in other films are the reason to see this one. Carey Mulligan, so enchanting in last year’s An Education, plays a pregnant teenager in “The Greatest,” written and directed by newcomer Shana Feste. Both show a great deal of promise in this sincere but uneven film.
Mulligan plays Rose, who has one perfect moment with Bennett (Aaron Johnson) before he is killed in a car accident. They were both seniors in high school who had watched each other and waited for glimpses of each other but hardly even spoken until the last day of school when finally they work up the nerve to speak to one another. And then, suddenly he is gone, and she is pregnant.
Bennett’s parents, already dealing with a lot of dysfunction, are devastated by the loss and driven apart by it, too. Allen (PIerce Brosnan), a professor of mathematics, is rational and keeps his feelings inside. Grace (Susan Sarandon), is emotional. In one shattering scene, she is in the bathtub and he hands her a bell to ring when she misses her son. She rings it immediately, insistently, harshly, making it clear that her pain is deep and permanent and cannot be confined. She is obsessed with the 17 minutes between the crash and his death. What was he thinking? What did he say? Did he suffer? But the only one who knows is the man from the other car, who is in a coma. Grace visits him, reading aloud, monitoring his care.
Rose, who has nowhere else to go, moves in with Bennett’s family. But it takes a while for each of them, grieving separately, to find a way to reconnect as a family.
Surprisingly, Feste is best with the older generation in the film. Brosnan and Sarandon are the real center of the story and their characters are the best defined and the most compelling. Johnny Simmons (“Jennifer’s Body”) and Mulligan do their best with roles that are both under- and over-written. Simmons is the younger brother, a recovering drug addict, whose primary job in the movie is to remind his parents every day that they are left with the troubled son instead of the one they were proud of. But he is stuck with a distracting sub-plot about a relationship with a girl (Zoe Kravitz) from his support group. The problem with Mulligan’s character is Feste’s view that in the midst of terrible grieving and dysfunction, the repository of all wisdom and imperishable goodness resides in a pregnant teenager with a disastrous home life but an adorable dimple. This leaves a blank space that unbalances an already-unwieldy story but leave us looking forward to seeing how Feste learns from this film do to better next time.