Adorable And Predictable, Home Is Fun!

The Good: Incredible animation, Decent voice performances
The Bad: Entirely predictable character arcs and plot, Overbearing soundtrack
The Basics: A fun animated film, Home is a very basic mismatch buddy comedy featuring a girl and an alien on parallel quests to find mom and save the Earth!


As a reviewer who has pretty straightforward standards, it is hard for films to overwhelm me with style; I'm one who looks for substance in all of the films I review. So, when my wife encouraged me to watch Home, I understood her enthusiasm, but I did not share her intense praise of the movie. Home is good; the animation is absolutely amazing and it begs to be seen on a giant screen. The voicework in Home is competent and it has a couple of good lines in it.

But, Home is also painfully predictable and utterly formulaic. And the soundtrack to Home blasts out in the most obtrusive way. Anyone who doesn't recognize Rihanna from her voice work as the female lead of Home will certainly recognize how the soundtrack is packed with her songs. And, despite being only 94 minutes, Home is so packed with stuff that it feels much longer.

The Boov are the most cowardly race in the galaxy, fleeing from planet to planet as they are pursued by the Gorg. When the Boov find and settle on Earth, the unappreciated Oh finds that his excitement for having a new home is not shared by his brethren. They do not want to come to his party or be around him any more on Earth than they did on the ship headed toward Earth. The last human not to be relocated to Australia is the seventh grader Tip, a young woman who has remained hidden in her apartment with her cat, Pig. But when one of the Boov finds her place, she flees. Unfortunately for Oh, his attempt to get his friend Kyle to come to his housewarming party results in his e-vite being sent out into the galaxy, providing the Gorg with a homing beacon, should the e-vite reach their massive ship.

Oh and Tip meet while on the run from the Boov authorities and Oh agrees to help Tip find her mom, after he gets to Paris to cancel the e-vite before it reaches the Gorg. They begin a transatlantic flight in Tip's car, which has been modified by Oh into a beverage-powered flying car. On their way, they form an unlikely friendship and Oh learns how to stand up to Captain Smek and the Boov who want to arrest him. As well, Oh learns the value of keeping his word and he bonds with Tip.

Home is That Kind Of Story, with a pretty obvious moral to it and the plot and themes are not enough to keep adults engaged. Fortunately, Oh is voiced by Jim Parsons and he is given a number of lines that are amusing, mostly based on grammatical errors or non-sequitors. Parsons is articulate and expressive as Oh, which helps carry most of the movie. The film is dominated by Parsons and Rihanna, who voices Tip. Rihanna is fine as Tip, though the role is hardly challenging and does not require her to be overly expressive.

The cast is rounded out by Steve Martin and Jennifer Lopez and their parts break up the occasional auditory monotony of Parson's delivery and Rihanna's music with very different vocal performances.

The vocal performances do not make the characters any more audacious or original or the plotting of the film any more impressive for the way Home progresses. On those fronts, Home is an incredibly basic children's movie. Is it well-made? Yes. But it is still incredibly basic on every other level, making it a much harder sell to a wider audience.

For other animated films, please check out my reviews of:
Minions
The Lego Movie
Aladdin

5.5/10

For other movie reviews, please check out my Film Review Index Page for a complete, organized listing!

© 2015 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |

Revenge And Detective Work: Lila And Eve Is Average, But Worthwhile!

The Good: Good acting, Decent characters
The Bad: Predictable plot, Mood
The Basics: Lila And Eve is not bad; it's just everything one would expect from That Type Of Movie.


Remember when Jennifer Lopez could open a movie? Remember when studios banked on her to open movies, even during Summer Blockbuster Season? Perhaps the best marker for the lack of cache in a performer's reputation is when they transition from being a Sure Thing to appearing in counterprogramming against the obvious blockbusters. As Ant-Man erupts onto screens as - predictably, and planned - the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe film to top the weekend box-office on its debut weekend, Jennifer Lopez and Viola Davis are given the dramatic counterprogramming on the indie film circuit to Ant-Man and Trainwreck with Lila And Eve.

Lila And Eve gets right to its point. Viola Davis earns top billing in Lila And Eve, where Jennifer Lopez serves as her sidekick. Davis plays Lila, Lopez plays Eve and the pair works well as a team of distraught and angry mothers who are seeking justice for their dead children. While law enforcement might not love the concept to Lila And Eve, the revenge drama is pretty much the wheelhouse for Lopez, much like Davis seems to be able to dominate the angry wife/mother niche.

Stephon is shot while walking down the street on night. His mother, Lila, is distraught and goes to a group therapy session. When Eve walks out, Lila strikes up a conversation afterward and finds that she is able to actually open up to her, despite how jaded Eve is. After Lila goes to the police and discovers how much of a dead end they are at in investigating Stephon's murder, she begins to empathize more with Eve and her disillusionment. Unable to sleep and worried for her other son, Lila lets Eve into her life and her apartment to commiserate about their pain (Eve's daughter was killed). While Eve is visiting, Lila discovers a pistol in Justin's (her other son's) bag.

Eve and Lila stake out the corner Stephon was shot near. When they approach one of the local thugs near the end of the night, he draws a weapon on them. Eve shoots him in self defense and steals his wallet and cell phone to try getting a name of the person who killed Stephon. As the police investigate the murder of Donelle Peete, Eve and Lila follow their own leads. Their pursuit of justice leads to them leaving a trail of dead bodies as they follow the names of those who were responsible in the death of Stephon.

Lila And Eve is a very basic grief-motivated revenge drama. Through a series of flashbacks, Lila's relationship with Stephon is illustrated very explicitly. That sets the film up for a seemingly predictable resolution, but I was pretty pleased when the "twist" was more compelling than simply Eve using Lila to get to the men who killed her daughter. The fact that Eve helps Lila kill her way up the gang food chain instantly contrasts Lila's relationship scenes and that acts as a red flag that there's something not quite right about Eve. That said, what is off about Eve is far more interesting than the simple revenge story.

Even more than the twist, what actually makes Lila And Eve worth watching - because it is! - are the performances. Jennifer Lopez might be given a supporting role, but she nails it, especially in the final act when she is saddled with a lot of exposition. The supporting performances in the film are pretty wonderful. While Julius Tennon's brief role as Ben allows him and Davis to exhibit great onscreen chemistry (which is good because they have been married for years!), Chris Chalk's part is eye-opening. Chalk played Gary Cooper on The Newsroom (season two is reviewed here!) and his menacing role as Alonzo makes the actor virtually unrecognizable to fans of his more articulate and relateable role!

Similarly, Andre Royo and Shea Whigham make the most out of their potentially monolithic roles as detectives.

But much of Lila And Eve hinges on the performance of Viola Davis as Lila. Davis has the requisite range that the role demands, playing quiet and grieving, determined and dealing (during the scenes where Lila redecorates her home), and furious. In order to sell the last act, Lila And Eve demands an actor who could be both appropriately grief-stricken and functional for the detective work and firearms handling that defines the character. Viola Davis is an excellent choice and she does all that the role demands.

Ultimately, Lila And Eve is a quiet success; it is a film that is not going to light the cinemas ablaze with spectacle or interest, but those who see it are likely to be satisfied that they have not wasted the hour and a half.

For other films currently in theaters, please check out my reviews of:
Dragon Blade
Fantastic 4
Jenny's Wedding
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
Ant-Man
Minions
No Way Jose
Terminator Genisys
Inside Out
Jurassic World

6/10

For other movie reviews, please check out my Film Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2015 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |

Exactly As Droll As One Might Suspect: Maxim: The Hot 100 Disappoints

The Good: Decent photography, Good interviews
The Bad: Stupid concept, Addy, Lowbrow writing
The Basics: Maxim: The Hot 100 lives down to what one might expect of the annual magazine issue, though I was pleasantly surprised by the interviews!


One of the animated sitcoms - Family Guy, American Dad or The Simpsons has a line about Maxim that was utterly hilarious; something about their “Most Rape-able Celebrities” list. My wife recently gave me a gift subscription to Maxim, ostensibly for review and when Maxim: The Hot 100 (the annual special issue) arrived, I found myself trying to remember the joke from television about the publication. Maxim: The Hot 100 might not be quite the sinister issue that the joke insinuates, but it is pretty damn close.

Comprised of photos and a blurb for the 100 women that Maxim has decided (apparently through votes somehow) are the most desirable in the world, Maxim: The Hot 100 is like a catalog for shopping for unobtainable women. In addition to being a preposterous exercise (ranking women on their “hot” factor, as if there were a universal standard for the subjective emotion of desire), Maxim: The Hot 100 undermines itself far too frequently to be at all useful or even engaging. It’s not just some form of weird sour grapes that I write that; - favorites of mine like Anne Hathaway and Ellen Page did not make the list, but Bar Paly and Candice Swanepoel did(?!) – but any list where Katy Perry is ranked as more desirable than Sophia Vergara or Avril Lavigne ranks 44 and Anna Paquin is 78 seems skewed toward the absurd.

In addition to having a purpose that is ridiculous – are Maxim readers so stupid that they need to be told whom to be attracted to?! – and somewhat inscrutable (what are the readers supposed to do, exactly, with this information?), the Maxim: The Hot 100 special issue seems remarkably lowbrow in terms of the writing. Take, for example, the listing for Gal Gadot (who made #84 on the list) on page 13 of this year’s Maxim: The Hot 100. The blurb for Gadot reads, “Hollywood’s newest Wonder Woman is a total badass. She not only owns a motorcycle but also served two years in the Israeli army” (13). Gal Gadot is Israeli. You know who else served two years in the Israeli army? Every other Israeli citizen; it’s mandatory. Does that make her more of a badass than #39, Gina Carano, who was a MMA-brawler? Probably not. My point is that virtually none of the blurbs say anything useful, interesting or insightful about their subjects.

What keeps Maxim: The Hot 100 from the most dismal of ratings, then? First off, the photography. Most of the photos are incredibly good, exactly what one might hope for from a celebrity spankbook with a ridiculously low cover price of $3.99. The price of the magazine might make one think that it was not going to be a glossy, good-looking magazine, but apparently advertiser dollars subsidize the magazine enough that the special issue needs not charge an arm and a leg. Maxim: The Hot 100 features photographically solid pictures; in terms of color, contrast, and composition, the photographers utilized in Maxim: The Hot 100 clearly know what they are doing. In fact, because the photographers seem able and their subjects are undeniably photogenic, it is astonishing that they get some of the celebrities in remarkably unflattering looks (there’s something horrid about calling someone “hot” and smacking up a picture of them looking haggard, as at least one of the women was).

The other aspect that sells the magazine – the one that pleasantly surprised me – is the interviews. Maxim: The Hot 100 features interviews with cool celebrities (this year, it was Bryan Cranston and Nick Offerman). The questions asked of these celebrities are not the typical ones that have been asked to death and the answers are fun and informative.

Unfortunately, the two articles and a smattering of the hundreds of pictures throughout the magazine are hardly enough to justify the magazine’s existence. Several pages of the magazine are wasted debunking movie plot/effect issues (like would reversing the Earth’s direction a la Superman: The Movie turn back time). Does Maxim believe a large population of its readers are physicists who somehow slept through basic temporal mechanics? Or biology students who do not know the average size of a great white shark? Other preposterous articles focus on the latest supermodel, hot trends, and a short story about joining the mile-high club. The average length of an article in Maxim: The Hot 100 is one page, which suggests that the average reader’s attention span is ridiculously limited.

Not overflowing with impressive diction or vocabulary, Maxim: The Hot 100 is fairly ad-filled. The 120-page magazine features 22 pages of full ads (not counting the inside and back covers), along with 3 pages of partial ads and 8 pages of style articles which list all of the items in the photos, with a price (which is pretty much an advertisement to me!).

Maybe I’m not the target demographic, maybe I’m not desperately looking for unobtainable women or maybe I just don’t need a magazine to tell me what to like to have opinions. But, for those who don’t care about smart (the most common comment by women on the Maxim Hot 100 list is about their own butt; none of the quotes capture the intelligence of any of the smart women on the list), aren’t looking for a woman even close to 40 (Jennifer Lopez seems to be the most senior member of the list) and who want something more respectably portable than a hard-core magazine, Maxim: The Hot 100 is enough to entertain those who want to spend the four bucks on it.

For other magazine reviews, please visit my evaluations of:
AAA Living
Ladies’ Home Journal
Buffy The Vampire Slayer Magazine

2.5/10

For other magazine reviews, please check out my Magazine Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |

The Saga Of Barney And Robin Is Encapsulated In How I Met Your Mother Season 5!

The Good: Moments of character, Moments of performance
The Bad: Plots and jokes are becoming ever-more familiar
The Basics: Despite what the title claims, Barney and Robin dominated the fifth season of How I Met Your Mother.


When a long-running television show has a winning formula, the writers and producers have a tough mandate to follow. They have to balance the balance the familiar and successful elements of a show against advancing a plot and the characters so that the show does not simply fall into a repetitive rut that bores the fan base. Friends (reviewed here!) did that fairly successfully by jerking viewers around with the on-again, off-again relationship between Ross and Rachel (only very seldom acknowledging how very infrequent the relationship was actually “on”) and Frasier (reviewed here!) very cleverly stretched out the demise of Niles’s marriage(s) to play out the long arc of his attraction to Daphne over many seasons. On How I Met Your Mother, Barney – played with consistent hilarity by Neil Patrick Harris – is one of the key winning elements and much of his appeal comes from the ridiculously uncomplicated way he pursues women for sex. But, to keep him from being disliked for the way he disposes of women whom he beds, the writers wrote a growing attraction for Barney. Barney has been somewhat hopelessly attracted to Robin by the time the fifth season begins. But at the climax of the fourth season (reviewed here!), Barney is outed as being in love with Robin and that forced the writers to actually figure out what direction the show would go in after that revelation.

Unlike Frasier, which committed to the Niles/Daphne relationship and brought viewers along for all the complexities that arose from their changing relationship (and characters!), How I Met Your Mother went with returning the show to the tried and true formula as soon as possible. As such, it is little surprise to those who pick up the fifth season, that after all the build-up and legwork done in Season Four of the show, How I Met Your Mother buries the Barney/Robin relationship remarkably quickly (eight episodes into the twenty-four episode season). In an act of particularly blatant cowardice on the part of the writers and producers, the effect of the relationship and its failure impacts Robin (who was oblivious to Barney’s feelings!) more than it does Barney. This allows Barney to return to form faster and the writers and producers of How I Met Your Mother highlight that with episodes like “The Playbook,” “Girls Vs. Suits,” and “Perfect Week.” Given how well Neil Patrick Harris performed the angst of Barney being so close to the woman he loved so much, the lack of genuine emotional ramifications to having and losing the love of his life rings false in the fifth season.

That said, the fifth season of How I Met Your Mother is watchable and generally enjoyable. Picking up where season four left off, Lily puts pressure on Barney and Robin to define their new relationship. When they agree to date for Lily’s sake, they soon find that is more complicated than they expected. Barney turns to Ted to teach him all about Robin’s likes and dislikes, which annoy Robin (especially when it turns out Ted is largely right about her!) and Marshall and Lily try to use Barney and Robin as their new “couples friend,” with disastrous results. It does not take long before Robin is annoyed by everything Barney says and does and Barney lets himself go to the point he is morbidly obese and the two call the relationship off.

In the wake of the break-up, Barney returns to his old womanizing ways and Robin struggles to deal with the emotional ramifications of losing Barney. As Robin builds an unexpected relationship with her failure of a co-anchor at Wake Up New York!, Don, Ted commits to being a college professor and even starts to have fun with his students. Throughout the season, Marshall and Lily begin to move closer to being comfortable with having children of their own and Ted has his least remarkable year of dating everyone but the mother of his (eventual) children.

The fifth season of How I Met Your Mother might well be the season that seems to have abandoned its premise more than any of the others. Ted Mosby, despite narrating the show, is much more of a supporting character in this season and no major steps are taken to get Ted closer to meeting the woman who will eventually mother his two children. Instead, the stronger plotlines in the fifth season involve Robin and Barney – together and then apart – and Marshall and Lily working on their own relationship. Ted Mosby becomes more of an observer in their lives and the only way this is at all refreshing for the viewers is that this is not a season that commits Ted to yet another obvious dead-end relationship with a woman who will not be “the mother.”

That is not to say that Ted Mosby does not have a few good moments in season five. The penultimate episode of the season, which has Ted dealing with a movie based upon his relationship with Stella in which the Ted Mosby character is the villain, is funny and painfully awkward to watch, but advances Ted’s character well. “The Wedding Bride” is presented as such a stupid romantic comedy (with an absolutely perfect stupid title!) that it gives Ted one of the few moments of real catharsis in the season and frees him up to truly move on in the next.

More than in the prior seasons, How I Met Your Mother Season Five falls into the familiar traps television shows get into when they have been on for a while: it relies upon guest stars to bring in viewers. In the fifth season of How I Met Your Mother, notable and prominent guest stars include Jennifer Lopez, who takes on Barney as a self-help relationship guru who refuses to put out, Amanda Peet, who provides temptation for Marshall, and Judy Greer, who is dating Ted when “The Wedding Bride” is released in theaters.

The fifth season of How I Met Your Mother is more familiar than funny, but it makes up for the middling humor by doing some decent character work on the important supporting characters in the narrative of Ted Mosby’s romantic life. Despite mortgaging the complicated relationship Barney and Robin could have had for a return to form, there is enough in How I Met Your Mother Season Five to recommend.

For other works with the amazing Amanda Peet, be sure to visit my reviews of:
Identity Thief
2012
The X-Files: I Want To Believe
Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip
A Lot Like Love
The Whole Ten Yards
Something’s Gotta Give
Changing Lanes
The Whole Nine Yards

6/10

For other television reviews, please check out my Television Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2013 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |

When People Who Have Money Decide To Have Kids, You Get A Troublingly Jumbled Film With What To Expect When You’re Expecting

The Good: Moments of humor
The Bad: Predictable, Overbearing soundtrack, Underdeveloped character arcs
The Basics: A big cast and a few good lines does not fix the problems with What To Expect When You’re Expecting.


I do not like babies. I have no problem admitting that. Babies (reviewed here!) was more of a horror story to me than a documentary. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But, the truth is, I lack any type of procreative instinct (more than made up for by my creative-productive instinct that encourages me to write, do art, etc.). I do, however, love movies. I love films with big casts and complicated stories, like Magnolia (reviewed here!) and Cradle Will Rock (reviewed here!). I don’t need the film to be depressing, but I like it to be smart. What To Expect When You’re Expecting is sprawling and filled with characters, but it is not complicated or interesting. And that’s not a baby-hater writing that, it’s a movie reviewer.

What To Expect When You’re Expecting seems initially ambitious with its four main overlapping stories of pregnancy and adoption, but it is so incredibly predictable and the embodiment of the conceits of “chick flicks” that it is hard to see how the film was ever produced. It’s almost like Lionsgate had a dozen hot young actresses and actors under contract and had to get them into a film before the contracts were up and they threw them all into What To Expect When You’re Expecting. What To Expect When You’re Expecting is loosely based on the non-fiction pregnancy manual by the same name and it fleshes out the “how to get through pregnancy” with characters and humor that does only lip service to each of the complicated situations that it tries to explore. Of course, that is what one gets when they try to squeeze four stories that could hold up on their own into a single 110 minute movie.

Instead of complexity or sophistication, What To Expect When You’re Expecting falls back on cheap, obvious conceits that reinforce the ideas that everyone ultimately loves babies and women’s instincts in relationships and pregnancy are the absolute right ones.

Wendy and her husband Gary run a breast feeding store and Wendy has written a children’s book about breastfeeding. She and Gary visit Gary’s former racecar driver father and learn that Ramsey and his young wife, Skyler, are having twins. Fitness guru Jules and her dance partner get pregnant as well. Photographer Holly has been trying with her husband, Alex, but it looks like they will be forced to adopt, which Holly is excited for because she wants to adopt an Ethiopian child. And, after a one-night stand, Rosie finds herself pregnant from a rival food truck owner.

The relationships have varying degrees of complexity, with Gary forced to confront his father over his competitive nature and Wendy realizing she hates being pregnant. Holly freaks out because Alex is not quite ready – even after visiting the roving dad walking club – and she loses her job at the aquarium. When Rosie miscarries, it strains her would-be relationship with the man who would have been the father. And Jules struggles with the relationship with Evan as her career is complicated by her pregnancy.

What To Expect When You’re Expecting is an excellent example with a short film trying to do far too much. In addition to being completely obvious – the fact that Joe Manganiello’s womanizing Davis, who gives the father’s club a vicarious attachment to single life, ends up getting a woman pregnant is utterly unsurprising – Anna Kendrick’s Rosie falls out of the film remarkably fast and Alex’s character struggle with having a child is almost completely neglected and washed over in the pursuit of Holly’s plan and goals.

Moreover, while scenes like Wendy’s rant at the baby seminar do a great job of exploring her character’s frustration, but her assistant, played by Rebel Wilson, provides a comic relief that is utterly unnecessary in the scene. Marco and Rosie are reunited by a weak conceit at the end that is more predictable than audacious or even interesting. In other words, like so many of the character arcs, What To Expect When You’re Expecting goes for the obvious, happy resolution as opposed to sensible, well-conceived stories that actually delve into the full complexities of the character.

The best example of this is with the character of Wendy. Wendy has a load of hopes and dreams associated with having a child, most of her illusions are shattered in the process of being actually pregnant. What To Expect When You’re Expecting fails to explore the consequences of that sudden disillusionment and it completely neglects the toll her rapid mood swings ought to take on her relationship with Gary. For those looking for either a satisfying story or character arcs, What To Expect When You’re Expecting is a bit of a letdown.

What What To Expect When You’re Expecting has in its place is a pounding soundtrack that overwhelms whenever director Kirk Jones needs a transition and virtually every hot “it” actress currently in the business. Led by Elizabeth Banks, What To Expect When You’re Expecting has some of the hottest Hollywood eating-disorder thin unrealistically shaped women in the world portraying the perils of impending motherhood when you have enough money to have a child. It’s hard to take seriously Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez, Anna Kendricks, and Brooklyn Decker worrying at all about having children when they – and all their characters – appear to be able to easily afford prenatal visits and adequate nutrition and houses and the like.

On the acting front, there are no superlative performances. Anna Kendrick, whose work I usually enjoy, seems to have started suffering from Mary-Louise Parker Syndrome (that rare disorder where a woman may not appear on screen with her lips together at any point), though she and Chance Crawford have decent on-screen chemistry. Dennis Quaid, Ben Falcone and Brooklyn Decker show nothing outside their established range – though to Decker’s credit, this film and her work in it is still better than Battleship (reviewed here!). Similarly, Jennifer Lopez, Roderigo Santo, and Cameron Diaz fail to wow in any way. Joel Murray and Chris Rock steal their brief scenes.

Now on DVD, What To Expect When You’re Expecting includes bonus features like deleted scenes, trailers for other “chick flicks,” and two featurettes, none of which make the primary programming better.

Ultimately, What To Expect When You’re Expecting is very typical lowest common denominator for women entertainment and it is not enough to reassure those who have reservations about parenthood, much less entertain an intelligent audience.

For other works with Anna Kendrick, be sure to check out my reviews of:
Breaking Dawn, Part 1
50/50
Eclipse
New Moon
Twilight

4/10

For other film reviews, be sure to check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |

The Turnaround on U Turn, Oliver Stone's Directing School Art Project

The Good: Some decent acting, Moments of character/intrigue
The Bad: Stone's directoral toying, Terrible characters, Feels long
The Basics: With violent, mean and unredeemably bad characters, U Turn tells a story of a man trapped in a backwater town that Oliver Stone sloppily creates.


When I was in college, possibly when I saw The Usual Suspects (reviewed here!) in the theater, I saw a preview for Oliver Stone's U Turn. Ever since then, it has been on my list to see and I was thrilled to find it on DVD (albeit a no-frills version) and I was excited to sit down and watch this movie. If anything, I was biased toward it from the previews I barely remembered. As the movie stretched on and on, the anticipation faded and the reality sunk in; there's a reason U Turn is almost never mentioned with Stone's classic works JFK and Natural Born Killers.

Bobby Cooper is driving through Arizona en route to paying off a gambling debt that has already cost him two fingers when the radiator tube in his car's engine ruptures and he is forced to get it repaired. In the desert, he finds the small town of Superior and a crazy hick mechanic named Darrell. While Darrell is repairing Bobby's car, he goes into the town where he encounters Grace. Grace is nice enough, recognizes his flirting and brings him back to her house. Bobby is attacked by her husband, Jake, who then approaches Bobby with a proposition; he'll give him money to kill Grace, a proposition Bobby rejects. Unfortunately for Bobby, he's at the site of a stick-up and the money he's carrying to pay off his debts gets shot up by a store owner who kills the robbers. As Bobby is tossed between Darrell and a psychopath named TNT, attracted to Grace and avoiding the law in the form of Sheriff Potter, he finds himself desperate to get out of Superior and in need of money he does not have.

U Turn has a number of elements that seem to set it up for greatness. It has a respected director (Oliver Stone), it has a decent cast that includes Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Jennifer Lopez (remember when she was primarily an actress?), and Billy Bob Thornton. It has characters that are, at the very least, intriguing. It even has some truly brilliant lines. The problem is, almost none of them all come together at the same time.

Possibly the best moment - and this is in the trailer, so it's not revealing anything too big - is when Bobby, played perfectly in the scene by Sean Penn, turns to Darrell - played with gruesome perversity by Billy Bob Thornton - and with uncharacteristic wit says, "Forty thousand people die each day, how come you're not one of them?" Now that's an insult! Penn delivers the line well, to the right character at the right moment. It's a nice moment of cinematic quality that is not necessarily indicative of the rest of the film.

Bobby owes people money and they've lopped off some of his fingers so from the moment Bobby comes into the picture, the viewer knows we're not dealing with the morally upstanding citizens of the world. Writer John Ridley does not keep the viewer waiting long, with Darrell being the first character the very impatient Bobby encounters. Whatever sympathy we have for Darrell who is immediately insulted by Bobby, fades with his shifty ways and underlying meanness (to say nothing of his rotted smile).

In short, U Turn features a cast of almost entirely unlikable characters. Superior, Arizona is populated by rogues, killers and psychopaths who bully, bribe and sex their ways through life. And it gets old pretty quick. Unlike a movie like Payback (reviewed here!) where the viewer roots for the antihero because they have been, in some way, wronged and has some redeeming quality to them, U Turn has no such luck.

Throughout this movie, characters tell Bobby that they see within him the killer instinct, the ability to kill, something he claims he has never done before arriving at Superior. The thing is, whether they see it or not, Bobby's sense of desperation leads him to exercise what he's never seen within him before. It's that kind of weak characterization where there's no integrity that turns the viewer off to empathizing with him. Instead, the viewer shrugs and says, "Don't care what's coming to him now."

Even the abused Grace has moments where the viewer thinks her character might be redeemable. Alas, Ridley and director Oliver Stone mortgage that by making Grace even more shifty than her abusive husband Jake. To his credit, Stone chose well to cast Jennifer Lopez as Grace and Nick Nolte as Jake. Nolte is appropriately menacing as Jake and almost every moment he's on screen makes the viewer's skin crawl. Similarly, Powers Boothe is decent as Sheriff Potter.

What's unredeemable is Stone's directing. Stone plays with the camera like a film school student, cheapening almost every vital moment of the film by using camera techniques. A good (or great) director figures out how to use the medium to effectively tell the story they want. While I applaud experimentation, Stone's camera experiments fail to illuminate the story or more importantly the characters in U Turn. Instead, the abrupt clips are distracting, sloppy and annoying.

Whatever potential the rogues gallery of U Turn had of surviving the unlikability of the characters and the somewhat predictable (or standard) criminal underworld plot is mortgaged by Stone's direction which sinks this film out of being watchable. At least now, it's off my list. If it's on yours, you might want to take it off before you, too, are disappointed.

For other works by Oliver Stone, be sure to check out my reviews of:
Platoon
Wall Street
W.
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

4/10

For other film reviews, be sure to check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012, 2007 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |

Kevin Smith Tries Some New Askew Plots . . . With Success In Jersey Girl

The Good: Funny, Sweet, Good characters, Good acting
The Bad: Predictable plot, Kevin Smith's lack of trust in his audience
The Basics: If Kevin Smith re-integrates deleted scenes into this comedy about a family on the verge of rebirth, Jersey Girl will be a work that will endure far longer.


In his first five films and single cartoon series, Kevin Smith created a universe that is immediately recognizable to fans of his work. It is in his mythical New Jersey that a drug dealer named Jay and his hetero- lifemate Silent Bob encountered obstacles ranging from mall security guards to demons bent on destroying the universe. Smith returns his fans now to a different section of his universe in Jersey Girl, though he is playing with many of his same core of actors.

Ollie Trinke is a publicist for the stars and he tends to be a workaholic. His wife, Gertrude, is very much in love with him, though when she becomes pregnant, they find some strain on their relationship, mostly to do with the amount he works. Gertrude dies in childbirth, leaving Ollie to raise her namesake Gertie. Gertie is a handful for him, leading him to a public relations mishap that gets him fired. Years later, Ollie and Gertie are still living with Ollie's father Bart in New Jersey and they are happy. Ollie, however, still pines for New York City and the life he left behind there. When he meets a charming video store clerk, Maya, who is clearly interested in him, his priorities begin to change and he needs to decide to return to the life he once knew or adapt to all of the changes that Gertie and Maya bring into his life.

First of all, I am a big fan of Smith's other outings and I like the View Askew Universe. Thus, I was looking forward to Jersey Girl from pretty much the first moment I heard about it. Unlike the many many fans who are likely to spend great time and verbiage complaining about Jersey Girl's lack of known View Askew Universe residents (notably Jay and Silent Bob), I resist such tendencies because Smith deserves his chance to explore and expand that universe (there's nothing to stop him from returning and/or integrating characters he creates now and in the future in future works).

But the fact is, I have a serious beef about Kevin Smith in regards to Jersey Girl. As many who heard about this movie knew, Ollie is played by actor Ben Affleck and Gertrude was played by actress Jennifer Lopez. The older this review becomes, the more this explicit statement will become necessary: Jersey Girl was shot while Affleck and Lopez shared an off-camera romantic relationship. In his filming diaries of Jersey Girl, Smith repeatedly remarked about how in love the two of them were and how their chemistry was amazing on film and how much life they brought to the movie.

Days before Jersey Girl was released in the theaters, Smith let it be known on his website that a good deal of the beginning of the movie - with Ollie and Gertrude in love - was being cut. He specifically cited the wedding between them hitting the cutting room floor and his given reason for the cut was that he did not want people who saw the movie to see Affleck and Lopez getting married and become confused about them being together (by the point the movie was released, their romantic relationship had been terminated).

My beef with Kevin Smith is this: he insults the intelligence of his audience and I am one of those people. Smith's lame remark was that because Affleck and Lopez came close to marrying, but did not, seeing them playing characters that got married would make the audience confused thinking that the actors had married. Please. What a ridiculous notion and what a waste of truly meaningful footage. There is a lack in Jersey Girl and it comes where the wedding should have been. Ollie and Gertrude go from courting to rather pregnant with wedding rings without the passion of something like a wedding to make explicit that there has been that deepening of their love.

Smith underestimates the power of his own work; Ollie, from the moment he appears on the screen, is quite clearly not Ben Affleck. Yes, Ben Affleck plays him, but they are not the same person. Actors play characters and Smith has cast perfectly, allowing Affleck to become Ollie the way Lopez becomes Gertrude. As a result, Smith instantly brings us into a world where two people are in love and encountering the very real stresses that come with juggling hectic work schedules. And if Kevin Smith had another reason for cutting the footage (i.e. one of the actors asking him to, because it was too painful for them to watch), fine, but he could have either been honest about it or come up with a better lie.

Smith's storytelling ability is wonderful here, as he takes the classic relationship story that he has been retelling since Clerks and puts yet another spin on it. And it works. More intelligent than just about any other romantic comedy, Jersey Girl goes into daring territory for Smith, illustrating a relationship seldom given focus in romantic comedies as the story revolves around Ollie and Gertie. The father/daughter dynamic and how it changes when another woman enters the picture is impressively explored here.

Indeed, because the plot is relatively simple, Smith is forced to flesh out his characters to an extent that he has not had to since Chasing Amy. Ironically, Jersey Girl is set up to be Gertie's story (from its title and the opening shots), yet it is Ollie's story. Ollie and his relationships with Gertie, Bart, Maya and his coworkers is what Jersey Girl is all about.

It is Ollie that moves much of the movie and he is a likable character who is instantly empathetic. Unlike Holden McNeil from Chasing Amy, who is empathetic up until he draws the worst possible conclusion from the data given to him, Ollie Trinke reacts emotively with a very real array of issues in all of his relationships. As a result, we often feel like he is a pinball moving between the different relationships in his life because he is emotively in limbo or (from the middle of the film onward) is finding his emotive center - his love for his daughter - set off balance.

Ben Affleck gives a great performance that Kevin Smith does not give justice to in assuming that people watching him will see Affleck instead of Ollie. Moreover, Affleck is given a chance to show more of his range from his action hero and whiny man types that have defined so many of his movies. This is quite possible Affleck's most accessible performance and the one that is easiest for the widest audience to relate to.

Similarly, Liv Tyler does an amazing job of defining Maya through her body language and soft voice. Tyler appears on screen shattering our perceptions of her as an elf (from her The Lord Of The Rings role) and instantly establishes herself as someone who has a sense of comic timing and real zest to her. Jennifer Lopez is decent in the few scenes we see her in and George Carlin gives a surprisingly dramatic performance as Bart.

The real surprise is Raquel Castro, who plays Gertie. Castro approaches the role with a surprising amount of maturity and depth that I have not seen in a child actor since Dakota Fanning in I Am Sam (reviewed here!). Castro, however, has a wonderful sense of a child's comic timing and she uses it in contrast to adult-like renderings of her dramatic lines that makes her character come alive.

Kevin Smith takes a chance in making a family comedy about a widower, his daughter, and the woman who enters the picture to affect their family and it's a bold, wonderful step in the growth of his storytelling ability. Hopefully, as the film hits DVD, he will have the courage to tell the story that will endure and let the tabloids fade into the past.

For other movies by Kevin Smith, please visit my reviews of:
Clerks
Chasing Amy
Dogma
Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back
Clerks II
Zack And Miri Make A Porno
Cop Out
Red State

8/10

For other film reviews, be sure to check out my Movie Review Index Page for a complete listing of all the movies I have reviewed.

© 2012, 2004 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |

Part Three of Jennifer Lopez's Hat Trick, Tarsem's The Cell Disappoints

The Good: Imagery, Moments of concept.
The Bad: Lack of character, Mediocre performances
The Basics: While Catherine Deane runs around inside the head of a killer, the audience becomes acclimated to the horror and wonders why she does not.


There was a moment when the world completely opened up to Jennifer Lopez. When she began her music career, she had a weekend that she had the distinct honor of having the #1 album in the nation (On The 6), the #1 single in the U.S. ("If You Had My Love") and the #1 movie with The Cell. The Cell is a fairly derivative movie directed by Tarsem, the man who directed the R.E.M. video "Losing My Religion." For his feature film debut, he essentially uses the same techniques and imagery that made that music video one of the more memorable ones.

Catherine Deane is a psychotherapist whose unconventional technique to help a traumatized boy is to journey into his mind to help him work through his trauma from the safety of his own imagination. Near to where Deane is doing her breakthrough work, the FBI is hot on the heels of a serial killer, Stargher. Stargher's fetish/modus operandi is to capture a woman and place her in a glass cell. After 40 hours, the prison is filled with water, essentially becoming an aquarium, and the woman he has in there drowns. Unfortunately for the FBI, when he is found, he is comatose, so agent Novak brings Stargher to Deane and she enters his mind to find where his latest victim is being held before her time runs out.

It seems to me, ever since Jacob's Ladder (reviewed here!), Hollywood has been looking for another film that is essentially a nightmare on celluloid. The relative success of Jacob's Ladder proved to some that one could essentially string together a whole bunch of terrifying images with the barest plot and sell it as a movie. The Cell seems like the natural successor in that history. Unlike a movie like What Dreams May Come, The Cell takes little time to develop the protagonists in a compelling way and resorts for the most part to the twisted imagery of the killer's mind to define Stargher.

Even so, the box-office success of The Cell is no real surprise. It was sold on Jennifer Lopez and the advertisements featuring Lopez dressed in various outfits no doubt brought the crowds in. It certainly was not the themes or plot of the movie that made this a load of dough, as it was far too conceptual and abstract for most people. This is essentially a science fiction crossover into the psychological horror.

The superlative aspect of The Cell, however, is not Jennifer Lopez, it is the direction and imagery from director Tarsem. Tarsem was an excellent choice to direct this visual-intensive film because he has an eye for metaphor, a great sense of lighting and a rich understanding of the use of color. So, for example, when Catherine's world is presented, the color contrast is richly different from the inside of Stargher's mind. Tarsem very effectively shows the statement he is trying to make without having to have characters speak about it.

And even though Tarsem utilizes some of the same imagery in this film that he used in the R.E.M. video he directed, he pulls it off well, making it feel new and different enough that it's easy to watch.

Tarsem's visual sense heightens the horror of The Cell, as his sense of what will be most disturbing is timed to have maximum impact. So, for example, early in Catherine's trip into Stargher's mind, a horse is vivisected by glass panels and spread apart where it appears to continue living (though it's not goin' out for any gallops anymore!). While this is widely regarded as a reference to the artwork of Damien Hirst, the image is effect, gross and powerful. Somewhere, there is still a woman beating her fella' senseless for dragging her to The Cell on a date.

The problem is not in Tarsem's direction or his sense of visual style, which creates some genuinely intriguing moments. The problem with The Cell is that effect is only one aspect of a movie. Unlike Requiem For A Dream, which had characters who were loathsome and descending into a metaphorical nightmare, The Cell features largely unremarkable characters living through a literal nightmare in the mind of Stargher.

Writer Mark Protosevich does not create characters that are empathetic, much less sympathetic or interesting. Sure, there are moment that the audience, like Catherine, manages to feel sorry for Carl, the boy Stargher once was. But whatever emotional connection the viewer has with the humanity of Carl is mortgaged by the way the film journeys into the nonsensical. Catherine becomes trapped within Stargher's mind, but it's unclear what keeps her trapped. Indeed, when Novak joins her in the mind of the killer, it's only when he starts shouting out personal information that she snaps out of the stupor she's in. But by that point, the character does not make sense. Catherine is strong, we're led to believe, but she becomes virtually hypnotized such that nothing has an effect on her, including watching Novak being tortured. IT's hard to believe that someone as empathetic as Catherine, who works so hard to help Edward (the boy) would not respond to a colleague being tortured.

Moreover, it seems very cheap that the person who has the most experience with this technique needs to be reminded that it's all unreal. My point here is that the characters are all flat and make no real sense. Novak adapts far too quickly to the nightmarish world he finds himself in (now if it was Mulder from The X-Files, it would be different . . .) and Catherine becomes victimized in a way that makes too little sense. Indeed, Stargher adapts pretty quickly and rationally to having other people running around in his head for someone who is supposed to be completely insane.

As it is, though Stargher is the best-developed character in the film and he is also played the best. Vincent D'Onofrio portrays Stargher and through all the weird outfits, hairstyles and beastly permutations Stargher takes on, D'Onofrio maintains menace and a strength of presence that makes it easy to believe his character is utterly insane.

Ultimately, though, it's not enough. Protosevich and Tarsem take the cheap, Hollywood, way out to resolve the movie, much like the way all of the last Star Trek movies degenerated into a "kill-the-villain" situation. Unlike the far superior The City Of Lost Children (reviewed here!) that has essentially the same plot - and precedes this by a couple of years - The Cell resorts to the big, Hollywood tough-woman-through-violence routine. It's cheap. The City Of Lost Children resolved its conflict in a far more compelling way and it worked with the characters, whereas it's hard to buy a psychologist slipping as far as Deane does.

What pushes the movie up into average territory is that it did not insult my intelligence by trying the cheapest trick in a movie like this. At the beginning, there are tests Deane is given as she comes out of the experience that establish that she is all together and she is herself. I waited for an end where there would be the cheap reversal of Stargher taking over Deane and being loose in the world in her body, but I was pleased to see neither Protosevich nor Tarsem were so unoriginal.

As it is, the images are interesting and disturbing, but not enough to recommend this movie. What Dreams May Come and The City Of Lost Children provide better opportunities to explore a visual marvel and a similar plot.

For other films where dreams are an essential aspect of the film, be sure to check out my reviews of:
Inception
A Nightmare On Elm Street
Coraline


5/10

For other film reviews, please be sure to check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing of the films I have reviewed!

© 2012, 2007 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |

The Wedding Planner: Something Hollywood This Way Comes . . .

The Good: Background scenery
The Bad: Utterly predictable, Lack of character and development, Pretty much all of the acting
The Basics: A disgustingly homogenized film in which everything we expect to happen does and everyone looks like they stepped out of a magazine. Bland.


My title ought to have the subtitle "As Bad As I Suspected It Could Be." Have you ever seen a film that didn't disappoint your lowest possible expectations for it? A film that was so predictable you could call the lines two scenes in advance and you sat through watching the clock begging for it to be over? Well, The Wedding Planner was exactly like that for me. I was expecting it to be bland, utterly Hollywood fare. Well, it was. In fact, it was the epitome of everything that is Hollywood.

Mary Fiore is, surprise, a woman who plans and directs weddings. She's landed the ultimate wedding to direct which has put her in a position to advance in the wedding planning business. In the process, she meets a guy and falls in love at first sight. As it turns out, again predictably, the man she's fallen for is the groom in this important wedding. You ought to be able to see where this is going; Mary tries to do her job, arranging the wedding for Steve and Fran while Steve and Mary fend off their feelings for each other.

The sole strength I could come up with for this film was the scenery. They picked a beautiful place (San Francisco) to shoot The Wedding Planner. The gardens are nothing short of amazing. And there are enough background shots that make the film easy enough to watch.

There is no character development. There are no plot surprises. There is not acting talent at work here. Matthew McConaughey plays Steve and he's not acting; he appears as the charming enough man who does the talk show circuit whenever he has a new film coming out. Jennifer Lopez was herself as well, meaning that her instant assumption was that the man she was with was gay (I almost wrote this as a "Is Jennifer Lopez a closeted lesbian?" piece because having watched Angel Eyes (reviewed here!) and The Wedding Planner today I'm somewhat surprised that the only thing the characters Lopez plays seem to have in common is a line where they both accuse their male costar of being gay. It's not subtle and it's bordering on homophobic accusation.). Anyway, Lopez isn't playing a character any different from herself when she does the talk show circuit. I mean, she's playing herself here as a business woman, kind of like how she acts when she talks about her music career; she's trying to sell herself as something and in this case, it seems like no leap of the imagination.

This film is not funny. This film is not charming. The two high points for me were when Charles Kimbrough (he plays Fran's father in the film; he played Jim on Murphy Brown) and Kevin Pollack showed up. Sigh even they couldn't save this film from being impossible to recommend.

You've seen this film, a hundred times before. All of the men are chiseled, all of the women skinny, bleached hair, over make-uped. In a word, Hollywood. None of these characters are real and none of them feel that way. This film is not worth your time. Well, unless you love Hollywood . . .

For other works with Judy Greer, be sure to visit my reviews of:
Love And Other Drugs
Marmaduke
The Big Bang Theory - Season 3
Love Happens
Arrested Development
What Women Want
Three Kings
Jawbreaker

1/10

For other film reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2011, 2002 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |

Trying To Be More Than It Is: Angel Eyes Fails.

The Good: Acting (surprisingly), Overall plot, Character development.
The Bad: Thematically heavy-handed, Rocky beginning, Attempts to be ethnic.
The Basics: An average film that floats on the notion that it defied one or two of my notions, Angel Eyes did not bore me and wasn't as bad as I anticipated.


Occasionally, I go on streaks where I'm recommending a lot of films or books or c.d.s and I get to feeling bad about it. There's a lot of stuff I don't like and I have rather discriminatory tastes as far as media presentations are concerned. When I feel I've been too nice to the media at large, I got to the library and I get out some films I'm fairly sure I won't like, just so I have something to pan so my reviews are balanced. Today, I went to the library with that intent and I got out two films featuring Jennifer Lopez. I figured I had some easy pickin's; every time one of her bubbly incessant, sugary dance-pop pieces of crap songs come on the radio, I turn it off. So, when I took out Angel Eyes I figured, it was post "J-Lo: The Phenomenon" had begun and it would be something for her to put out there trying to sell her image. Well, every now and then, one of my attempts to balance my reviews fails (damn my taking things as they come!).

The truth is, Angel Eyes isn't a bad film. It's not a great film, but it's not the terrible dreck I had assumed it would be. Is the purpose of Angel Eyes to sell an audience on a body supposedly insured for one billion dollars? Yes. And that's distracting. How distracting? Very distracting. Let's start with the title. Angel Eyes. It's attempting to get us, the viewer, looking at Jennifer Lopez. Not Sharon Pogue (the character she plays), but Jennifer Lopez. This is one of those horribly misnamed films. It's as if the people putting the film out changed it at the last minute to try and sell Jennifer Lopez. And hey, checking out the IMDB, I see that the working title for the film had been "Heart Of Town;" they should have kept it at that.

So, Sharon Pogue is a police officer, quite lost on the dating scene. She has a temper and is, to put it mildly, rough around the edges. She assists at the scene of a car accident and in an uncharacteristic bit of compassion stays with a person, encouraging them to live beyond the moment and to hold on for the paramedics. A year later, Sharon is on the streets, committing police brutality (interestingly enough the only suspects she loses her temper with and gets physical with are white), and being socially awkward. She ends up chasing a suspect, losing her gun to him and is about to be killed when Catch, a mysterious stranger that we the audience are smart enough to know is not there by happenstance, rescues her. Lucky Sharon.

What follows immediately is an awkward friendship leading slowly into a relationship and an exploration of Catch's past as well as Sharon's. They both have backstories and most of it is well played out.

The kickers are in continuity. I mean, pretty glaring stuff. For instance, the film opens at night. It's night and the police and paramedics are arriving at the scene of the accident on a major bridge in Chicago. The film opens with some of the most forced, unrealistic dialog I've ever seen in a police-themed film. I mean, Lopez's first lines made me think, "This review will be easy" At that point, I was betting it was a one out of ten film. But I digress. The film opens at night and it's raining heavily. When Catch remembers the moment of the accident, it's daylight. It's pretty bright daylight. Mock police all you want, but it doesn't take paramedics and police over two hours to get to an accident on a major bridge in Chicago. Doesn't happen that way.

Okay, so we get an awkward beginning where Sharon rescues Catch from the car and Catch rescues Sharon from a gunman. I was even willing to suspend my disbelief to believe Sharon didn't recognize Catch from the car wreck. However, she clearly sees him moments before the attack that results in him saving her. That is never addressed. That's somewhat troublesome. Especially as Sharon is portrayed as suspicious and guarded.

I found myself actually enjoying the film when the socially awkward Catch and the very guarded Sharon go to Sharon's apartment. The dialog they have flows well, the characters seem vital and real. In a move of almost subtlety, Sharon removes her last gun from her back while talking with Catch. We see her opening up.

There's a clunky moment between Sharon and her brother (her brother makes a comment about her coming to the construction sight in her "police uniform" and that reads wrong. It's obviously a uniform and in real life no one I can think of would add the "police" to it and spell out the obvious. This film, however, does), but for the most part, the middle is solid. As a relationship develops between Sharon and Catch, Sharon's history of family violence comes out as does the mystery of who Catch is and why he is there.

On the subject of the family violence, the first time the subject is broached, it's actually a wonderful scene. Sharon and her mom have a whole dialog alluding to her abusive father (whom she once had arrested for domestic abuse) while not making anything explicit. It went up a notch in that dialog alone. The problem is, it keeps coming up. When Sharon's brother hits his wife, every possible cliche in the book about domestic abuse is used. The characters try to address that, tying it back to the parents, but it falls flat, it's too late. The phrasing is already clunky and obvious. It's as if they said everything we've heard before and then the characters say, "I know you've heard that all before, but what are we supposed to do?" My answer would be "You ought to have innovated."

For the duration of the awkwardness between Sharon and Catch, they film is actually good, more than simply watchable but actually good. The film even gets good enough, flows well enough with the characters learning and growing through their interaction with each other that there comes the gratuitous "Jennifer Lopez Appears In As Little As We Can Afford Without Her Being Naked Scene" and it doesn't even feel gratuitous. And recall from my opening, I was looking for such scenes to help me pan this film. I still don't think this film was rated R. It was PG-13 at best.

When Sharon probes too hard, Catch begins to freak out and realize his own forgotten past. That works well. James Caviezel is wonderful in the role of Catch. He was also in Pay It Forward (reviewed here!) playing the same type of quiet, but competent character. He has the affect of one of those The X-Files freaks of the week who starts as a simple loner, but then is actually a mutant of some sort. James makes the role of Catch and his presence is far more impressive than Jennifer Lopez's.

Jennifer Lopez, for her part, holds her own acting. My thought on that front is that she should quit her night job and stick with acting. She has some potential for talent there or at least competence, which she lacks in her overproduced "musical" career.

The writing is inconsistent, especially in the beginning. The jibes that the officers exchange do not read as realistic and the partner loyalty (a la NYPD Blue) is completely lacking. In short, Sharon's character is written trying to be a tough streetsmart officer and it comes across as a rich actress trying to be something she's not. It's as if Lopez was saying to the people in the neighborhoods she grew up in, "See, I'm still one of you! I haven't changed!" Well, the $500 shoes say something different.

In the final analysis, though, it's a razor decision and in this case, the benefit is going in favor of the film. It was nowhere near as bad as I expected it to be or as awful as it could have been. If that's not reason enough to recommend an otherwise average film, I can't think of a good one. Actually, I can think of the exact moment I decided to "recommend" the film. Near the end, Sharon and Catch meet and it's after Sharon tells a story that anyone with experience knows is going to be a reversal story and Sharon tells a story in which her love for her estranged father comes through. Throughout the film, the importance of keeping appointments is stressed and when Sharon and Catch meet after that scene, he's late for meeting him and they did not say what I expected them to; Catch does not say he came because it's important to keep appointments.

It's a good thing I decided then, though; the last moment of the film cheesed me off; Catch, driving for the first time since his near-fatal car accident that opened the film, doesn't put on his seatbelt. Sigh. Sometimes I think I expect too much in terms of reasonable continuity.

For other works with Kari Matchett, be sure to check out my reviews of:
Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip
Invasion
Wonderfalls

5/10

For other movie reviews, please click here to visit my index page on the subject!

© 2011, 2002 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.


| | |

"Blah, Blah, Blah Blah Blah Blah," The Smurfs Is Just Horrendous.

The Good: Hank Azaria and Neil Patrick Harris show up for it . . .
The Bad: Not funny, Not charming, Dull plot, No character development, Terrible special effects, Virtually everything.
The Basics: Entirely underwhelming, The Smurfs is not worth seeing for adults or children, giving it little to no redeeming value during a bloated Summer Blockbuster Season.


One of the nice things about being a reviewer is getting into preview screenings. Unfortunately, many of them are public screenings intended to generate word of mouth and it was one such screening I found myself at yesterday morning for The Smurfs. And it's not like my wife didn't warn me the place would be overrun with screaming children (which it was), but as she correctly guessed, I just can't get enough of panning the works of Katy Perry. The truth is, my disdain for the works of Katy Perry would have been reason for me to brave seeing The Smurfs eventually, but it was my appreciation of the works of Neil Patrick Harris that made me want to see the movie early and go when the place was packed with kids.

Sadly, Neil Patrick Harris and Hank Azaria appearing in the movie is not enough to override the overwhelming sense of suck that this movie possesses.

The Smurfs suffers not from being what it is - which is family-friendly fare - but from being the most mundane, senseless version of what it is supposed to be. There is no message, no strong moral, not even a sense of nostalgia for those of us who grew up on the Smurfs. Yes, despite going into the movie suspecting it would disappoint, I had a secret hope that this would remind me of something simple that I did love as a child, but instead, The Smurfs completely underwhelmed me and left me, if possible, more cynical than ever. And Katy Perry was not the cause of it, which might be the first time I can use the phrases "more cynical" and "not Katy Perry's fault" together. Instead, The Smurfs is a prolonged slapstick chase sequence connected by humor that didn't even seem to grab the under ten crowd that dominated the screening I was at.

The Smurfs are living in peace in their village when the evil sorcerer Gargamel invades to try to capture Smurfs for his nefarious purposes. Fleeing Gargamel, six of the Smurfs - including Papa, Smurfette and Brainy - fall through a portal into New York's Central Park. Their feelings of safety and familiarity are upset when they see the giant buildings and are chased by Gargamel and his cat, Azrael. As the Smurfs try to find safety, they end up in the possession of Patrick Winslow, who is fairly cynical and unappreciative of the magical beings.

Encouraged by his wife Grace, Patrick tries to keep the Smurfs safe and help them return to their village. But soon, the Smurfs and Patrick must work together to stop Gargamel when Papa Smurf is captured by the wizard.

I'm going to start my critique with the most mundane of criticisms of The Smurfs because someone has to say it. The Smurfs in The Smurfs are not three apples high. Right off the bat, there is a huge perspective problem with The Smurfs that will upset purists and make the project seem like it was put together by people who couldn't tell the difference between an apple and a crab apple. Besides that, the best special effect in The Smurfs truly is the make-up that transforms Hank Azaria into Gargamel. Between the make-up, his voice and the goofy sense of movement Azaria has to make him embody Gargamel, Azaria is utterly unrecognizable, even to fans of his work.

The Smurfs suffers because the plot is almost nonexistent and the character development is entirely absent from the piece. The plot is a pretty basic chase movie with Gargamel being a pretty absolute evil character whose motivations are not explored and instead is the Villain For The Sake Of A Villain. The Smurfs are, conversely, good, even Grouchy who lives up to his name by being the contrarian of the lot. The chase from Gargamel is broken up by quieter bits that have Grace and Patrick learn more about the Smurfs as they are subjected to pretty banal humor, usually involving the fact that the Smurfs are so small interacting with the human-sized world and accessories therein.

The Smurfs are characterized by their names. Papa is an old leader, Chef cooks, Clumsy falls down, Smurfette is a girl, Brainy spouts facts and ideas constantly, you get the picture. Beyond their names and the lone trait they embody, the Smurfs are virtually identical. Physically, they look the same with their white hats and white pants, save Smurfette who wears a dress, Papa who wears red, Brainy who wears glasses, and Gutsy, who wears a kilt. The lesson of The Smurfs is, ostensibly, that people need to work together to get things done. So, Brainy is not nearly as useful without Hefty or Gutsy because it is one thing to be smart, but it is another to be able to put a plan into action with strength or stones. We get it. Unfortunately, the children in the audience did not seem to care much about the social message because they were overwhelmed by the CG Smurfs that look utterly fake in the real environments. Moreover, the moral of the Smurf lifestyle is comparatively underemphasized in the film in favor of chase sequences and ridiculously bad puns that are supposed to pass for humor.

As for the acting, Hank Azaria carries his scenes, but the others, including a surprisingly flat Neil Patrick Harris, do not. Harris and Jayma Mays do an excellent job of keeping their eyelines proper for the virtual characters, but Harris has a lack of spark uncharacteristic to his performances. So, while he makes humorous gripes that nitpickers of the Smurfs will appreciate, he does it without any particular zest or irony, as if he doesn't want to upset his mealticket by buying into his lines. Jayma Mays, conversely, plays yet another dew-eyed optimist who gives us nothing we haven't seen from her before. The voice actors all do fine as their characters, including Katy Perry, though none of them are given real voice challenges that warrant their celebrity. Indeed, some of the celebrity is distracting. Each time Grouchy opened his mouth, I was aware I was listening to George Lopez.

Ultimately, The Smurfs is mundane and it is not entertaining to add buoyancy to that averageness, which sinks it further. I suppose not every property from the 1980s is marketable today with CG effects and a tongue-in-cheek attitude to it. Still, I'd pay to see a good Masters Of The Universe flick. I would not pay to see this and cannot recommend anyone else pay for it or even waste their time on it when seeing it is free.

For other works featuring George Lopez, be sure to visit my reviews of:
Marmaduke
Valentine's Day
The Spy Next Door
Swing Vote

1.5/10

For other movie reviews, please visit my index page on the subject by clicking here!

© 2011 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.

| | |