The overriding theme of Love in the Time of Cholera, the new film from 4 Weddings and a Funeral director Mike Newell, is that true love never dies. Nice sentiment to be sure, but unfortunately for viewers of this sprawling adaptation of the wildly popular novel by Nobel Prize Winner , my love for the film died about an hour before the movie ended.
To keep the running time of the film to 139 minutes Newell and team cut and slashed away at the book’s 50-year timeline, altering storylines somewhat—for example, Dr. Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt) dies from a fall rather than natural causes—eliminating characters and generally condensing the novel’s 368 pages into a more cinematic form. Happily the power of love theme hasn’t been lost; unhappily they have chosen to highlight the story’s melodramatic elements, adopting a style more appropriate to a daytime soap than a high minded literary adaptation.
Set in 1878 in the Columbian town of Cartagena during a cholera epidemic, the film is the saga of young Fiorentino’s (Unax Ugalde) love for Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). They fall deeply in love, but when her domineering father (John Leguziamo) discovers their affair he spirits her away to a small mountain town far from the admiring hands of her young suitor. There she meets and marries the handsome Dr. Urbino (Benjamin Bratt) who provides well for her but occasionally strays outside the boundaries of their marriage.
Over the next few decades the heartbroken Fiorentino (Javier Bardem as the adult character) finds success in business but none in his personal life. He remains a bachelor, but an endless (and well catalogued) string of one-night stands and brief affairs only accentuates the aching love he still feels for Fermina.
When Dr. Urbino unexpectedly dies Fiorentino seizes the chance to rekindle his long dormant love affair with Fermina.
Love in the Time of Cholera has none of the charm of the novel. Although lushly photographed mostly on location in Columbia, the film lurches along from one scene to the next with little regard to pacing or coherent storytelling. At 139 minutes it feels twice as long because of the disjointed way Newell unrolls the story. The film leaps from year to year like a gazelle chasing its prey, the characters age rapidly (with unusually obvious makeup) and several scenes simply don’t belong. A love scene between Bardem and beauty queen Laura Harring as the buxom Sara Noriega seems to only have been included to give Newell the opportunity to show the former Miss USA winner topless.
Bardem, so effective as the psycho killer in No Country for Old Men commits himself fully to the role of the heartsick Fiorentino but is undone by a weak script and an almost total lack of chemistry between him and his paramour co-star Giovanna Mezzogiorno. No sparks fly between the two and it is hard to believe that anyone would spend a lifetime pursuing such a flaccid relationship and since that pairing is at the core of the film, its failure brings the whole enterprise down.
Love in the Time of Cholera is a missed opportunity to turn a literary masterpiece into a masterful—although in this case I’d even settle for good or even bearable—movie.
Leatherheads takes us back to 1925 when college football ruled while the allegedly professional players were mostly thugs who played drunk and thought nothing of brawling during regulation play. They were kind of like hockey players only without the sticks.
George Clooney, who also directed the picture, is Dodge Connolly, the over-the-hill captain of the Duluth Bulldogs, a rough and tumble team on the verge of bankruptcy. To increase the team’s popularity he recruits college ball’s most popular player, Princeton’s Carter “The Bullet” Rutherford (The Office’s John Krasinski). Carter isn’t just famous as a ball player, he’s also a war hero who apparently got a whole platoon of Germans to surrender. He the all-American hero, but one Chicago Tribune editor thinks his story is too good to be true and sends impish reporter Lexie “I’m not really the homemaker type” Littleton (Renee Zellweger) to “break the myth of the boy hero.”
As Lexie searches for her story, Carter and Connolly become rivals on the field and for Miss Littleton’s affection.
As a director Clooney nails the period and the conventions of screwball comedy. Taking a page or two from the playbooks of Howard Hawks, George Cukor and Frank Capra, the masters of the madcap genre, Clooney hits most of the right notes. He populates the movie with colorful characters in great looking clothes, sets up a love triangle and even throws in some farce. The movie looks great, touched with a beautiful nostalgic glow and the dialogue is snappy—it’s just too bad the pacing isn’t.
For all its attention to period detail and the splendor of the production design, Leatherheads falls flat, devoid of any of the free-for-all spirit of the rowdy brand of football that is the basis of the story. The cast hands in nice performances—Zellweger’s pouty lips are perfect for the period and Clooney has put away serious George in favor of the pratfalling goofy George—but they are often undone by scenes that last too long. Look up the definition of screwball comedies and you’ll see the word “snappy” used to describe both the pace and the dialogue. Clooney only got it half right.
Marketing wise Leatherheads should have had been a field goal. You have football for the guys and George Clooney for the gals, but despite Clooney’s obvious love for the genre it feels more like an incomplete pass.
No one has spent as much time on screen jumping from dimension to dimension as Keanu Reeves. All the way back to Bill and Ted’s excellent time traveling adventures through to Neo in the Matrix and Constantine his characters have tripped the light fantastic, jumping from one plane to the another. His latest film, The Lake House, is a romance so you’d think that all the time shifting mumbo jumbo would be put aside, but think again. In The Lake House Reeves and co-star Sandra Bullock have the ultimate long distance relationship.
Based on Lee Hyeon-seung’s 2000 Korean film Il Mare, The Lake House is the story of Bullock, a forlorn doctor and Reeves, a frustrated architect. In common they have a beautiful house on a quiet lake. It’s been in his family for years and she has rented it while interning at a nearby hospital. When she moves out she leaves a courtesy note in the mailbox asking the owner to forward any mail that may get misdirected to that address. An exchange of letters begins and it becomes obvious that something is off. Somehow our leads have been swept into a time tunnel—he’s living in 2004, she’s in 2006. Unlike the last time they shared a marquee—1994’s Speed—there is no madman on a speeding bus to keep them apart. This time it’s meta-physical.
Meta-physical romance isn’t a new genre—there have been others like Frequency and Somewhere in Time—but the thing all those movies have in common is the difficulty of keeping the romance passionate when the two leads are rarely in the same time zone. The Lake House makes the best use of that sense of longing for something that may, or may not be real, and tries hard to generate some heat between the Bullock and Reeves. Their physical encounters should appeal to the romantics in the audience who will be rooting for them to figure out the physics and get together.
The Lake House has a bit of a tone problem in trying to tell too many stories at once. The addition of Christopher Plummer—who might enjoy a little mustard with his hammy performance—as an uncaring father gets in the way of the magical romance. On the plus side the movie has a slow, deliberate style and despite some editing that seems like it was borrowed from a 1980s wedding video, unfolds into a passionate romance.
Lady in the Water is a story originally conceived by Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan for his children. It’s a modern fairy tale about an unassuming building manager, Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), who saves an ethereal young woman (Bryce Dallas Howard) from danger only to discover that she a narf, a character from a bedtime story who is trying to make the perilous journey from our world back to hers. Heep and the tenants of the apartment complex work together to protect their new delicate friend from the scrunt, a deadly creature who is determined to prevent her from returning home.
The Lady in the Water is easily the oddest and most audacious film of the summer blockbuster season. Shyamalan is one of the most successful directors of the last decade, having huge hits with films like The Sixth Sense and Signs that were heavy on atmosphere and surprising plots twists but in Lady in the Lake he plays it straight, more or less. Don’t expect a twist at the end—the last Shyamalan film, The Village, was ruined for me because I spent the whole movie anticipating the twist and never connected with the plot—but the story isn’t exactly clear-cut.
The viewer is asked to follow a fable that unfolds slowly, and is filled unusual characters and strange mythology. It’s the soul of the movie and it will either work for you or it won’t. I thought the mythology was a bit too contrived, and a little bit too much like watching a long game of Dungeons and Dragons, complete with narfs, beasts, guilds, and healers. The intricate fable slows down the story, getting in the way of the moral—that people should consider their purpose on earth—and gets increasingly ludicrous as the movie plods along.
The main reason to watch is to see good actors doing good work. Paul Giamatti hands in another likeable performance that shows why he is one of the best actors working in mainstream movies today. Bryce Dallas Howard as the title character has a naturally brittle otherworldly look that works very well. In supporting roles Bob Balaban is amusing as an self-important film critic (is there any other kind?) who meets a nasty end—I’m sure Shyamalan enjoyed writing that part after the lambasting he took on his last film—and the director himself takes on his largest (and most ego stroking) part to date as a writer destined to become a prophet of sorts.
Lady in the Water is a frustrating movie. It’s not awful by any means, it has good performances and it looks beautiful, but it isn’t really successful either. What’s missing here is a strong hand in terms of interesting story telling. At it’s best it is a refreshing attempt to steer a summer blockbuster into more interesting ground, but at it’s worst does what all bedtime fables are supposed to do—put you to sleep.
The Wayans Brothers, Keenan, Marlon and Shawn are the most successful comedy team in Hollywood. From In Living Color through to I’m Gonna Get You Sucka to the Scary Movie series and now Little Man, the Wayans have elevated lowbrow comedy to new heights. Not since the Marx Brothers have a family gone to such lengths to make us laugh.
In Little Man a well-meaning Chicago couple find a youngster abandoned on their doorstep. What they don’t realize is that the toddler isn’t a toddler but a vertically challenged hardened jewel thief who has come to the house to recover the Queen Diamond. He and his partner-in-crime dumped the jewel in the wife’s purse to avoid being caught by the police and now they want it back.
Hilarity anyone? Anyone?
Little Man is a great example of a movie concept that should have remained an idea for a skit. Had the Wayans done a five-minute version of this on In Living Color there would have been a few laughs before the commercial break. As it is now you have to pay 12 bucks to watch commercials before the movie starts and then wait patiently for 90 minutes for the laughs to start.
Little Man is short on laughs. Not for lack of trying. The Wayans are funny guys who just aren’t doing their best work here. It’s a one joke movie with too much mugging for the camera; too many jokes involving diapers and their contents, and too many men getting kicked in the nether regions. Once is funny. Ten times is obnoxious.
You don’t go to see a movie about two-foot-six-inch tall jewel thief looking for subtlety and nuance, so I knew what to expect—toilet humor, slapstick and rude jokes—but I expected them to be funny. I didn’t even pay for this movie and I wanted my money back.
Instead of going to the theatre to see Little Man this weekend, stay home and rent Little Big Man with Dustin Hoffman, or Little Man Tate directed by Jody Foster, or even The Man Who Knew Too Little. Just don’t waste your money on Little Man.
First aired on A&E in a shorter form, this Kevin Spacey-narrated documentary covers the entire history of Superman. Issued on DVD the day before the theatrical release of Superman Returns the cynical among us might think this is a cleverly disguised commercial for the Bryan Singer film. And you’d be partially right. Look, Up in the Sky does plug both Superman Returns and Smallville, (both owned by Warner Brothers) but at least has the decency to wait until the end of the documentary to do so. Up until then the Kevin Burns (he did the “making of” extras for Planet of the Apes, Cleopatra and Star Wars DVDs) directed doc is a fascinating and detailed look at the man of Steel from his first appearance in a Shuster and Siegel short story through to present day. There are rare clips from the Superpups show, which thankfully never made it to air, with dogs dressed as the superhero and the infamous musical comedy It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s Superman! in which Superman sang and danced while fighting crime!
Look, Up in the Sky is essentially a really good DVD extra stretched to feature length, but it does have enough interesting footage and behind the scenes material to recommend it.
In Lord of War Nicolas Cage stars as Yuri Orlov, a charming guy who rises to the top of his field in the death-dealing world of gunrunning. Defending his profession he notes that his wares kill fewer people than cigarettes and alcohol, and that he’s never sold anything to Osama Bin Laden because “he was always bouncing cheques.” The lighter moments, however, are tempered with scenes that aggressively show that damage guns do. One particularly effective montage follows a bullet from the manufacturing phase straight through to the gun which shoots it at a young man’s head.
The film received middling reviews when it came out theatrically—it gets a 58% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes—but actually plays much better on DVD. Mixing the dark humor of Catch 22—The first and most important rule of gun running is: Never get shot with your own merchandise—with Cage’s anti-hero gives this the feel of an HBO movie of the week. Lord of War is dramatically flawed, but thought provoking and inventive enough to be worth a rental.
Last Holiday: Weirdly paced story about a woman who is diagnosed with a deadly disease and given only three weeks to live. She decides to make the most of the short time she has left and goes to a $4000 a night European hotel to see a side of life that she had only ever dreamed about. Once there she hob knobs with the rich and powerful–including the morally corrupt owner of the department store she used to work for–who think she is a wealthy socialite. The film is meant to be a life affirming fantasy, and on that level it succeeds, but mostly because Queen Latifah is so charming and so watchable on screen. If you took her out of the equation Last Holiday would be more like a vacation from hell.
The Legend of Zorro is a sequel to the popular Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones Mask of Zorro film of 1998. Like its predecessor the new film is an action adventure romp that blends romance, outrageous stunts and slapstick humor. It feels like a throwback to the Disney films of the 1960’s—lots of bloodless action to keep the kids interested; the bad guys are really bad and get their deserved comeuppance and there’s even a bit of a history lesson in there as well.
In Lucky You Eric Bana plays a professional card shark trying to raise enough money to compete in the World Series of Poker at a Las Vegas hotel. Things haven’t been going well for him. His father, poker legend LC Cheever (Robert Duvall) is back in town; he loses a ten thousand dollar bet; the girl of his dreams, lounge singer Billie (Drew Barrymore), dumps him when he steals money from her and he gets roughed up by some Vegas thugs. If it wasn’t for bad luck, he wouldn’t have no luck at all.
Fortune, however, favors the bold, especially in Hollywood, and he finds a way to come up with the money, play kissy face with Billie and get his private life in order all in one marathon two hour plus movie. It’s Cincinnati Kid-lite, a movie about the gritty sub-culture of Vegas gamblers that is completely without grit.
Director Curtis Hanson, best known as the helmer behind L.A. Confidential and 8 Mile, has succeeded in the past by creating interesting, richly textured worlds for his movies to inhabit. The former wouldn’t have been as effective if not for the lush, sexy and dangerous Los Angeles he created, and the latter’s grungy depiction of the wrong side of Detroit’s tracks added a great deal of flavor to that film. Both seemed authentic and were integral parts of those movies. Lucky You isn’t so fortunate to have such a well defined sense of place. Las Vegas is probably the least authentic city on the planet. Everything there is artifice, which should create interesting possibilities to for a director to place some real people in amongst the surreal surroundings. Instead Hanson’s Las Vegas is populated by characters we’ve seen before—wacky locals who’ll bet on anything, the down-on-his-luck gambler, and the supportive love interest.
Eric Bana has been given four shots at A-list stardom in the past few years—more than anyone else I can think of—and yet leaves virtually no impression on me as a viewer. I wanted to like him in The Hulk, but found his performance flat. I barely remember him in Troy even though he was second billed to Brad Pitt and in Munich he, once again, failed to impress. As Huck in Luck You, a gambling addicted poker player with deep personal issues, we should understand his compulsion. Instead he spouts a handful of catch-phrases which are suppose to shed light on his compulsion, but end up sounding more like excuses than explanations. Unfortunately Bana just isn’t strong enough or interesting enough an actor to carry this kind of material.
Barrymore is wasted in a supporting role that requires little more from her than to be the resilient and supportive girlfriend.
Third billed lead Robert Duvall, however, schools both these younger actors in how to walk through material like this with your dignity intact. His performance as L.C. Cheever is the highlight of the film.
Lucky You? Lucky you if you don’t have to sit through this.
