In the first thirty minutes of Nothing Like the Holidays, a new seasonal film starring Alfred Molina and John Leguizamo, many story lines are introduced. There is a troubled Iraq vet back for Christmas for the first time in three years, unresolved feelings about a former girlfriend, accusations of infidelity and racial stereotyping. It may not sound like it, but it’s also a comedy. It’s Coming Home, Home for the Holidays, The Family Stone with a hint of Lucy and Ricky all rolled into one stale Yule Log.
Like many Christmas movies that came before it, Nothing Like the Holidays treats the Yule season as a cinematic excuse to showcase a family who loves one another but doesn’t get along. In this case it is the Rodriguez family gathering in Chicago at their parent’s home to celebrate the season and brother Jesse’s (Freddy Rodriguez) safe return from Iraq. Over the course of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day it is uncovered that sister Roxanna (Vanessa Ferlito), an actress, isn’t exactly setting the Hollywood studios on fire; that brother Mauricio (John Leguizamo) and his uptight wife Sarah (Debra Messing) aren’t as happy as believed and the parents, Anna (Elizabeth Peña) and Eduardo (Afred Molina), are getting a divorce after thirty-six years. Will the healing power of the season bring them together, or will this be their last Christmas together?
Nothing Like the Holidays is an average TV Christmas movie re-gifted for the big screen. The basic themes and plot devices are nothing we haven’t seen done before and better in The Family Stone, This Christmas or Home for the Holidays. The big twist is cultural—this time the family in question is Puerto Rican! The loud and boisterous family gives the film some energy, but the situations are so predictable that the film struggles to maintain the audience’s interest.
Former Oz star Luis Guzmán is the film’s comic relief. When he wonders why his brother and his waspy wife haven’t produced a “Sorta Rican” it provides the film’s best line, but too often the comedy gets in the way of the drama and visa versa. Tender moments collide with slapstick and it makes for uneven viewing.
Adding some weight to the cast is Alfred Molina, who, despite an ever shifting accent brings warmth to the role of the family patriarch and Elizabeth Peña who makes the most of her limited role as the mother. Of the rest of the cast John Leguizamo sleepwalks through his part as the hotheaded attorney son while, as his wife, Debra Messing does her best to bring some of her sitcom chops to a very thinly written character.
Despite its good intentions Nothing Like the Holidays is something like a lot of other movies we’ve seen before, and might be best seen next year when it can be rented from the bargain bin.
At the movies it usually takes at least thirty minutes before my Crap-O-Meter starts ringing, but Nobel Son set off alarm bells right away. The film, which stars Alan Rickman as an arrogant Nobel Prize winner embroiled in a convoluted kidnapping plot, had me squirming in my seat from the clumsy opening scene. It’s one of those movies that has “suck” written all over it in large letters.
The elaborately plotted, but completely unbelievable story involves everything from kidnapping to cannibalism to spoken word poetry to molecular science and a foul mouthed animatronic mall Santa.
Not only is the story far fetched and overly complicated but there isn’t a single believable character anywhere to be found. The characters are also far less interesting than they (or the movie) believe them to be.
Alan Rickman’s is a bigheaded Nobel winner who cheats on his wife with students, and he’s such a lowlife that he then has the gall to give the girl in question bad grades. “When you do “D” work,” he tells her while they are having sex, “You get a “D.” The performance is so over-the-top it makes Mr. T look like Laurence Olivier.
Also unwatchable is Danny DeVito. His take on the formally obsessive compulsive Gastner is the most annoying performance in a career comprised of annoying Danny DeVito performances.
Nobel Son mistakes snappy editing and frenetic sound design for style and an overwritten script for true, entertaining dark hearted comedy.
Imagine if our collective image of Santa Claus had been shaped by Allegory of Gluttony and Lust painter Hieronymus Bosch instead of some nameless commercial artist at Coca Cola and you’ll get an idea of the dark edge of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. The jolly fat man in the red suit is gone, hijacked by a skeleton in a pinstriped suit.
Although Tim Burton’s name appears above the title The Nightmare Before Christmas was actually directed by stop motion animation legend Henry Selick, but make no mistake every frame of the film bears Burton’s twisted imprimatur. Originally conceived while he was working as an animator on much tamer fare for Disney in the early 1980s, the story of the mayor of Halloweentown who kidnaps and impersonates “Sandy Claws” to bring his own brand of good will to the world, percolated in his head until 1993 when he was powerful and famous enough to get the film made the way he envisioned it. The result is a wonderfully twisted holiday story that is plays like an offbeat Rankin / Bass production.
The film is really wonderful, with creepy songs by Danny Elfman, amazing stop motion visuals (more than 120 animators worked on the project) and warped humor that should appeal to most of the members of the family. Note though, that The Nightmare Before Christmas is a tad too dark for smaller children. It’s a Disney release but it is one of the rare ones that isn’t meant for the entire family.
The Nightmare Before Christmas has been released several times on DVD but this package includes some extras that are worth the shelling out a few additional dollars for. This Special Edition contains the usual stuff—a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film and theatrical trailers—but it also offers up two Tim Burton shorts, Vincent and Frankenweenie; Tim Burton’s original poem narrated by Christopher Lee and all new audio commentaries from Burton and Selick. It’s a great package and highly recommended.
Nim’s Island is a fantasy film aimed at the under ten crowd. Based on the popular Wendy Orr kid-lit novel of the same name, it is a gentle fantasy-adventure story featuring an all-star cast including Jodie Foster, Gerard Butler and Abigail Breslin.
Nim (Breslin) is an 11-year-old who lives with her marine biologist father Jack (Gerard Butler) on an uncharted Pacific island. They are the Swiss Family Robinson for a new generation. When she isn’t dancing or playing soccer with best friend, a sea lion, she passes the time reading adventure novels about a fictional character named Alex Rover written by a phobic San Francisco author also named Alexandra Rover (Jodie Foster). When Jack is lost at sea, abandoning Nim on the lonely island, she turns to the only person she thinks can help—her heroine Alex. Thinking she is e-mailing her hero she actually is in touch with the neurotic author who drops everything to come to the rescue. As they work together to find Jack they overcome their fears and Alex becomes the mom Nim never had.
Nim’s Island will likely entertain young girls born after 1998 but may be a tough sell for anyone over the age of ten. Bogged down by bad dialogue, lame action and blatant product placement—Apple Computers anyone?—the whole thing feels lackluster despite the efforts of the cast.
Abigail Breslin sparkles in the lead role, but doesn’t have the depth of personality she usually shows while Jodie Foster gives her worst performance to date. She’s a great actress but her efforts to inject some life into the proceedings fall flat as she proves once and for all that she has no gift for slapstick. Butler fares best of all in a double role that is both charming and fun.
Nim’s Island is an unremarkable movie that does have good values for kids but suffers from a predictable story and a misguided performance from Foster.
For those not up on their hand-to-hand combat sports, mixed martial arts is the hot new trend, but it’s not exactly new. Early forms of the art date back at least to the late 19th century and it enjoyed some popularity in the late 1960s and early 70s with the emergence of Bruce Lee and his practice of blending various martial art styles. In recent years, however, MMA has changed from its brutal anything-goes roots to a kinder, gentler sport with safety rules and far fewer fatalities.
Since the implementation of these changes, the sport has grown swiftly, to the point of setting pay-per-view records, so it was just a matter of time until modern MMA made its big screen debut.
Set in Orlando, Florida Never Back Down—a title so generic it could have been plucked from the Jean-Claude Van Damme reject pile—sees new-kid-in-town kid Jake Tyler (Life As We Know It’s and Tom Cruise look-a-like Sean Faris) become a trouble magnet. After taking a beating from bully Ryan “The Beat Down King” MacDonald (Cam Gigandet) Jake is convinced to join an underground fight club where he will learn the art of mixed martial arts from mentor and coach Jean Roqua (Blood Diamond’s Djimon Hounsou). Whether Jake uses his newfound skills in the ring to become a better person, or simply to eek out revenge on his tormentor Ryan is at the crux of the plot.
Story wise its one part Karate Kid mixed with two parts Save the Last Dance. Action wise its Fight Club lite, a teen friendly genre film that has just enough blood and guts to keep the boys in the crowd interested, but not enough to earn the deadly R rating.
The look of the movie is pure 1990s music video, with montages galore, loads of slo mo and even some dry ice effects. It’s appropriate that Never Back Down resembles a music clip because it has as much insight to teen angst as a Weird Al Yankovich video. Don’t let the pumped-up production value or the abundance of pretty people fool you, this is drive-in teen exploitation fare with a story we’ve seen many times before.
Never Back Down is simply an overwrought teen genre picture that flies along when it sticks to the teen gladiator action, but gets very silly when it attempts to adds layers of character or plot.
The Coen Brothers have spent most of their careers as critical darlings, the favorites of people like me who love the offbeat sensibility they bring to their films. Their classic work, which includes O Brother Where Art Thou, Barton Fink and of course, the Oscar winning Fargo dates back to the early eighties with their breathtaking debut Blood Simple.
The new millennium, however, hasn’t been kind to the brothers or their fans. An attempt at romantic comedy, Intolerable Cruelty, lacked both romance and comedy and The Ladykillers was an ill advised remake of an Ealing Studios classic. Happily, they found their footing with their new film, an adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel No Country for Old Men, featuring a serial killer with a Beatles haircut, a title borrowed from the first line of W. B. Yeats’ poem Sailing to Byzantium and some of their best work in years.
The story begins when down-on-his-luck Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), hunting near the Rio Grande, stumbles across the site of a drug deal gone wrong. Bullet-ridden dead men litter the landscape, and a several kilos of heroin and a suitcase stuffed with two million dollars in cash have been abandoned. When Moss makes off with the money his life and the lives of those around him are changed forever.
In hot pursuit of the runaway and the cash are disillusioned Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) who vainly tries to contain the situation, a cocky bounty hunter played by Woody Harrelson and an enigmatic killer named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem).
Bardem’s performance as Chigurh (ironically pronounced “Sugar”) is the film’s secret weapon. The movie is top heavy with good performances—Jones is at his world-weary best while Brolin continues his comeback winning streak with another strong outing—but it is the quiet menace that Spanish actor Bardem brings to the film that gives it is oomph. His diabolical killer cavalierly flips coins for people’s lives, speaks in a monotone when he does speak, but usually he just lets his weapons—like a pressurized air gun usually used to stun and kill cattle—do the talking for him. His near catatonic countenance, Prince Valiant haircut and seeming indestructibility make him the best and strangest on-screen villain of the year.
The Coens have faithfully adapted McCarthy’s novel, keeping the dark humor, unbearable suspense and high body count—the ultra-violence would make David Cronenberg proud—while at the same time tightening up their notoriously loose narrative style. This is muscular filmmaking, highly structured but not predictable; it’s well paced and suspenseful. Couple the terrific story with great performances and beautiful New Mexico photography and the result is not only their best film since 1996’s Fargo, but also one of the best of the year.
A few months ago promo items for The Nanny Diaries started popping up everywhere. A poster at the Cineplex. The tie-in novel at the book store. Scarlett Johansson’s face was all over the place, but where was the movie? Well, it was moved from a prime early summer slot to late August, traditionally the dumping ground for troubled movies. Rumors flew around the internet that the movie was a bomb; that they did massive reshoots to salvage the allegedly messy movie. The studio spin on the delay was that an August release put the film in a better position come awards time. I can tell you two things: The Nanny Diaries is no where near the disaster that internet pundits were predicting, but it ain’t going win any awards either.
The story is a roman a clef written by two former Manhattan nannies masquerading as an anthological study of that city’s Upper East Side Clan. Johansson plays Annie, a university grad with a degree in finance and a minor in anthropology who decides she needs some life experience before she sets off for a career in banking.
After a chance encounter in Central Park with Mrs. X (Laura Linney), who mistakes the name Annie for the word Nanny, she’s hired to look after young Grayer (Nicholas Art) a sweet but spoiled rich kid. Mr. (Paul Giamatti) and Mrs. X are the poster couple for dysfunction, absentee parents who feel it is more important to attend a seminar on childrearing with their Park Avenue friends than actually stay home with their kid. They treat Annie like a child rearing machine, not a person, rarely giving her any time off and forbidding her to date. But before you can say Nanny 911 a rich, handsome law student (Chris Evans) sets his sights on Annie and things become strained on the Upper East Side.
There are no surprises in The Nanny Diaries. Everyone learns appropriate life lessons regarding the error of their ways, and somehow you know that young Grayer will end up in good hands. Lurking inside the mushy chick lit story is a class struggle between the pompous rich and the wise people who rely on them for a paycheck. It’s been done before and better, but while The Nanny Diaries doesn’t really rise much beyond the level of a Saturday night sitcom, it does offer some mild pleasures.
There are laughs scattered throughout, and although they become fewer and further between as the minutes tick on, Johansson’s deadpan anthological voice over in the film’s opening moments is amusing and peaks interest in the story to come. The movie doesn’t live up to the promise of the opening, but a bit of magic realism with a bank logo that comes to life to convince Annie to become Mary Poppins for the summer is imaginative and fun.
The cast is a little higher end than you might expect, given the lowered expectations of the story. Johansson slides by with her usual pout firmly in place, but does sparkle in some of the film’s lighter moments.
Laura Linney could play Mrs. X in her sleep. She doesn’t stretch here, but does offer up some great moments of withering condescension and contempt. The role becomes less interesting when she tires to bring some real character to the script’s thinly written caricature. As a Cruella de Ville Jr. she’s all surface, but it’s an entertaining surface.
The biggest surprise is Paul Giamatti in the small supporting role of Mr. X. He’s clearly only here because the directors, Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, were the team behind his breakout hit American Splendor. That’s the solitary reason I can see for such an interesting, talented actor to take such a characterless and underwritten role. He does the best he can with what he’s given, but as Mr. X he’s simply a stereotype of the cheating workaholic we’ve seen so many times before.
The Nanny Diaries is formulaic, predictable stuff, but is very nearly saved by Johansson and Linney’s winning performances.
No Reservations succeeds because of one of the performance by its two Oscar nominated females. No, it’s not Catherine Zeta Jones as the control freak chef who makes this one worth while, it’s the sweet performance of eleven-year-old Abigail Breslin, a child actress so unpretentious and natural that she steals every scene she’s in. Audiences loved her as Little Miss Sunshine and she is the reason to go and see No Reservations.
In this remake of the marvelous German film Mostly Martha, Catherine Zeta-Jones plays Kate Armstrong, a well-respected chef at a trendy New York City bistro who adopts her niece Zoe (Abigail Breslin) after her mother is killed in a car accident. Kate’s entire reason for being is the kitchen, and the new-found role of mom disrupts her carefully arranged life. She also seriously lacks kid skills. For their first meal together Kate serves Zoe a fish, complete with the head. In her restaurant it probably sells for $35. The problem is you couldn’t pay a kid to eat it.
When the owner of her restaurant brings in a new sous chef in the form of the boisterous Nick Palmer (Aaron Eckhart) sparks fly—both professionally and romantically.
The odd couple doesn’t mesh at first, but this is a romantic comedy, so soon enough rivalry becomes romance and they bond over food and their shared affection for Zoe. Kate struggles to figure out that there is no perfect recipe for life and to find true happiness she must look past her four burner.
Zeta-Jones and Eckhart are perfectly acceptable romantic leads for a film like this. She’s gorgeous, he’s blandly handsome, but they don’t seem to have much in the way of romantic chemistry. Better are the kitchen scenes where they prepare beautiful, expensive food with the care and precision usually ascribed to diamond cutters or heart surgeons. The pair only seem to have any real connection on screen when they are ladling sauces.
The connective tissue here, the thing that brings it all together is Breslin, a scene stealer with expressive eyes and a knack for underplaying her roles. She’s so effective because she seems like a real kid and not the Hollywood version of what a kid in her situation might be like. There’s not a precocious moment in her performance.
No Reservations director Scott Hicks is best known for making big serious movies like Shine and Hearts of Atlantis, and he struggles here. The movie looks great and has a great sense of place—you’ll want to fly to New York for dinner right after the movie—but his pacing of the paper-thin and obvious opposites attract plot is out of whack. The movie is only an hour and forty-five minutes but feels much longer.
No Reservations—come for the story, stay for Abigail Breslin!
Narc is the kind of movie that makes you forget the dark patches on both Jason Patrick and Ray Liotta’s resumes. You remember Patrick in Rush, and forget about Liotta in Operation Dumbo Drop.
The story is simple enough, and almost clichéd. When the trail on a murder investigation of a policeman goes cold, an undercover narcotics officer, Detective Sgt. Nick Tellis (Patrick), is teamed with loose-cannon detective Henry R. Oak (Liotta) to solve the case. It’s old hat – the good cop teamed with a out-of-control cop – we’ve seen it in movies and on television for as long as there have been police dramas, but when it is treated with the kind of conviction and intensity that Liotta and Patrick bring to their roles it seems fresh and compelling. Both play cops who cross the line into unlawful behavior in order to do their jobs, and have both become tainted by their experiences. Narc explores what happens to a good cop when he is forced to break the law.
Visually director Joe Carnahan captures the feel of the mean streets, using a grainy film stock and handheld cameras to underline not only the dirt, but the energy of the street and the sleazy underbelly in which these two men operate.
Narc is a great cop movie, but it has a generic title, and a grainy feel to it that I don’t think audiences will connect with because they want to see something glitzy, something happy, something that is going to make them feel a little better. Hopefully it’s the kind of movie that will build a nice cult following on DVD.
