Then, little by little, filmmakers began to chip away at the formula, making rom coms with a twist. There was a “Warm Bodies,” a zombie rom com and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s one-two punch “500 Days of Summer” and “Don Jon,” among others. Now there’s “The F Word,” a fresh and funny take on romance and the nature of love.
Called “What If” in the United States where the “F Word” title was seen as too salacious, (in the movie the “F” stands for friend), it’s the story of Wallace (Daniel Radcliffe), a loser in love who meets Chandry (Zoe Kazan), the girl of his dreams, at a party. She’s charming, pretty, funny and has a live-in boyfriend. Like Harry and Sally before them, they must discover if men and women can just be friends.
Enchanting, whimsical and sweet are words I could use to describe “The F Word,” and the film earns each and every one, but it is also more than that.
Director Michael Dowse doesn’t allow the tone to get sugary and slip into saccharine mode. He’s aided by a smart and funny script by Elan Mastai, but it’s Radcliffe and Kazan that draw us in. The pair has chemistry to burn and their conversations have a ring of truth that doesn’t feel contrived or rom commy.
They’re supported by an able cast, including Megan Park in a star-making turn as Chantry’s promiscuous sister and “Girl’s” alum Adam Driver as Wallace’s best friend Allan.
In Chloë Grace Moretz ‘s new film “If I Stay,” she plays Mia, a gifted teenage cellist from a family of musicians. When a catastrophic accident throws her into a coma she has an out-of-body experience. The rest of the story is told from the perspective of her memories before the accident and in the present, as she observes, ghostlike, the aftermath of the car crash.
Based on bestselling novel by Gayle Forman “If I Stay” is a romance, a coming-of-age story and a supernatural family drama. That’s a whole lotta genres bumping heads, but director R.J. Cutler does an admirable job at balancing the elements. Using the book as the movie’s backbone, his approach is almost literary, as he treats each component like a chapter in a novel. He turns the pages, introducing each new twist, giving the audience time to adjust. What could have been a muddle is, instead, a living breathing thing, a story unafraid to wear its heart on its sleeve.
Juggling genres aside, the movie has a complicated flashback structure. When it’s not reflecting on the past the tale is told through Mia’s eyes, a young girl halfway between life and turning into a ghost. She must piece together the events of her day and decide whether she wants to go on or slip into a permanent sleep.
At the center of all this is Moretz, an actress who, over the course of a short but eventful career, has made a habit of playing introverted characters with rich lives swirling around them, and here, she delivers what may be her best performance yet. As Mia she is a talented teen just discovering a life beyond the cello that has been her constant companion since she was young. It’s a simple and uncluttered performance with a lot going on behind the eyes.
“If I Stay,” but its nature is melodramatic. It’s a study of life and loss, leaning heavily on the regret of building relationships only to see them disappear in the wink of an eye. Luckily Moretz’s subtle performance prevents the movie from becoming a soap opera of despair.
If you are a football fan, specifically of the American high school game, then “The Streak” is something you’re likely familiar with. From 1992 to 2004, under the guidance of legendary football coach Bob Ladouceur and assistant coach Terry Eidson, the De La Salle High School Spartans from Concord, California won 151 consecutive games, smashing all records for any American sport.
It’s a great story that the film “When the Game Stands Tall” uses as a starting point. We join the Spartans as their record-breaking sprint to the history books comes to an end. During the 2003 post season Coach Ladouceur (a very low key Jim Caviezel) suffered a heart attack and a popular student was senselessly gunned down. The following school year, in September 2004, they lost their first two games in “the biggest upset in high school football history,” according to one commentator. Their biggest problem isn’t the other teams, however, it’s a lack of teamwork. “We got lost. Caught up in the glory.” Can the Coach convince them that it’s not if you win or lose, it’s how you play the game that counts?
“When the Game Stands Tall” puts a spin on the usual football flick by adding in faith-based subtext about the power of positivity. It’s not about playing a perfect game, the guys are told, but handing in a “perfect effort.” Coach Lad, who still trains the De La Salle High School Spartans to this day, is an inspirational figure who turns young lads not just into champion football players, but into men.
The underdog aspect of the story doesn’t quite gel. Two defeats don’t exactly make the Spartans the Caltech Beavers who had an impressive run of 207 loses on the gridiron. When the embark on their inevitable climb back up the ladder one announcer calls it “one of the greatest comebacks in football history.” Really? Try telling that to the Caltech Beavers.
The football scenes, however, are effective, exciting and feel genuine. The spirit of the players feels a little over blown as done some of the dialogue. “The only way I’m going off this field is on a stretcher,” says quarterback Chris Ryan (Alexander Ludwig) before winning one for the Gipper… er… I mean Coach Lad.
For football fans “When the Games Stands Tall” brings a famous story to life. For the rest of us it plays like an after school special with better production value.
The second feature from “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner is an odd duck. A comedy about substance abuse and bi polar behavior, it’s not as funny as a movie starring Owen Wilson and Zach Galifianakis should be nor is it as insightful as Weiner likely intended.
Wilson is Steve Dallas, an Annapolis, Maryland weatherman who lives off a diet of marijuana, scotch and anonymous sex. “I eat life out of the big box,” he says, unconvincingly. His best friend is Ben Baker (Galifianakis), a childhood pal “who wasn’t that screwed together to begin with.” He’s bi polar, drug addicted and the heir of a large chunk of money and land from his late father. His plan to create a utopian society on his dad’s old farm doesn’t sit well with his controlling sister Terri (Amy Poehler) who tries to have him declared incompetent. Steve is in the middle of the action, coming between Ben and his sibling while trying to woo Ben’s twenty-five year old free spirited stepmother Angela (Laura Ramsey). Between the strife and family politics the characters look for the answer to one of life’s great questions: Is this it?
Audiences may find themselves asking the same thing, but for very different reasons. For all the movie’s commentary on the vagaries of life, like friendship—“It’s a lot rarer than love,” Says Steve, “because there’s nothing in it for anybody.”—mental illness and the freedom to be who we are, the story doesn’t add much to the conversation on any of those topics. Add to that some annoying characters and a disrespectful attitude toward the film’s women—they are either harridans or contradictory in their behavior—and you’re left with the feeling that if Weiner had turned this into a television series and given the characters time to live and breath he might have been able to develop this into something more interesting.
By Richard Crouse & Mark Breslin – Metro Reel Guys
SYNOPSIS: Called What If in the United States where the F Word title was seen as too salacious, (in the movie the “F” stands for friend), this is the story of Wallace (Daniel Radcliffe), a loser in love who meets Chandry (Zoe Kazan), the girl of his dreams, at a party. She’s charming, pretty, funny and has a live-in boyfriend. Like Harry and Sally before them, they must discover if men and women can just be friends.
STAR RATINGS:
Richard: 4 Stars
Mark: 4 Stars
Richard: Mark, enchanting, whimsical and sweet are words I could use to describe The F Word, and the film earns each and every one, but it is also more than that. Director Michael Dowse doesn’t allow the tone to get sugary and slip into saccharine mode. He’s aided by a smart and funny script by Elan Mastai, but it’s Radcliffe and Kazan that drew me in. The pair has chemistry to burn and their conversations have a ring of truth that don’t feel contrived or rom commy.
Mark: Richard. This is an incredibly sweet-hearted movie that will do nothing to alleviate the problems in the Middle East. Nevertheless the movie is about 25% more realistic than most rom-coms and I was so grateful for that. But I’ve never seen a movie where the characters were so polite to one another; no wonder they set it in Toronto.
MB: I was also grateful for the indie score and the way the characters looked a little mussed, with some visible pores and an occasional zit, even if they all sported impossibly cute and expensive eyewear. Toronto does look sexy—although not dangerously sexy—but for a city that trumpets its multiculturalism, the cast and tone were lily-white. The lead was actually British! Speaking of the lead, I liked Radcliffe in the role. You, Richard
RC: I did. I thought he and Kazan made a cute couple. There’s more to Radcliffe than wizardry and battling “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.” Breaking free of Harry Potter must have seemed daunting for the young actor, but he proven in movies like this and Kill Your Darlings and The Woman in Black that he is versatile and won’t be typecast. I’m curious to see what he does next.
MB: I heard he was doing Vladimir in Waiting for Godot on Broadway, dressed as Osama Bin Laden. Personally, I think he’s too short for the role.
Remember those wild Monster Trucks ads, “You Pay for the Whole Seat but You’ll Only Need the Edge!”? They were selling you on the excitement of watching giant trucks careening around an arena but the sales pitch could just as easily describe the feeling of slowly edging to the front of your seat while watching a thriller.
At their best these movies are adrenaline rushes that, as Wikipedia says, “heavily stimulate the viewer’s moods, giving them a high level of anticipation, ultra-heightened expectation, uncertainty, surprise, anxiety and terror.” Or as author James Patterson put it, “Ultimately, a great thriller is a roller coaster ride.”
There are as many different kinds of thrillers as there are red herrings in a Dan Brown story… TO READ THE REST CHECK OUT THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE OF MOVIE ENTERTAINMENT ON NEWS STANDS NOW!
If you know who the Time Lord is, then you’re a Whovian. If you know what the TARDIS is, then you’re a Whovian.
Whovians, of course, are fans of Dr. Who, the long-running British science fiction television series… Watch Richard’s Cineplex.com video on Doctor Who and get a first look at the new season of Doctor Who HERE!
Robert Rodriguez, co-director of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, has assembled an impressive cast of marquee names for the long awaited followup to 2005’s Sin City.
Actors like Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson and Bruce Willis are returning from the first instalment, while newcomers to the series include Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Eva Green and Josh Brolin.
Rodriguez welcomes back another name, Lady Gaga, who he first cast in Machete Kills.
“When I asked if she was interested in acting she said, ‘I studied acting and I always wanted to be in one of your movies because of the theatricality and the showmanship.”
When she finished shooting her role of a deadly assassin in Machete Kills, Rodriguez tweeted, “Holy Smokes. Blown away!” and promptly cast the singer in A Dame to Kill For.
For years, directors have looked to musicians to bring their natural charisma to the screen. Perhaps no one more than Nicolas Roeg has explored the potential for rock stars to become movie stars. “They have,” he said, “a greater ability to light up the screen than actors.”
In 1970 Roeg and co-director Donald Cammell made the psychedelic crime drama Performance, starring Mick Jagger in his first on screen role. The Rolling Stone played the mysterious Mr. Turner, a jaded former rock star who gives shelter to a violent East London gangster (James Fox). In 2009 Film Comment declared Mick Jagger’s Turner the best performance by a musician in a movie.
Next came The Man Who Fell to Earth, an existential sci-fi film about an extraterrestrial named Thomas Jerome Newton, starring a perfectly cast David Bowie in his feature film debut. Roeg says he “really came to believe that Bowie was a man who had come to Earth from another galaxy. His actual social behavior was extraordinary. He seemed to be alone — which is what Newton is in the film — isolated and alone.”
Finally, Bad Timing was advertised as a “terrifying love story” and called “a sick film made by sick people for sick people” by its own distributor. Art Garfunkel, of 60s folk duo Simon and Garfunkel, stars as a psychology professor living in Vienna whose sadistic relationship with a pill addicted woman (Theresa Russell) ends with a battle for her life. The sexually explicit film was difficult for the actors, and at one point Garfunkel even wanted out. Over martinis Roeg told his nervous actor, “I must ask you to trust that I know where I’m going. It’s a maze, but there is an end to it.’”
Garfunkel stayed on, delivering a performance that the New York Times called “very credible.”
Diana Gabaldon is notoriously protective of her work. Her website asks amateur writers to refrain from producing any fan fiction based on her characters and it has taken decades for her to OK a screen adaptation of her best known novels, the eight-part Outlander series.
The former academic-turned-bestselling-author writes thick books that Entertainment Weekly describes as containing a “time-hopping, continent-spanning salmagundi of genres.”
Since the publication of the first Outlander book in 1991, rumours of a film franchise have flitted about, with big names like Liam Neeson and Sean Connery attached. The mix of romance, time travel and adventure sounds tailor-made for the screen, but Gabaldon wanted to make sure the story was told properly.
“Outlander is a very big story,” she says. “The very intricate plot fits together like the pieces of a watch. You start pulling things out and the whole thing isn’t going to work. Consequently a two-hour movie cannot be made and reflect the integrity of the work.”
Enter Battlestar Galactica producer Ronald D. Moore who says he “read the book and was quite taken by it. It’s a page-turner in the truest sense of the word. I really liked the central character of Claire because she was intelligent and strong; very capable and interesting.”
He saw Outlander not as a movie, but a television series.
“There were surprises along the way, reversals of fortune I didn’t see coming,” he says, “which I thought would be really great for a television series. I got it. We’d do one season a book and there’s seven more books in the series.”
His take on the material won Gabaldon over. “I told Ron when I saw the pilot script, ‘This is the first thing I’ve seen based on my work that didn’t either make me turn white or burst into flame.’”
The show, which premieres Aug. 24 on Showcase, stars Irish model/actress Caitriona Balfe as Claire Randall, a married Second World War combat nurse mysteriously transported back in time to 18th-century Scotland.
“We’re trying to keep the show grounded throughout,” says Moore. “You want to really believe that both those places exist. I’m a strong believer in the idea that if you’re going to take the audience on a fantastical journey, the more believable you make it, the better. That way the audience will go with you when something crazy, like time travel, happens.”
Gabaldon gives the show her stamp of approval, saying, “I feel very fortunate to be able to share with them in this production.”
A few years ago the romantic comedy seemed like it was on life support, suffering from a bad case of the Katherine Heigls. The once proud genre had succumbed to predictability with witless stories and characters direct from Central Casting. The term rom com became an anti-selling point to audiences tired of the same old Barrymore Method© rom com design—unlikely couple meets, falls in love, overcomes obstacles, breaks up and… well, I’m not going to give away the ending but if you don’t know it already then either you don’t have a romantic bone in your body or you’ve never seen a Drew Barrymore (or Kristen Bell or Kate Hudson or Jennifer Aniston) movie.
