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.
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!
Making a horror comedy is tricky business. Do it right and you get a classic like “Sean of the Dead,” a movie whose body count is offset by just the right amount of laughs. Do it wrong and you’ll wind up with “Repossessed,” a movie that is neither funny nor scary, just dull. “Zombieland” director Ruben Fleischer (whose next movie is to be called Psycho Funky Chimp) understands that horror comedies are neither fish nor fowl—they are both. For every decapitation you have to have a giggle and “Zombieland” delivers on both counts.
This post-apocalyptic zom com stars Jesse Eisenberg as a teenage curmudgeon who has survived a fast acting viral plague that turned his neighbors (and everybody else) into ferocious flesh eating zombies. Mad cow became mad person which became mad zombie disease! It should be a paradise for this videogame playing hermit—no facebook status updates!—but a life spent killing ravenous zombies has left him starving for human contact. When he meets zombie killer Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), and two dishonest sisters, Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), he realizes for better or worse, they must stick together to survive.
“Zombieland” has the same over-the-top silly vibe that makes movies like “Killer Klowns from Outer Space” such guilty pleasures. It’s gross-out funny with plenty of action and zombie kills for the hardcores, but underneath the absurdity is a message about humanity. At the end of the movie Eisenberg’s character realizes that his solitary life was turning him into the thing he feared most. “Without other people,” he says, “you might as well be a zombie.” The sentiment may not be as powerful as George A. Romero’s zombie metaphors but it puts a nice little bow on this coming of age story.
Also strong is the casting. Eisenberg, a young actor second only to Michael Cera in playing awkward teens on film, is an unlikely action movie hero, but here he plays to his strengths—playing the witty self-conscious teen—and expands his range to include zombie serial killer.
Equally fun is Woody Harrelson as the Twinkie loving zombie hunter Tallahassee. Harrelson brings a swagger and some unexpected twists to the character and delivers many of the film’s funniest lines.
Both are ably supported by Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin who don’t have as have much to do as the boys, but do a great deal to keep the story moving forward.
The showiest role in the film, however, belongs to a Hollywood superstar who has one of the most surreal cameos in recent memory. I’m not going to tell you who it is (it’s funnier if you don’t know) but his wild scenes alone are worth the price of admission.
“Zombieland” breathes a bit of new life into the sometimes stale zombie genre.
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.
