“The Intern” is a Nancy Meyers odd couple / buddy movie about a “senior” intern, played by Robert De Niro, working for Anne Hathaway’s whirlwind of an internet start up boss. Expect jokes like, “This job ages you, which in your case isn’t a good thing,” lots of lifestyle porn and a good dollop of sentimentality.
Hathaway is Jules Ostin, owner operator of About the Fit, a website specializing in upscale women’s clothes. In just eighteen months she has turned it into a going concern, with over two hundred employees and thousands of orders a day. Despite her success—and eighteen-hour work days—the company is growing so quickly her investors want to bring in an experienced CEO to grow the business.
Enter Ben Whittaker, a seventy-year-old widower who applies for a job as senior intern to help pass the time. After a shaky start the pair bond as Jules comes to regard Ben as a calming influence and a bottomless font of advice. De Niro’s back to playing “The Godfather”… but the magical fairy godfather who becomes Uncle Ben to everyone in the office, teaching the boys to be men and Jules to enjoy life.
A mix of slapstick and sentimentality “The Intern” is clearly designed to be a crowd pleaser, the kind of movie that moves along with few speed bumps along the way. But there are speed bumps. Take for example a woefully conceived house break-in scene that must be one of the worst action scenes ever committed to film. Or an infidelity subplot that rears its ugly head in the final third and does little except to raise the dramatic stakes, but it’s clumsy and feels tagged on. How about the film’s murky stance on women having a career and a family?
Juxtaposing Millennials and Baby Boomers should mine a rich vein of comedy and there are a few gags sprinkled throughout “The Intern,” but it feels aimed at an older audience who might find sitcom gags like a young guy walking in on what he thinks is a sex act, but is actually completely innocent. Cue the laugh track.
“The Intern” relies on charm rather than knee slappers. De Niro and Hathaway have good chemistry and can effortlessly bound between mawkish melodrama and comedy. Is this one of De Niro’s more memorable characters? Nope. Ben Whittaker and Travis Bickle will never be mentioned on the same breath but his work here could be considered a companion piece to “Meet the Fockers.”
At one time or another everyone has fantasized about, if not killing, then at least doing grievous bodily harm to an employer. The guys in Horrible Bosses, the 2011 comedy starring Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis, actually tried to make their fantasies reality.
The idea of squaring off against the boss man struck a chord with a lot of people and the movie raked in more than $100 million. So the inevitable sequel, Horrible Bosses 2, hit theatres earlier this week.
They’ll have to go some ways to top the last trio of bad bosses: Jennifer Aniston as a foul-mouthed sexual predator with a bad habit of using laughing gas as foreplay; a manic boss with no scruples in the form of Kevin Spacey; and a drug-addled loser with a penchant for cocaine and masseuses who inherits a business from his papa, played by Colin Farrell, who berates his employees for coming in late after attending his dad’s and their old boss’s funeral.
“Well, maybe that excuse would have flown when my dad was here, but I’m in charge now.”
But even that terrible trio pales in comparison to the worst movie bosses of all time.
One of the worst is Working Girl’s Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver). Parker is two-faced, and attempts to pass off her trusted secretary Tess McGill’s (Melanie Griffith) ideas as her own. Roger Ebert said of Weaver’s performance, “From her first frame on the screen, she has to say all the right things while subtly suggesting that she may not mean any of them.”
In the end, Tess teaches her a lesson about honesty and gets Katharine fired.
Katharine looks like a pussycat compared to Buddy Ackerman (Kevin Spacey), the tyrannical Hollywood producer in Swimming with Sharks.
“You are nothing!” he says to his new assistant Guy (Frank Whaley). “If you were in my toilet I wouldn’t bother flushing it. My bathmat means more to me than you!”
Guy finally snaps, kidnaps Buddy and tortures him. But in an unexpected twist, the extreme behaviour earns Buddy’s respect and Guy gets a promotion.
Finally, if you mix the swooping white hair and bad attitude of Cruella DeVille with the people skills of Vlad the Impaler, you will come up with Miranda Priestly, the worst boss in all of moviedom. Played by Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, Priestly is the editrix of a fictional fashion magazine called Runway who never met an assistant she couldn’t humiliate with a withering glance and a few choice words. “By all means, move at a glacial pace,” she says to newbie Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway). “You know how that thrills me.”
What’s a wormhole anyway? According to Wikipedia it’s a “postulated method, within the general theory of relativity, of moving from one point in space to another without crossing the space between.” Huh? Maybe it’s easier to think of them as a cosmic shortcut to the past or future. If Bill and Ted could figure these things out—their first “excellent adventure” saw them sucked into a wormhole to assemble historical figures for a high school project—then so should we.
Christopher Nolan uses these theoretical bridges through time as the bridge through his new space opera “Interstellar.”
In the earthbound portion of the story crop blight has led to a food shortage and a worldwide ecological disaster. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), is a pilot-turned-farmer trying to find a way for his family to survive the impending apocalypse. An answer to his problems arrives in the form of Professor Brand and his daughter Amelia (Michael Caine and Anne Hathaway) who believe a new planet with the possibility of supporting life exists on the other side of a wormhole near the planet Saturn. “We’re not meant to save the world,” Brand says. “We’re meant to leave it.”. Cooper, Amelia and a team of astronauts embark on a year-year quest to find the planet and find humanity’s salvation.
“Interstellar” is twice as long as the similarly themed “Gravity,” but only half as enjoyable. It’s larger in scope—this is Christopher “Billion Dollar Baby” Nolan after all—than the Sandra Bullock movie, and more ambitious too, but it’s a strange mix of sci fi and sentimentality that plays up the idea of the power of love. The only thing missing is a Celine Dion over the final credits.
Nolan reaches for the stars with beautifully composed shots and some mind-bending special effects, but the dime store philosophy of the story never achieves lift off.
McConaughey’s been down this road before in “Contact,” and acquits himself well enough, but the interesting actor who anchored “True Detective” gets lost in space for much of the 169-minute-running time.
On the upside “Interstellar” earns points for not being based on a novel or video game. On the downside, it’s not based on good sci fi either.
Turning a beloved television show into a film isn’t as easy as simply writing a longer, feature length script. For every Sex and the City or X Files that successfully makes the leap from small to big screens, there’s a Bewitched, Mod Squad or The Honeymooners, all ideas that should have worked but failed to find audiences. Or, in the parlance of Maxwell Smart, “They missed it by that much…”
The new big screen adaptation of Agent Smart’s exploits, Get Smart, is loosely based on the 1960s television series and while it tries to be all things to all people—there’s slapstick, action, romance, The Rock!—what it doesn’t try to be, for better and for worse, is a photocopy of the original series.
In the new film evil doers KAOS infiltrate the super-secret offices of CONTROL and learn the identity of each of their working agents. The only two uncompromised operatives left are Agent 99, an expert spy who was recently rendered unrecognizable after massive reconstructive plastic surgery—unless of course you saw Brokeback Mountain or The Devil Wears Prada and you’ll note she looks just like Anne Hathaway—and Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell), a desk-bound analyst who recently passed his field agent exam. The future of CONTROL and the free world rests in their hands as they do battle with KAOS head honcho Siegfried (Terence Stamp).
Fans of the television show will be pleased that many of the touchstones from the series are firmly in place. Max uses a shoe phone; there’s a new, but not entirely improved cone-of-silence and, of course, the catchphrases—“Sorry about that Chief,” “Missed it by that much,” and “Would you believe…”—are all intact.
What has changed is the tone. Get Smart has the silly jokes and the pratfalls of the series, but it can’t seem to decide whether it is a full-on comedy or an action film, or both. Either way it is an uneasy mix topped off with an unconvincing romance that only muddies the waters even more. Just when the movie works up a head of comedy steam it is often sidelined by a full-on action sequence and vice-a-versa.
Carell puts his own spin on the character which actually has little to do with the original Agent 86, Maxwell Smart. As played by Don Adams in the series and a couple of reunion movies—The Nude Bomb and the TV movie Get Smart, Again—Smart was an ironically named klutz who prevailed against evil not because he was clever or talented but because he was a self-confident fool who usually got lucky. Carell’s take on the character is different and it changes everything.
His Maxwell Smart is smart; a dedicated worker bee who tries harder than everybody else and prevails because of perseverance. It’s a small change but it inverts the character from someone an audience enjoys laughing at to someone who tries to make the audience laugh with him. That one change sucks much of the anarchic spirit of the series out of the big screen treatment, leaving us with a rather generic spy spoof.
That being said there are some good things about Get Smart. Carell makes good use of his innate comic timing and brings a straight-faced charm to the role, but I wish they hadn’t called him Maxwell Smart. By any other name I would likely have thought this was an interesting comic creation but, frankly, he pales by comparison to Adams who imprinted his take on the character on an entire generation’s consciousness. For those unfamiliar with the original show, however, and there are likely many younger audience members who have never had the pleasure, Carell’s Maxwell Smart will become the new standard should this movie spin off into a sequel or two.
There is much to enjoy in Get Smart; there are some good gags, a nice nod or two to the television series, some good action and even an improbable but fun explanation regarding the gap in age between Agent 99 and 86, but for old timers like me who grew up on the television series it doesn’t feel like the real deal.
If the number 24601 brings a tear to your eye then you can likely skip past the synopsis paragraphs in this review as you probably already know the epic story of “Les Misérables.” For the uninitiated, however, what follows is the sad and tragic tale of obsession, love and redemption, now an all singing (but no dancing) operetta from “The King’s Speech” director Tom Hooper.
Based on the mega-musical that brought Victor Hugo’s 1862 French novel to Broadway, the film is a faithful adaptation of the show that inspired gallons of tears on the Great White Way.
Hugh Jackman is Jean Valjean, a French national imprisoned for two decades for the crime of stealing a loaf of bread to feed a starving child. Once released he breaks parole, flees, makes a new life for himself and searches for redemption. Searching for him is police Inspector Javert (Russell Crowe), who refers to Valjean by his ID number, 24601. Their cat and mouse game spans two decades culminating in the 1832 June Rebellion in Paris.
Wringing extra emotional from the melodramatic tale is a side story concerning Fantine (Anne Hathaway), ill-fated factory worker (her story is one of the main reasons this is called the “Miserables”) and mother of an illegitimate child, Cosette (played by Isabelle Allen as a child, Amanda Seyfried as an adult). Forced into prostitution, she entrusts the care of her daughter to Valjean.
After the royal bollocking Joel Schumacher gave “The Phantom of the Opera” a few years ago the future of poperas on the big screen looked bleak. Sure “Chicago” hit some of the right notes, but apart from lighter fare like “Mama Mia” big time musicals have been few and far between at the movies.
Add to that the reputation of “Les Misérables.” It’s not only an emotional epic, combining a stew of audience grabbers like forgiveness, self-sacrifice, and courage but it’s also the world’s longest-running musical. Fan expectation is high.
Director Hooper’s all-star cast (with the addition of stage vets Samantha Barks and Colm Wilkinson, who originated the role of Valjean on Broadway) is game for the challenge, and once you get past the giggles at seeing tough guy Russell Crowe warbling operatic, it works.
Jackman is a natural, with both the acting and vocal chops to play Valjean. He’s the lead, the heart of the show, but he isn’t blessed with the most interesting repertoire. His songs are occasionally repetitive but perhaps because they’re weren’t prerecorded—as is the usual practice in screen musicals—but sung live on set, Jackman ups the sentiment and could land an Oscar nod for his work.
Crowe has better songs but a different approach, less musical theatre and more Pink Floyd.
Eddie “My Week with Marilyn” Redmayne as Marius is terrific in a strong supporting role and Amanda Seyfried’s voice is almost as big as her eyes, but it is Anne Hathaway’s performance that lingers.
As Fantine she has the smallest role of the leads, but given her slim screen time makes the biggest impression. Her version of the show’s four Kleenex signature song “I Dreamed a Dream”—shot in one take—is a microcosm of the entire show. It’s raw in its passion, hits on themes of life, death and disappointment echoed by the other characters and yes, it’s a little bit showy. Hathaway nails it and kind of blows everybody else away in the process.
“Les Misérables” succeeds by playing it straight. Hooper highlights the star power but underplays everything else. The film looks sumptuous, but wisely avoids the flamboyant approach that sunk “Nine” and “The Phantom of the Opera.”
“Love and Other Drugs,” the new film starring Oscar nominees Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhal, isn’t your standard rom com. Call it a drom com, or a romantic dramedy, but it isn’t afraid to try and wring a tear or two from you while slathering on the romance.
Gyllenhal is Jamie, a good looking med school drop-out who finds his calling selling pharmaceuticals. Until meeting Maggie (Hathaway), a beautiful and talented but troubled woman, he slid through life based solely on charm and his ability to get people to do anything he wants them to do. He falls in love with her but [SPOILER] because she has early onset Parkinson’s Disease she refuses to let Jamie get too close, preferring to keep their relationship purely physical. As her sickness progresses they both find themselves with some very serious decisions to make. [END OF SPOILERS]
Based on Jamie Reidy’s memoir “Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman,” the movie is a mix of broad comedy (which doesn’t always work so well) and heartfelt romance (which does). Gyllenhal and Hathaway sell the romance, their huge eyes—both these actors have soulful eyes bigger than on any sad-eyed clown painting—and make a convincing couple. The plot takes its lead from the standard rom com set-up but liberally mixes in sex, nudity (yes, movie lovers the two comely leads spend a great deal of time topless and bottomless!) and more genuine feeling than any ten Katherine Heigl movies.
It’s not a seamless mingling of serious romance and comedy however. Other than Maggie Jamie shares his screen time with two sidekicks, and that, frankly is one too many. Oliver Platt, as his sales mentor is a riot and underused. Josh Gad, as Jamie’s porn addicted brother, the role Jack Black would have played ten years ago and Jonah Hill probably auditioned for this year, is funny-ish but wears out his welcome early on. And please Mr. Gyllenhal never do “painful erection” jokes ever again in your career.
“Love and Other Drugs” could have deepened the script by increasing the time it gives to the evils of the pharmaceutical business but instead avoids the disease-of-the-week clichés and puts the focus where it belongs, on two very likeable and watchable stars doing some very good work.
The subtitle for “One Day,” a new romance starring Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway, should be “Carpe Diem!” Seize the day, it seems to be telling us, particularly if you’re in love.
Sturgess and Hathaway each affect English accents for their roles—his is real, her’s clearly isn’t—of people who meet on July 15, 1988 and play romantic cat and mouse for almost twenty years. In the beginning Hathaway is an earnest poet who thinks she can change the world. How earnest is she? She plays Tracy Chapman’s “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution” as seduction music. That’s pretty earnest. He’s a rich kid with a yin yang symbol, representing the perfect union of opposites, tattooed on his ankle and, as it turns out on his heart. This pair of opposites spend most of their lives trying not to fall in love until one day, July 15th, no less, they take the leap.
“One Day” is many things. It’s a style parade of hair and clothes from the past twenty years and it’s an interesting take on how to tell a story but it’s also a little disconnected. I think the year-by-year format—we drop in on Jim and Anne every July 15 for twenty years—is the culprit. It begins to feel gimmicky by the early nineties and by the millennium almost feels as though it is playing out in real time.
Luckily the story is rescued by the chemistry between the leads. Sturgess brings an easy charm to the character, and his transformation from happy-go-lucky student to lounge lizard TV presenter is effective. Hathaway’s charm lies in the intelligence she brings to her characters. Here she plays a smarty-pants young woman set adrift in life, someone who is slowly finding thye self confidence to be who she really wants to be. In Hathaway’s hands you never doubt that she’ll get there.
The decades long dance they do as they pretend not to be in love shows the chemistry between the two. The film has some serious structural flaws but the spark between the two of them forgive many of the film’s sins.
We’ve seen the ‘can men and women be friends’ thing a hundred times before but “One Day’s” “whatever happens tomorrow… we’ve had today” theme is effective and may even wring a tear or two from the most hard hearted of viewers.
Anne Hathaway is getting a lot of notice for her raw edged work in Rachel Getting Married, and rightfully so. The young actress best known as the goody-two-shoes star of The Princess Diaries and Ella Enchanted has, in recent years, been making moves to distance herself from the young adult mainstream with a provocative role in Brokeback Mountain and a high profile turn in The Devil Wears Prada. In Rachel Gettting Married she hands in tour-de-force work that marks her first completely adult performance.
Shot cinéma vérité style on a combination of grainy, handheld 35 mm and consumer video cameras the movie begins with recovering addict Kym (Hathaway) leaving rehab to attend the wedding of her older sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt). Old wounds are reopened as family Kym tries to readjust to life with an overbearing father (Bill Irwin), absent mother (Debra Winger) and her sister’s upcoming “happy day.”
Director Jonathan Demme has spent most of the last ten years making documentaries and it shows in every frame of Rachel Getting Married. It feels like a doc, from the jiggly camera work to the raw, Dogme style of emotional intensity. The film was shot without rehearsal and it shows, in a good way. Scenes are frequently shot in long, uninterrupted Robert Altman-esque takes and the actor’s reactions often feel spontaneous and that feeling of naturalness deepens the believability of the story. It feels intimate, free-wheeling and unpredictable.
At the center of it all is Hathaway, who, surrounded by a cast comprised of old pros like Debra Winger and Bill Irwin and newcomers like TV On the Radio singer turned actor Tunde Adebimpe, is the emotional core of the film. Her greatest feat here is to play an unlikable, self-centered person and still have the audience feel sympathy for her. It’s an intense, unvarnished performance that reveals the pain that lurks beneath Kym’s goth-like exterior. She’s tough and fragile; someone who is able to live with her past sins, but can’t get over them. It’s an award caliber performance that she has hinted at before but never delivered.
Also very good and award worthy is Debra Winger as Kym’s detached mother Abby. Winger works infrequently, she’s only made four films since Y2K, but her work as the damaged Abby, a woman who cannot come to grips with the wellspring of emotion that exists inside her, is spectacular.
Rachel Getting Married isn’t a perfect movie. It is a rambling film with that suffers from self indulgence from Demme, who pushes the audience’s tolerance for wedding music—no matter how eclectic—to new extremes but its great performances and tough emotional truths more than make up for unnecessary excesses.
It is ironic that Mitt Romney’s former company Bain shares a pronunciation but not a spelling with the villain in “The Dark Knight Rises.” I say ironic because in the film it is Batman and not the burly bad guy who takes on the Occupy movement.
Eight movie years have passed since Batman (Christian Bale) last donned the cape. He’s become a recluse, having assumed responsibility for District Attorney Harvey Dent’s crimes in the hopes that if the Dent anti-crime act worked Gotham would become a peaceful city. It was successful until a cat burglar named Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) put into motion a series of events that would draw the caped Crusader from retirement to fight his mightiest foe yet, Bane (Tom Hardy). In a battle that will no doubt delight and confound Occupy veterans, Wall Streeters are gunned down and a billionaire strives to take back the streets from the 1%.
It’s a story that seems like it played out in real life on our streets, albeit without capes, gadgets and murderous villains. When Seline purrs “You’re all going to wonder how you ever thought you could live so large, and leave so little for the rest of us,” into Bruce Wayne’s ear, it sounds ripped from the headlines. Such is the timeliness of the film, but let’s not forget that this is a summer blockbuster, not a treatise on the haves and the have-nots.
It aspires to deeper meaning, to be “A Tale of Two Cities” with a cowl, and there’s lots of talk of “restoring the balance of civilization,” but it is also a very entertaining action movie. The first seven minutes is as wild a scene as has ever been captured by IMAX cameras and there’s no shortage of colorful characters.
Bale grimaces and growls with the best of them. As loyal manservant Alfred Michael Caine emotes more than usual for a superhero movie, Morgan Freeman is an oasis of calm amid the chaos and Gary Oldham is the very model of steely determination as Commissioner Gordon. All well and fine, and the expected complexity of character is on ample display, but it is the new characters that shine.
As the brooding hulk that speaks like a slightly loony Shakespearian villain, Hardy is an imposing presence. Grandiose though he is, Bane lacks the chaotic charm of Heather Ledger’s take on the Joker, but as sadistic scoundrels go, he’s one part modern day terrorist, two parts Attila the Hun.
Anne Hathaway had to overcome the memory of a much-loved performance by Michelle Pfeiffer, but from her first appearance the slate is wiped clean. Charismatic, charming and sexy, she’s dropped Pfeifer’s paw-licking cat mannerisms and instead presents a physical, complex character whose chemistry with Bale burns up the screen.
On the side of law and order is idealistic Gotham cop John Blake, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He’s heavy on the exposition—someone has to explain what’s going on!—but what could have been a throw-a-way role is transformed into a real person in a movie filled with super villains and improbable situations.
Nolan favorite Marion Cotillard brings a feminine touch and some mystery to an already plot heavy and enigmatic story.
Is “The Dark Knight Rises” a perfect summer movie? It’s certainly in the running, but there are a few let downs.
It is a heroic tale and the beautiful IMAX photography creates a larger-than-life feel for the epic-ish story, but it also exposes some missteps in the fight choreography. With the picture blown up to the size of a football field (as opposed to a picture of a blown-up football field, which provides one of the film’s highlights) some of the fighting is just this side of convincing.
Also, despite being the title character The Dark Knight spends relatively little time in the cape. Instead we’re shown more of the inner life of the character. Not a bad thing, but let’s face it, clothes make the man, and the Batsuit is one of the key props in the series.
And the early fear that Bane’s dialogue would be unintelligible isn’t completely unfounded. With his mouth hidden beneath a mask Hardy delivers an effective performance with just his eyes, unfortunately lines like ‘There can be no true despair without hope!” often end up sounding like a baroque but garbled mixture of drunken whispers and baby talk.
“The Dark Knight Rises” is a very accomplished blockbuster. At two-hours-and-forty-four minutes it manages to provide the thrills associated with the genre, but also takes time to create memorable characters.
