In this film Eight Mile director Curtis Hansen delves into the troubled relationship of two sisters. Toni Colette plays a repressed lawyer who comforts herself by buying expensive shoes. Her sister, played by Cameron Diaz is a drunken party girl, destined to become, as her sister says, “a middle aged tramp.” The kind of girl who is fun to hang out with, but you wouldn’t necessarily take home to mother. She’s cut adrift from the conventions of a “normal life,” and only surfaces when she needs money, or wants to borrow one of the expensive pairs of shoes. After one particularly nasty sexcapade the Diaz character flees to Florida and the not so open arms of a grandmother who was absent during her formative years.
This is Hansen’s third film following Wonder Boys, LA Confidential and Eight Mile. Each of those films was an exploration of life with surprises that lifted the story beyond the average. The surprise here is that there is no surprise. In Her Shoes is a conventional film buoyed by strong performances by Toni Collette and Shirley MacLaine (as the grandmother) but one that plays out exactly as you might expect. I won’t provide spoilers, but in a movie with such a predictable plot there aren’t many spoilers to give.
“Knight and Day,” the new couple-on-the-run movie starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, borrows elements from “North by Northwest,” “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” and even “There’s Something About Mary” to form one whole that is slightly less than the sum of it’s parts.
If this was “North by Northwest” Diaz would have the Cary Grant role. Here she plays June Havens, a single woman who gets sucked into a very dangerous situation. A routine flight from Wichita, Kansas to Boston becomes not so routine when she meets Roy Miller (Tom Cruise), a handsome but deadly spy whose world is divided into two kinds of people—“bad guys” and “worse guys.” Following a crash landing, a some globetrotting and briefings and de-briefings by good guys and bad, June must learn who to trust and more importantly, who not to trust. At stake is a tiny battery that could power an entire city, a nerdy inventor and possibly, just possibly, June’s romantic future.
“Knight and Day” attempts to combine the specialties of its two stars—romantic comedy and action—but it’s not exactly a seamless package. Diaz has years of rom com experience under her stylish Gucci belt and Cruise adds a comedic edge to his standard issue action hero but the two never quite gel. The movie can’t decide whether it is screwball spy movie like “Get Smart” with bigger guns or a romantic comedy with explosions. It is weighted heavier toward the action, but I couldn’t help but think it would have worked better as a straight up spy drama without the punch lines or the romantic yuks.
It’s a movie that wants us to care more about the characters than we actually do. Cruise and Diaz are working it here, dodging bullets, exchanging the odd kiss and trying to create some heat, but every time we start to get to know the characters the movie slams the pedal to the metal and kicks into action movie mode. Much of the action is fun, some of it inventive, but none of it is really exciting, perhaps because the stakes are so low. When you don’t really care about the characters who cares if they get blown to bits by Spanish terrorists?
It could be that the on-screen personas of Cruise and Diaz are so firmly etched in our minds—he’s the heroic man of action, she’s going to end up with the guy in the end—that it’s hard to build excitement when you know how it’s likely to end. That’s not a spoiler… just an observation.
Not that the whole thing is a flat line. Far from it. It’s a slickly made movie that shies away from the new norm of action photography. Here you can actually see what is happening as things blow up and Cruise catches some air on his motorcycle, unlike the recent “A-Team” movie that confused frenetic camera work with exciting action.
“Knight and Day” tries to use the star wattage of Cruise and Diaz to sell a story that tries to be an action movie that will appeal to the rom com set, or a romantic comedy that action fans will like. Unfortunately it falls somewhere down the middle.
The synopsis for My Sister’s Keeper sounds a bit like a tearjerker episode of LA Law with a sci fi twist. It begins when Kate, the two-year-old daughter (Sofia Vassilieva) of Sara and Brian Fitzgerald (Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric), is stricken with leukemia. In an effort to provide for her and prolong her life the couple conceive Anna (Abigail Breslin), a designer baby, specifically to provide genetically matched organs, blood and bone marrow for Kate’s treatment. She is, literally, a donor child; a spare parts warehouse for Kate. All goes well until, at age 11, Anna refuses to have any more medical procedures and seeks medical emancipation from Sara and Brian. Hiring her own lawyer (Alec Baldwin) she sues her parents for the right to decide how her body is used. “Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if Kate had been born healthy,” says Anna.
There’s a lot going on here but the movie isn’t about the court case, or the test tube baby debate or even the medical ethics. Director Nick Cassavetes (son of indie legend John) wisely keeps the focus on the family, uncovering ideas of love, loyalty and how one person’s sickness can touch everyone in the household.
It’s touching, if occasionally calculating stuff. Cassavetes draws out the ending, pumping up the emotion with a heart tugging score, but despite my feelings of being manipulated My Sister’s Keeper works.
I think it works because of the honesty of the performances. Cameron Diaz as the mother in the fight of her life, for her daughter’s life, sometimes dips into shrill territory, but otherwise hands in the best dramatic performance of her career. Jason Patric, a fine, underrated actor, brings strength and warmth to the role of the father. There’s also nice supporting work from Alec Baldwin as Anna’s slyly humorous lawyer and Joan Cusack as the conflicted judge, but the two stand outs here are the young actresses Sofia Vassilieva and Abigail Breslin.
Vassilieva (she’s Patricia Arquette’s daughter on Medium) is heartbreaking as the young girl who will likely not live to see her prom and gives old pro Breslin, (she’s 13 with 15 movies to her credit!), usually the scene stealer, a run for her money.
Based on a bestselling novel of the same name from Jodi Picoult My Sister’s Keeper is the tearjerker of the year. At the screening I was at people were sobbing so loudly it was hard to hear some of the dialogue in the last twenty minutes or so. Trust me; bring a towel to wrap around your neck so you don’t have to sit in a puddle of your own tears.
In What Happens in Vegas a young successful woman marries an unemployed guy after a night of drinking. No, it’s not the Britney Spears story, it’s a new romantic comedy starring Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher.
The premise is right out of Rom Com 101. Kutcher is Jack, a good looking womanizer who can’t hold down a job. Diaz is the beautiful but controlling Joy. In other words they are stereotypes: he’s a slob; she’s a controlling harridan. One drunken night they hook up in Vegas, and despite their differences they wind up getting hitched. In the cold light of day they both realize they don’t really like one another and need to get an annulment, pronto. That is until Kutcher puts her quarter in a slot machine and wins three million dollars. Her quarter, his pull. Back home a judge (Dennis Miller) rules that neither gets a dime of the cash or an annulment unless they try and make their marriage work for six months. Wacky hi-jinks ensue.
Anyone who’s read the Rom Com Handbook knows it’s only a matter of time until the best friend says, “Oh my God, you’re falling for her…” and we discover, once and for all, that opposites truly do attract.
What Happens in Vegas has four solid laughs and 95 minutes of clichés provided by a script that appears to have been written by the Rom Com Automatic Script Generator. It plays to the worst kind of stereotypes, the type of gender humor that should have gone out with Lucy and Desi. Worse than the old fashioned “men and women cannot coexist” approach is an painfully unfunny scene makes fun of domestic abuse.
Diaz and Kutcher, both romantic comedy veterans, are the above the title stars but it is the supporting cast that squeezes the laughs out of this battle of sexes material. Rob Corddry and Lake Bell are the best friends—known in the Rom Com Handbook as “wacky sidekicks”—and have all the best lines. Bell has the same kind of appeal as her co-star Cameron Diaz showed in There’s Something About Mary—she’s beautiful and goofy—and it’s the first time Corddry, who was always so great on The Daily Show, has been funny in a movie. He can take a throw away line like, “She’s awfully hostile for a girl named Joy,” and turn it into one of the funniest things in the whole movie.
The famous Vegas tourist board slogan should be the headline for this review: What Happens in Vegas, despite two funny supporting performances, really should have stayed in Vegas.
It’s hard not to like a movie that features scantily-dressed fun-lovin’ women kicking butt and having a good time, but Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle rings so hollow I can’t muster much enthusiasm for it.
The first film, 2000’s Charlie’s Angels was empty-headed, but at least had a sense of fun. This instalment ups the hip quotient, taking all the elements that worked well in the previous one and amplifying them – the actions scenes are louder, the kicks (and the skirts) a little higher, Cameron Diaz has not one, but two dance sequences and story is even more confusing than the first – jamming maximum eye candy into every frame. It has everything that summer audiences crave, everything that is, except soul. The MTV reared director McG moves the action along at the speed of light, proving that he has an attention span only as long as his name.
Last time around McG and producer Drew Barrymore (who also starred as Dylan Sanders) created a movie that paid homage to, but winked at the original 70s television series. In that daftly subversive movie the trio were at the beck and call of the mysterious Charlie, but were in no way enslaved by him, which was the uncomfortable reality of the television show. The movie Angels were playful and powerful.
This time out the film tries to hard. The fun, what little of it there is seems forced and uninspired. Instead of empowered women, Full Throttle offers up high kicking Barbies devoid of the charm that made them so winning the first time. In lieu of an actual character Cameron Diaz (look for her to earn multiple nominations when the next Golden Booty Awards are announced) simply flashes her toothy smile and underpants around, while Lucy Liu is still trading off the same hard-core dominatrix pose she perfected on Ally McBeal. Only Barrymore’s character seems rooted in reality, but even that sense of humanity evaporates the first time we see her fly through the air, kicking the stuffing out of the bad guys.
As the villainous ex-Angel Madison Lee, Demi Moore looks fabulous in her barely-there wardrobe. Apparently she has spent a good deal of time since we last saw her on the big screen at the gym. Too bad she didn’t skip the weights and take an acting course or two. Never a brilliant actress, I believe this is the first time Moore has actually been upstaged by her own abs.
Other supporting cast members fare only slightly better. Demi’s ex Bruce Willis is seen for under a minute, while the teenage Olsen Twins barely muster ten seconds of screen time. Other star cameos include Pink, Robert Forster, Carrie Fisher, Eric Bogosian and television Angel Jaclyn Smith. Director McG should be fully throttled for his mishandling of John Cleese as Lucy Liu’s father. It’s a funny idea to have a tall gawky Brit playing the diminutive Liu’s father, but his talent is utterly wasted. He’s given nothing to do except react with bulging eyes to a string of cheap double entendres. On the plus side Crispen Glover reprises his role from the first film as The Thin Man, delivering a delightfully unhinged performance as the hair fetishist assassin.
In the end big and bloated are two words I’d never use to describe the Angels (for fear of bring pummelled) but would use to describe the movie.
SYNOPSIS: In the new Cameron Diaz movie, Bad Teacher, she plays – you guessed it – a bad teacher! More concerned with hooking up with a wealthy co-worker (played by her real life ex, Justin Timberlake) than with her students, she doesn’t make much of an effort to actually educate until she learns there’s a cash bonus for the teacher with the highest classroom grade average.
Star Ratings:
Richard: ***
Tony: ***1/2
Richard: Tony, having seen the red band trailer for Bad Teacher, I went in expecting a vulgar, funny swear fest along the same lines as The Hangover. Instead I got a funny, only somewhat vulgar movie that I think could have benefitted from a bit more raunch. Don’t get me wrong, I liked it, but my expectations were higher… or, I guess, lower. What did you think? (Remember you have big shoes to fill here!)
Tony: Well, first let me thank you for the opportunity to temporarily replace the vacationing Mark Breslin. I wanted to like this movie… so i did. From the opening song Teacher, Teacher by Rockpile, something I still have on original vinyl, to the great casting in even the smallest of roles to the sweet moments followed immediately by gross sight gags to the nicely paced direction by Jake Kasdan, Bad Teacher had a little bit of everything. But it could have had a lot more raunch, you’re right.
Richard: Yeah, it seems a bit afraid to go all the way. Diaz’s character, desperate, pretty on the outside but ugly underneath, is an odd character to hang a comedy on, but she pulls it off. She’ll never be the funny, fresh face she was in There’s Something About Mary and The Mask, and for this movie that’s a good thing. The very slight patina of age and experience in her manner adds some extra desperation to Elizabeth. Having said that, I don’t think this movie would work nearly as well without the supporting cast. You?
Tony: The cast was incredible. Justin Timberlake really shines here. Jason Segel, John Michael Higgins, Phyllis Smith from The Office, they do their usual, great characters, but Eric Stonestreet from Modern Family played opposite to what you would expect, to really funny results. The only sad thing was the grossly underused Molly Shannon. It’s sad. If she was 15 years younger, she’d have been perfect to play Lucy Punch’s Amy Squirrel character, who I felt was doing a great Molly Shannon.
Richard: The supporting cast don’t exactly rescue this movie–it doesn’t need rescuing–but without them, Bad Teacher wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.
Tony: It is very funny if you can allow your suspension of disbelief to ignore the premise that Cameron Diaz’s character actually worked at the school for a full year and gets hired back to have the shenanigans in this movie.
Detroit columnist Bob Talbert once wrote, “Good teachers are costly, but bad teachers cost more.”
Of course he wasn’t talking about actual dollars, but the emotional cost of a sketchy education. He could also have been talking about the new Cameron Diaz movie, Bad Teacher, in which she plays – you guessed it – a bad teacher! More concerned with hooking up with a wealthy co-worker (played by her real life ex Justin Timberlake) than with her students, she doesn’t make much of an effort to actually educate until she learns there’s a cash bonus for the teacher with the highest classroom grade average.
Bad teachers are nothing new on the big screen.
In Animal House, Donald Sutherland played stoned-out college professor Dave Jennings. Sutherland said he has regrets about the film.
Not that he had to parade around dressed only in a shirt and effectively moon the audience, no, he bemoans that he didn’t accept a percentage of the box office as payment. “(Director John) Landis phones up and says, ‘I’m going do this movie called Animal House, and they want to give you two-and-a-half per cent of the profits.’
“And I said, ‘No way! I’ve got to have my daily salary everyday.’ So I got paid for one day’s work and threw way $2 million!”
Probably the worst teacher ever appears in Class of 1984, a trashy school drama starring Roddy MacDowell as Terry Corrigan, a fed up teacher who threatens his unruly class with a loaded gun.
Director Mark L. Lester claims the scene was based on a real event, although a follow-up sequence showing an unbalanced Corrigan attempting to run down his students was pure fiction.
Due to excessive violence the movie was banned in several countries but is of interest to Canadian audiences for a performance by Hamilton, Ont. punk band Teenage Head.
One bad movie teacher actually redeems himself. When we first meet Fast Times at Ridgemont High’s Mr. Hand (Ray Walston) he’s prone to saying things like, “What is this fascination with truancy?” to his students, but near the end of the movie he softens and even pulls out all the stops to help his worst student, Spicoli (Sean Penn), graduate.
Ray Walston, so memorable as the uptight Mr. Hand, almost didn’t get the part, however. It was originally offered to Munster’s star Fred Gwynne who declined over objections to the film’s sexual content.
The road trip is part of the American psyche dating back to the young men (and women) who took Horace Greeley’s famous advice—“Go west young man!”—to heart and left the east for the frontier. Hollywood saw the allure early on, recognizing that road movies offer opportunities to inject exciting secondary characters and interesting scenery into stories each time the leads stop in a new town. Add to that the sexy appeal of two people running for their lives and you have a new genre—the fugitive couple movie.
Whether it is the doomed Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sydney on the lam in 1937s You Only Live Once or Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz’s worldwide trek in this weekend’s Knight and Day, the idea of runaways on the open road has been irresistible to filmmakers.
On early fugitive road movie is Persons in Hiding, a nasty 1939 film based on J. Edgar Hoover’s best-selling book of the same name. J. Carrol Naish stars as a small-time hood on the run with Dorothy Bronson (Patricia Morison). Together they rob banks and even kidnap a hapless stranger all to appease Ms. Bronson appetite for champagne and furs. Of course, this being based on Hoover’s book, the pair isn’t mythologized à la Bonnie and Clyde. No, the heroes here are the FBI who use their “infallible” methods to bring the couple to justice.
Better known is The Getaway, Sam Peckinpah’s violent love letter to criminal behavior. Based on a 1959 pulp novel by Jim Thompson, it stars Steve McQueen as a cocky safecracker who hits the road with Ali MacGraw following a botched holdup. Panned on its original release—Roger Ebert called it “a big, glossy, impersonal mechanical toy”—it was a box office success, partly because of the ruckus the tabloids made when MacGraw left her husband, producer Robert Evans, for McQueen during production.
More recently crime and scandal were at the heart of Natural Born Killers, a satire of media sensationalism and America’s love affair with violence. Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis play married murderers—“the best thing to happen to mass murder since Manson”—on a cross country killing spree. Named the 8th most controversial movie of all time by Entertainment Weekly it earned mixed reviews—Movieline called it “mindless” while Peter Travers named it “one of my all time favorite movies.”—and may be the wildest fugitive couple movie ever made.
I had a couple of questions after seeing “The Box,” a new existential thriller starring Cameron Diaz.
First: What the hell was that?
Second: Is it possible for a once promising director to completely forget how to make a movie?
Here’s the scoop. Diaz and James Marsden play Norma and Arthur Lewis. They’re a regular family; he wants to be an astronaut, she’s a teacher specializing in existential literature who lost four toes in a horrible X-Ray incident. One day, early in the morning, a mysterious box is delivered to their door. Inside the box is a device that looks like the “Deal or No Deal” buzzer along with a note that reads “Mr. Steward will call on you at 5 pm.” At precisely five the doorbell rings and the bringer of the box, Mr. Steward (Frank Langella) is at the door. He’s a nattily dressed charmer, but there’s something strange about him. For starters he has a facial disfigurement that makes Harvey “Two-Face” Dent look like a Fabio. But there’s more. He calmly explains that she has twenty-four hours to make a decision. If she presses the button she’ll be given one million tax free dollars. There’s a hitch though. Someone, somewhere will die. If she doesn’t press the button he’ll return in one day, collect the box and that will be that. From that point on it is a story of buttons, bloody noses and prosthetic feet. Oh yeah, it’s also about choices and consequences.
“The Box” wants to be a deep multi-layered horror fantasy about the human condition, the afterlife and fate but bites off more than it can chew. The button test is meant to reveal not only the essence of human nature but apparently, the very heart of what it is to be human, or something like that. I’m not exactly sure because by the time we got to that point in the story I was already thinking about what I wanted for lunch the next day. No thrills, no chills, just bored sighs.
Cameron Diaz’s performance made me long for the days when she danced in her underwear in the first reel of all of her movies and Frank Langella is clearly slumming it for a paycheque here but “Donnie Darko” director Richard Kelly is the real problem. It’s looking more and more like “Darko,” the stylish sci fi mystery that rightfully earned Kelly a cult following, was a fluke. “The Box” is so painfully dull, so silly and overwrought it’s as if there was no director.
Like the movie suggests, there are consequences for every action. I wonder what the consequences will be for making a movie as bad as “The Box.”
In this film Eight Mile director Curtis Hansen delves into the troubled relationship of two sisters. Toni Colette plays a repressed lawyer who comforts herself by buying expensive shoes. Her sister, played by Cameron Diaz is a drunken party girl, destined to become, as her sister says, “a middle aged tramp.” The kind of girl who is fun to hang out with, but you wouldn’t necessarily take home to mother. She’s cut adrift from the conventions of a “normal life,” and only surfaces when she needs money, or wants to borrow one of the expensive pairs of shoes. After one particularly nasty sexcapade the Diaz character flees to Florida and the not so open arms of a grandmother who was absent during her formative years.
