“Romeo & Juliet” is arguably the best known of Shakespeare’s plays. Certainly it is his most loved romance and is one of the most filmed plays of all time. Among the modern versions of the two young “star-cross’d lovers” are a classic big screen MGM adaptation starring Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer, the musical “West Side Story” and an anime rendering about two rival ninja clans fighting each other. Perhaps the strangest reimagining of the story, however, hits screens this weekend. As the title suggests, “Gnomeo & Juliet” replaces the human protagonists with garden gnomes. That’s not gnormal but then again, this isn’t your garden variety kid’s flick.
Set on Verona Drive, the movie takes place in the back gardens of feuding neighbors Mr. Montague and Mrs. Capulet. Their dispute isn’t the only grudge on the block however. While they are away at work or asleep at night their garden gnomes come to life and do battle. Divided into red and blue gardens, every night the gnomes kick some grass in an effort to sabotage one another. The whole situation comes to a head when Gnomeo (voice of James McAvoy) and Juliet (Emily Blunt) fall hopelessly in love after a chance encounter.
“Gnomeo & Juliet” isn’t a strict translation of Bill Shakespeare’s play. In other words, and this is not a spoiler, it doesn’t end in gnomacide. Other than that the themes of the original are in place—like the forcefulness of love, love as a cause of violence and the individual versus society—but that’s for eggheads and this is for kids. In the movie the high-falutin’ themes have been winnowed down to nice teachable moments for the tots about tolerance and not judging a book by it’s cover, or in this case, a gnome by the color of their hat.
Parents will likely get a kick out of the nods to classic movies—there’s the chariot race from “Ben Hur,” the bucket scene from “Flashdance” and “American Beauty’s” bed of roses to name a few—and the equally classic Elton John song (he’s a producer on this along with his husband David Furnish) but overall this is pitched at young children.
The best thing about “Gnomeo & Juliet” is the animation. Each of the colorful gnomes has a distinct personality and the animators have carefully recreated the weathered ceramic look of real garden gnomes.
The downside is kind of dull voice work—surprising because the cast is a who’s who, including Michael Caine, Maggie Smith and Ozzy Osbourne and even duller 3D. But despite the lack of really memorable voices the story carries the day to create a fun family-friendly film.
We can blame Stephen Frears for the travesty that is “Gulliver’s Travels.” Frears didn’t director or work on this big budget 3D adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s satiric novel. In fact he might not have been within a hundred miles of the set, but ten years ago he cast Jack Black in “High Fidelity,” a movie that showcased the actor’s unhinged brand of humor and made him a star. Black had kicked around Hollywood previously, taking small roles in movies like “The Jackal” and “Enemy of the State,” but Frears gave voice to Black’s now trademarked manic enfant terrible act. Since then there’s been good moments—“School of Rock,” “Kung Fu Panda”—some bad moments—“Envy” and “Year One” and now a downright ugly film—“Gulliver’s Travels.”
Black plays Lemuel Gulliver, a ten year mail room veteran at a big publishing company with only one ambition—to date Darcy (Amanda Peet) a pretty magazine travel editor. When he finally works up the courage to ask her out a misunderstanding leads to him being offered a travel writing assignment instead. Sent to the Bermuda Triangle, he gets sucked into a vortex and lands in Lilliput, a miniature kingdom under constant attack by a neighbouring nation. When Gulliver helps defend the diminutive country he becomes a hero to all except the scheming General Edward (Chris O’Dowd) who will stop at nothing to cut the giant down to size.
At one point during the action Jack Black cracks a joke and follows the punch line with, “Does that translate? Is that a joke here?” a question he probably should have asked after initially reading the script. The satiric tone of the novel has been surgically removed, replaced with “Star Wars” references, a lame musical number and Black’s incessant mugging. I get that this has been reinvented with a young audience in mind, but dumbing down a classic novel like this just seems wrong. It’s like watching “King Lear” interpreted by The Three Stooges with Larry, Curly and Moe as Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. It just doesn’t fit. Perhaps a title change might have been in order. May I suggest “Gulliver’s Twaddle”?
The problem doesn’t lie completely with the script. It’s terrible to be sure, but its Black’s antics that really sink the movie. He dominates the movie, and not just because he is twenty times the size of his co-stars. Perhaps it’s just that a little bit of his hyperactive slacker routine goes a long way or perhaps that we’re weary of his overgrown kid shtick. What once seemed so fresh now seems tired and worse, not funny.
“Gulliver’s Travels” suffers from some dodgy special effects, a dreary script and an over abundance of Black, and for that I blame Stephen Frears.
The movie “Looper” looks at what happens when the older and younger versions of the same person end up in the same time? Of course, anyone who has seen an episode of “Star Trek” can tell you it is bad for the space–time continuum mojo.
In the twisty-turny world of “Looper” time travel doesn’t exist. At least not yet. Set just a few years from now, the film is the story of “loopers,” people who execute criminals from the future. What?! Told you it was mind-bendy.
Thirty years in the future time travel is illegal. The only people who use it are criminal organizations when they need to get rid of someone. Chip implanting has made getting rid of bodies difficult, so they send undesirables back to the past to be disposed of. Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is an experienced looper—or present day trigger-man—slowly stashing his pay so one day he can retire and live in France. He doesn’t count on a crime lord from the future, the Rainmaker, ordering his loop be closed. That is sending his future self, Old Joe (Bruce Willis), to present day to be executed. When Joe hesitates Old Joe gets away and sets in motion a chase to determine the fate of not just one, but both Joes.
It’s two, two Joes in one. As the younger Joe Gordon-Levitt has a fake nose and an uncanny knack for the cadences of Willis’s voice. Willis is Willis, but a world-weary one, who wears each and every of the thirty-year age gap on his face and in his bearing. Both hand in solid performances, as does Emily Blunt as a protective mother whose son (Pierce Gagnon) is on Old Joe’s hit list. Ditto Jeff Daniels who takes a break from “The Newsroom” to play the looper boss.
But the actor’s aren’t the star of the movie, the ideas are. ”Looper” harkens back to sci fi that is about concepts rather than space ships. Is it airtight? No, but that time travel movie is? The crime bosses of the future could have saved a lot of trouble by doing the killing themselves and sending the bodies back to be disposed of, but where’s the fun in that? We need the two Joes in one place to get the story revved. It’s what happens after that is interesting.
Director and writer Rian Johnson uses the sci fi premise to allow the character of Joe in both forms to examine his life, past, present and future, and discover what’s really important to him. It’s humanist science fiction that values the person (or persons) over special effects.
It’s also a wildly entertaining chase movie, with enough sci fi to keep the left side of your brain engaged while the right brain will thrill to the chase.
As tittles go “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” is a mouthful. It’s quirky enough to catch your eye, I suppose, and it isn’t a cute metaphor for something else. This movie is indeed about salmon fishing in the Yemen, but it’s also about faith as much as fishing.
Ewan McGregor is Dr. Alfred Jones a rigid scientist at the British government department of fisheries. He studies spawning habits of fish, writes scientific papers and lives a life of quiet desperation. When he is approached by Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt), a consultant for Yemeni Sheikh Mohammed (Amr Waked), to create a fly fishing reserve in the Yemen, he balks at first but soon not only dives in headfirst to the project, but, since this is a light romanic comedy, also discovers an interest in a life form without gills.
“Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” should do for fly-fishing what “The Big Year” did for bird watching. That is to say, not much. The mix of science, faith–fishing is a mystical past time, apparently—and romance has some charm, mostly due to the engaging performances of McGregor, Blunt and Waked, but other plot threads—like an assassination attempt–feel forced and out of place.
Popping in and out of the story is Kristin Scott Thomas as the aggressive spokesperson for he Prime Minister. She’s used for comedic relief and pulls off the part with aplomb. If the rest of the film had the spark she brings to her scenes we might have been better able to forgive its plot transgressions.
Take the swooping white hair and bad attitude of Cruella DeVille, mix in the people skills of Vlad the Impaler and you’ll get Miranda Priestly, the worst boss in all of moviedom. As played by Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada Priestly, the editrix of a fictional fashion magazine called Runway, never met an assistant she couldn’t humiliate with a withering glance and a few choice words.
Rumor has it that she is based on all-powerful Vogue editor Anna Wintour who apparently uses assistants like the rest of us use toilet paper. In 2003 one survivor, Lauren Weisberger, extracted revenge on her former boss, writing a vaguely fictionalized account of her time spent working for the dragon lady of fashion. The Devil Wears Prada changed the names, exaggerated the stories and offered a scandalous look at the inner workings of a big-time New York fashion magazine.
In the movie version Anne Hathaway plays Andy Sachs, a fashion-impaired university grad who takes a job as Miranda’s assistant as a stepping-stone to her dream job of writing capital “J” journalism for The New Yorker. Courtesy of Miranda’s right hand man Nigel, Andy is given a high fashion makeover from the Jimmy Choo’s on up. Dripping in Dior she quickly becomes Miranda’s star assistant, eclipsing the ambitious, and supposedly firmly entrenched Emily. Andy soon learns that in Miranda’s fast paced world results are the only tings that matter. Other little details like personal relationships, dignity and self worth are secondary. The story is as thin as the models in the pages of Runway, but it is the characters that make this so much fun.
The Devil Wears Prada moves along at a nice clip when Streep, draped in Chanel and clutching the latest Marc Jacobs bag in her talons, is on screen. She gets the rare opportunity to show off her comedic side and seems to have devious fun with the character. She’s nasty, but of course Streep brings more to the role than vicious one-liners, (“The details of your incompetence do not interest me,” she says to a frazzled helper.), and evil eyes. She plays Miranda without a hint of weakness. Her marriage may be falling apart but she chose this life and is willing to accept the consequences no matter what the cost. She takes a one-dimensional character and turns her into the most interesting person on-screen.
Stanley Tucci as Nigel, Miranda’s long-suffering, but tough as nails sidekick and Emily Blunt as the snooty Assistant Number One are also perfectly cast and fun to watch. The least interesting character, Andy Sachs, has the most screen time, and while Anne Hathaway is charismatic and beautiful she gets slightly bowled over by the over-sized personalities of Streep, Tucci and Blunt.
The Devil Wears Prada only wears thin when the filmmakers indulge Hathaway’s inherent decency. By the time she decides that she doesn’t care about the glamour and glitz of the fashion world we don’t care either. Luckily the bulk of the movie is wicked fun.
“Your Sister’s Sister” contains the most modest sex scene of the year. It’s the kind of scene where great care is taken to pull blankets up to the neck and whatever glimpses of unblanketed human form is on display are shrouded in a t-shirt. It’s a sequence that sums up the entire movie—modest and not nearly as revealing as it should be.
Actor – director Lynn Shelton has created a three-hander to examine the fraught relationship between a trio of people, sisters Iris and Hannah (Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt) and Jack (Mark Duplass) the brother of Iris’s late ex-boyfriend. The odd bunch find themselves at a remote family cottage, examining their relationships after a night of drunken fun goes too far.
A mix of improvisation and scripted dialogue, “Your Sister’s Sister” is a nicely performed piece that feels like a nicely performed piece and little more. Characters talk about themselves and their relationships but their development feels stagey and often contrived. It’s a case of good actors saddled with too much dialogue and bad editing. Scenes go on longer than they should, and by the time we get to the rom-com-esque ending the movie has a hard time justifying its ninety-minute running time.
For someone who once famously said, “You would have to kill me and prop me up in the seat of my car with a smile painted on my face to get me to go near Hollywood,” writer Phillip K. Dick certainly has a good Tinsel Town track record. Films based on his novels and short stories have made more than $1 billion, a figure that is bound to increase with the release of this weekend’s The Adjustment Bureau.
Based on Dick’s short story Adjustment Team, the film stars John Slattery as a mysterious Adjustment Bureau agent who must keep star-crossed lovers Matt Damon and Emily Blunt apart. It follows along with at least one tradition typical of Dick’s Hollywood adaptations—a title change.
Blade Runner was based on the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale became Total Recall and Next, the Nicolas Cage movie, was loosely based on the short story The Golden Man.
“Phil often commented that he couldn’t write good titles,” said Dick’s ex-wife, Tessa. “If he could, he would have been an advertising writer instead of a novelist.”
Blade Runner is arguably Dick’s most famous film, but an early draft of the script so displeased Dick he went on the offensive, deriding it as “Phillip Marlowe meets The Stepford Wives.”
Later, however, when shown 20 minutes of special effects shots, the author came on board, saying the footage of Los Angeles in 2019 looked “exactly as how I’d imagined it.” Ironically, director Ridley Scott later let it slip that he had never even read Dick’s book.
Total Recall also had a similar rocky development from page to stage. Early on, David Cronenberg was attached to write and direct but walked from the project when producers told him they wanted to change the story into something akin to “Raiders of the Lost Ark Go to Mars.” Eventually it was made as an incredibly violent Arnold Schwarzenegger film Roger Ebert called “one of the most complex and visually interesting science fiction movies in a long time.”
Despite the fact that Dick died in 1982 of a heart attack, interest in his work remains unabated. Disney is planning an animated adaptation of King of the Elves and Ridley Scott is reported to be producing a mini-series based on The Man in the High Castle for the BBC.
What do Coco Chanel, Queen Victoria and aviatrix Amelia Earhart have in common? All are women, made headlines and smashed barriers, becoming feminist icons in the process. They are also all being given the big screen treatment this year in big Oscar bait movies. Coco Avant Chanel is in theatres, The Young Victoria comes out in December and this weekend Hilary Swank plays Earhart in Amelia.
None are strangers to posthumous celebrity; Victoria has been portrayed on screen almost 100 times by everyone ranging from Glenda Jackson to Michael Palin, but Earhart, a pioneering female pilot who disappeared over the Pacific during a circumnavigational flight of the globe attempt in 1937, has enjoyed a particularly good pop culture run of late. She’s been featured in Apple Computer’s Think Different ads, Buck 65 rapped about her in Blood of a Young Wolf and last year Amy Adams made her flesh and blood in Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian.
Academy Award winner Swank’s take on the character is the eighth time Earhart has been immortalized on screen, not counting Jane Lynch’s portrayal of her in The Aviator which ended up on the cutting room floor, but she isn’t the first Oscar winner to play the fly queen.
In Flight for Freedom honorary Oscar holder Rosalind Russell played Tonie Carter, a character based on Earhart. The film and Russell’s flamboyant performance popularized the unsubstantiated notion that Earhart’s disappearance was a result of clandestine work for the U.S. Navy.
That theory was furthered by a TV movie (subsequently released as a theatrical feature) called Amelia Earhart: The Final Flight. Starring Oscar winner Diane Keaton, the movie suggested the doomed flight was financed by the navy in exchange for her reports of suspicious Japanese activity in the South Pacific.
In Close Encounters of the Third Kind Steven Spielberg suggested another reason for her disappearance—alien abduction! In the film‘s climax Earhart exits the Mothership alongside a hundred alien abduction survivors. Spielberg said this was a tribute to Earhart and others who have mysteriously vanished at sea.
Whether or not Earhart would have approved of any of these portrayals we’ll never know, but at least Swank says she tried to be respectful of Earhart’s legacy. “Any time that you play a character who was alive… you want to tell the story in a way that they would be proud of.”
“The Adjustment Bureau,” a new film starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt as star crossed lovers, is a hard film to categorize. It’s a sci fi movie, with some action, romance and even a bit of metaphysical drama about two people who run afoul of The Adjustment Bureau, a shadowy group of men whose job it is to tweak or adjust people’s lives to make sure the overall plan for their life stays on track.
“The Adjustment Bureau’s” story exists at the intersection of chance and fate, exploring the nature of destiny and the role that free will plays in people’s lives. Key concepts imported the from Phillip K. Dick short story that forms the backbone of the movie include questions about humanity’s ability to truly do the right thing for themselves and the planet and whether or not we have free will or simply the appearance of free will.
Heady stuff. But like the best sci fi it’s not simply about the ideas, it puts a human face on its theories. Matt Damon and Emily Blunt are David and Elsie. He’s a charismatic but impulsive politician whose frat boy behaviour just cost him an election. She’s an up-and-coming ballerina with a wild side. It’s love at first sight for both of them, but somehow, for years, they are kept apart. When they have a second chance meeting David is determined not to let her go, but the mysterious men from the Adjustment Bureau are just as determined to keep them apart. Will David be able to accept his predestined path and let her go, or will he try and create his own free will?
Much of the success of “The Adjustment Bureau” is due to its cast. Damon and Blunt have great chemistry and are completely believable as a couple. The sparks that fly off the pair as they meet for the second time on a New York City bus light up the screen and provide a very human edge to a weird but quite wonderful story. Without that the idea of a group of fedora-wearing men who control every aspect of humanity’s interactions would feel overreaching, but put a human face—well, two faces as appealing as Damon and Blunt’s—on it and you get a story that transcends genre.
Add to that some situational humor, some interesting supporting actors like John “Mad Men” Slattery, Anthony Mackie and Zod… er, I mean Terence Stamp in full-on metaphysical mode and you have a strange, but strangely appealing look at humanity
