“Life of Crime” is slickly made but blandish adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel “The Switch.” As usual Leonard’s bad guys are more interesting than the straights. The trick here is figuring out who the bad guys are.
Jennifer Aniston is Mickey, the trophy wife of the abusive and corrupt Frank Dawson. Outwardly they have the perfect marriage, but at home trouble is brewing. At home, at least when Frank isn’t off doing “business” at his hideaway in the Bahamas, tending to his girlfriend Melanie (Isla Fisher) and off shore bank accounts.
When two low-rent criminals, Louis (John Hawkes) and Ordell (Yasiin Bey, the artist formerly known as Mos Def) kidnap Mickey they hadn’t counted on Frank using their plan as a quickie divorce. No ransom, no alimony. Cue the double crosses and intrigue.
The major selling point here is the dialogue. Leonard was a master of the backroom criminal dialogue and here they have the good sense to keep most of his snappy words intact. Hawkes and Bey are particularly adept at delivering the goods, mouthing the words as if they were Leonard’s illegitimate children. Robbins is convincing as the sleazy land developer and Fisher is a femme fatale in the making. The weak link is Aniston, who seems like she might have calibrated her performance for the similarly plotted “Ruthless People” rather than a down-and-dirty crime drama.
Like many of Leonard’s stories “Life of Crime” tends to favor the characters who live on the down low. Hawkes and Bey—despite their association with a neo-Nazi (Mark Boone Jr.)—are treated as the sensitive heroes of the piece, while everyone else is playing some sort of game. It makes for interesting character dynamics but doesn’t sit as well here as it did in “Get Shorty” or “Out of Sight.”
In the new movie The Other Woman Mark King (Game of Thrones’s Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) tries to push infidelity to Tiger Woodsian heights by cheating on his wife (Leslie Mann) with multiple mistresses, including Carly and Amber (Cameron Diaz and Kate Upton). “We got played by the same guy,” says Carly.
“Getting played” in Hollywood movies dates back further than the invention of the ashleymadison website.
In 1960 the Jack Lemmon movie The Apartment tackled the subject of adultery. The film, about a lonely insurance company lackey who allows his bosses to use his apartment as a trysting spot in hopes that they will promote him, was a big hit, but also a controversial one. The Saturday Review called it “a dirty fairy tale” and co-star Fred McMurray says a woman on the street hit him with her purse, taking to him to task for making “a dirty, filthy movie.”
2005’s Derailed, stars Clive Owen as a married man who hooks up with Lucinda (Jennifer Aniston) after meeting her on a commuter train. In a hormone induced rush they decide to consummate their illicit affair at a seedy hotel, only to be interrupted by a burglar who robs them and sexually assaults Lucinda. Things spiral out of control as the robber blackmails the couple and seems to have an unquenchable thirst for Owen’s money.
Derailed is a cautionary tale about staying faithful to your spouse and never, ever renting rooms in sleazy hotels. Part Fatal Attraction, part Hitchcock thriller the movie stays on track through the set-up of the story, but as soon as the going gets rough the story, well… derails.
The most famous infidelity movie has to be 1987’s Fatal Attraction. It begins with Michael “I’m a married man!” Douglas having a fling with Glenn “I’m not gonna be ignored!” Close. When he tries to break off their affair, she becomes a lesson in why not to cheat on your wife.
The film was a sensation on release, inspiring a number of imitators including The Crush, Single White Female and a spoof called Fatal Instinct, and its most famous clip, the rabbit boiling on the stove, even inspired a phrase in the Urban Dictionary. According to the website, cook your rabbit “refers to the moment when someone goes over the edge in their obsession with another person.”
In an interview twenty year after the film’s release Close said, “”Men still come up to me and say, ‘You scared the [crap] out of me.’ Sometimes they say, ‘You saved my marriage.'”
I couple of years ago I had the soul crushing bit of bad luck to have to sit through movies with names like “Just Go With It,” “Friends with Benefits,” “No Strings Attached” and “New Year’s Eve.”
Romantic comedies. Rom coms. Whatever you want to call them, it was a punishing year spent watching good looking do the same thing over and over again—meet cute, fall in love, then fall out of love before walking off into the sunset, happily ever after.
Kathryn Heigl, Jennifer Aniston, Justin Timberlake, Kate Hudson and Chris Evans not only tested my love of movies, but my love of love in that grim year.
At the time I declared the rom com dead.
I suggested it could be resurrected if someone like Quentin Tarantino came along and completely reinvented the genre, but the chances of that happening were about as great as Kristen Bell finding herself alone as the end credits roll.
Then along came Joseph Gordon-Levitt and “Don Jon.” Tarantino must be too busy reinventing the grindhouse genre to bother with rom coms, but the former “Third Rock from the Sun” star isn’t.
Gordon-Levitt, who also wrote and directed, stars as Jon Martello, nicknamed Don Jon because he is the godfather of meeting women in bars. He and his pals (Rob Brown and Jeremy Luke) troll nightclubs in search of “dimes”—perfect tens—but in secret Jon prefers the company of his computer. Addicted to porn sites, he spends an inordinate amount of time surfing the net, looking for the perfect video to “lose himself in.”
He can’t even give the habit up after he meets Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson), a beautiful, gum snapping Jersey girl who thinks people who watch porn are sick. She encourages him to go back to school, to better himself, which he does, all the while watching porn.
The porn addiction (SPOILER ALERT) eventually drives a wedge between them, but he soon learns about true intimacy when he meets an older woman (Julianne Moore) at night school.
“Don Jon” is a rom com is disguised as a character study. Jon’s romantic dalliances are a context for his intimacy issues, but the romance comes in unexpected places, subverting the formula that makes movies like “Sweet Home Alabama” so predictable.
The comedy comes from the characters. Imagine all the guys from “Jersey Shore” rolled into one porn-obsessed lothario and you have Gordon-Levitt’s foul mouthed but spot on portrayal of Jon.
Johansson, who swallows her words in what may go down as one of the greatest Jersey accents ever to be captured on celluloid, is the movie’s McGuffin. She appears to be the girl of his dreams, but she is simply the physical embodiment of his bombshell porn dreams come to life. It’s because he doesn’t love her that he learns what love actually is.
Cudos also go to Tony Danza as Jon’s father. He’s a carbon copy of the hot headed horn dog, and living proof that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
“Don Jon” is a stylish, crude look at romance with loads of laughs. It shows off Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s promise as a filmmaker, but more importantly it reinvents the rom com in a fun—although vulgar—way.
Everyone has fantasizes about if not killing, then at least doing grievous bodily harm on an employer. The guys in “Horrible Bosses,” a new comedy starring Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis, actually do something about it.
Chances are you’ve never had a boss as mean, manipulating or just plain odd as the bosses in this movie. These people make Genghis Khan look like an equal opportunity employer. Bateman works for Kevin Spacey, a corporate shark not above exploiting his workers and then taking a promotion and pay raise for himself. The cast’s other Jason, Sedaris, is saddled with Colin Farrell an unscrupulous coke head with a bad attitude and an even worse comb over. Finally Day works for Jennifer Aniston, a dentist who uses laughing gas as a sex toy.
All are stuck in their jobs and fed up with the daily humiliation offered in their workplaces decide to do the only thing a reasonable person would do—kill their bosses.
OK, I was joking about the reasonable person part. Of course no reasonable person would try to hire a hit man on the Internet or break into their bosses homes looking for ways to kill them, but this is a comedy so we’ll accept that. Or will we? The movie stars off strong, funny and well paced but it’s central premise—let’s kill our bosses!—seems forced and it sucks some of the funny from the middle part of the movie.
There are laughs for sure, but the bungling of the crucial set up scene left me feeling like I was watching a funny enough movie marred with a silly premise.
The cast holds up well. The Jasons bring their usual brand of well practiced funny, and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” star Charlie Day is a funny find but thesis rises here are Farrell and Aniston. We’ve seen Spacey do this kind of thing before, the manic boss with no scruples (ie: “Swimming with Sharks”) but his cast mates are breaking some new ground. Farrell throws vanity out the window to play a drug addled loser with a penchant for cocaine and masseuses. He’s funny and edgy and does work here unlike we’ve seen before from him.
Aniston leaves her America’s Sweetheart persona behind to play a foul mouthed predator with a bad habit of using gas as foreplay. If this doesn’t wipe away any traces of Rachel left over from her TV work, I don’t know what will.
“Horrible Bosses” is a darkly funny employee revenge film that mostly works, I just wish the motivation felt more authentic.
He’s Just Not That Into You, a new romantic comedy with an all star cast, is being described as Love Actually meets Sex and the City. Not surprising since the book it was based on was inspired by a line from the latter. The book’s authors Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo’s eureka moment came when they saw the episode Pick-A-Little, Talk-A-Little. On the show Miranda (if you don’t know who that is, stop reading now) was telling Carrie’s boyfriend Berger about a date who declined her invitation to come up to her apartment. “I have an early meeting,” he said by way of an excuse. Berger analyzes the situation and concludes that “he’s just not that into you,” adding that “when a guy’s really into you, he’s coming upstairs, meeting or no meeting.” That one exchange inspired a self help book which became a bestseller and now a two hour movie starring Drew Barrymore and Jennifer Aniston.
The multi-pronged plot involves a seemingly unconnected group of Baltimore men and women who by the time the movie is over have swapped spit, broken up, gotten back together, dated, stalked and generally dabbled in all forms of human interaction. The unifying theme is that one person in each relationship is more “into” the other person than vice versa. According to director Ken Kwapis the relationship tango goes like this: “Character A is going out with character B, character B is really into Character A, but Character A is really into Character C who’s dating Character D…”
The first thing you’ll notice about He’s Just Not That Into You is that every good looking actor or actress in Hollywood is in this movie. It’s a panoply of blue eyes, shiny coiffed hair and jaw lines so sharp you could use them to cut granite and, of course they all live in beautifully designed homes and have cool jobs. So go see the movie for the clothes, the apartments, the general beauty of the cast, but don’t expect anything useful in terms of relationship advice.
Despite the movie’s source material and general self-help premise this is one of the most toxic looks at male – female relations since the Brittney Spears, Kevin Federline wedding video. The women are either portrayed as a.) incomplete without a man in their lives, b.) home wreckers, or c.) pathetically man crazy.
The men don’t fare much better. The guys are needy, cheaters, slobs or downright smarmy. One man, played by Bradley Cooper, has a slip of the tongue where he says “funeral” when the word he should have said was “wedding.” That’s about the extent of the character development on display here. (In case you don’t get it, he’s wondering if he ruined his life by marrying too young.) All in all despite their obvious genetic gifts it’s no wonder these characters are terminally single.
He’s Just Not That Into You makes the point that dating is hard and relationships are difficult and confusing. Well, thanks for the info. I get it. I got it after the first hour. By the end of the second hour of watching these hapless characters flop around from one warm body to the next I could only think of one sure fire way to test for a prospective mate. Make them watch He’s Just Not That Into You. If they want to leave midway through you may have found someone worth hanging out with.
With the release of “Just Go with It,” the latest Happy Madison comedy, Adam Sandler puts himself one step closer to Woody Allen territory.
But not in a good way.
He now joins the ranks of middle-aged movie stars who cast themselves opposite impossibly hot love interests. Watching the 44 year old star whooping it up with a 23 year-old swim-suit model put me in the mind of Woody’s endless attempts to recapture his long forgotten cinematic youth.
“Just Go with It” begins with one of those premises that only exists as a movie idea. Sandler plays Danny, a successful Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. Twenty years ago he learned the kind of valuable lesson that can only be taught in rom coms. That is, women cannot resist a man with a wedding ring and a story of martial woe. By day he reshapes rich people’s bodies with the help of his pretty assistant Katherine (Jennifer Aniston); by night he picks up young women in bars. Everything changes though when he meets Palmer (Brooklyn Decker), a va-va-voom twenty-something teacher. For the first time he meets a woman without using the ring trick, but when she discovers his prop wedding ring he fabricates a long story about being on the edge of a divorce. Of course she wants to meet the soon-to-be-ex to make sure the story is true. And then the fun begins.
Except that it doesn’t.
The movie never takes off. It feels less like a story and more like an endless stream of inappropriate remarks and IBS gags masquerading as jokes. That’s true of several of Sandler’s movies, but usually he‘s charming enough to carry the day and usually the movies aren’t this bad. This truly is a case of likeable actors making an unlikeable movie.
The film’s premise is odious enough, even for a rom com but worse than that is probably the most annoying kid’s performance ever—sorry Bailee Madison, but that Eliza Doolittle accent thing you do isn’t cute, it’s grating—and the comic stylings of Nick Swardson manage to make things even less amusing than they already were.
The film’s nadir is a desperately unfunny scene in a nightclub that will make you long for the days when Adam Sandler got into fist fights with Bob Barker and battled a cursive problem.
On the plus side there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from Heidi Montag which suggests maybe she does have a sense of humor about her plastic surgery woes. Also former swim suit model Brooklyn Decker adds some eye candy, (but acts about as well as you would imagine a swim suit model would act), the “Ha-wow-ee” setting is nice and boomers may enjoy the all-Sting soundtrack but that’s about it.
Despite its beautiful features—both location and cast—“Just Go with It” should be, more truthfully, titled “Just Go Away From It.”
Just when I was ready to declare the romantic comedy genre dead along comes a movie that makes believe that there is some life left in the old boy-meets-girl storyline. “The Switch”, a new rom com starring Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman as best friends who—now here’s a surprise—might have unresolved feelings for one another doesn’t exactly cover new ground, but it covers the old ground in a pleasing, interesting way. Dear friends, it’s not time to write that eulogy just yet.
At the beginning of the movie Wally (Bateman) is described as a beady eyed manboy. That’s a pretty apt description, although it leaves out insecure, hypochondriac and loner. His best friend Kassie (Aniston) is a network television producer with “gorgeous cervical mucus” desperate to have a baby, even though she is single with no prospects of a boyfriend, let alone husband. Wally offers his “services” but she declines. “She wouldn’t know good sperm if it slapped her in the face,” offers Jeff Goldblum, Wally’s pal from work. She eventually settles on Roland, a married, but genetically blessed donor. On the night of the artificial insemination Wally, who doesn’t approve of the whole thing gets black out drunk and makes a switch. Cut to seven years later. Kassie and son Sebastian (Thomas Robinson) return to New York after living in Minnesota. Wally’s memories of that night are foggy at best, but the more time he spends with Sebastian the more he is convinced he is the father. The problem is Kassie is more interested in striking up a relationship with Roland, the man she believes is the boy’s biological or “seed” dad.
“The Switch” has much in common with other romantic comedies. It shares same kind of predictable plot, the New York setting so crucial to rom coms and the convention of the wacky friend—Jeff Goldblum is a wild eccentric presence here, but makes it worth staying to the end to hear a snippet of his bebop piano version of Happy Birthday.
What’s missing is the shiny gloss of most other romantic comedies. Despite the kind of outlandish plot “The Switch” feels like maybe there are actually real emotions involved instead of the usual rom com faux feelings. For instance in the final reveal—no spoilers here, but you can likely guess what it is—there is no sappy music trying to manipulate us into feeling a certain way. Instead there are believable characters in a slightly unreal situation behaving the way real people might. The tears look genuine and unlike most romantic comedies, they aren’t always tears of joy. Call it an art house rom com if you like but if all romantic comedies were this good the idea of going to see people fall in love at the movies wouldn’t be so odious.
This is considerably more charming than say, “The Back Up Plan,” the JLo movie from earlier this year that covered some of the same ground as “The Switch” and it is mostly because of the actors. Aniston and Bateman are compelling and watchable but it is Sebastian (played at different ages by brothers Thomas and Bryce Robinson) who is the bow on the package. His (their?) deadpan performance is both hilarious and touching.
“The Switch” is much better than it has to be and gives me hope that romance isn’t dead in Hollywood.
This new film starring Clive Owen—the man who should have been James Bond—and Jennifer Aniston is a cautionary tale about staying faithful to your spouse and never, ever renting rooms in sleazy hotels. Part Fatal Attraction, part Hitchcock thriller Derailed stays on track through the set-up of the story, but as soon as the going gets rough the story, well, derails.
Owen plays a family man saddled with troubles at work and at home who hooks up with Lucinda, played by Jennifer Aniston, after meeting her on a commuter train. In a hormone induced rush they decide to consummate their illicit affair at a seedy hotel, only to be interrupted by a burglar who robs them and sexually assaults Lucinda. Things spiral out of control as the robber blackmails the couple and seems to have an unquenchable thirst for Owen’s money.
It wouldn’t be fair to reveal any more about the plot, but suffice to say it tries to keep the viewer of balance until the closing moments of the movie. The trouble is the script telegraphs most of the story’s surprises, providing a virtual roadmap for all the twists and turns that lay ahead. The other problem is the casting of the leads. Owen and Aniston are miscast as a wimpy, ineffectual man and femme fatale respectively. Owen, whose hangdog look perfectly captures the despair his character feels in his complicated home life, is simply too charismatic to play a believable dumb schmuck and Aniston, who hasn’t been in a thriller since 1993’s Leprechaun, has an innate sweetness that seems at odds with her character.
In The Bounty Hunter, Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler work on the borders of their comfort zones. Butler is the titular character, a former cop so down on his luck he takes a gig tracking down his ex-wife (and alleged real-life girlfriend) Aniston, for a payday of $5,000.
“I felt this was a different role for her,” says Butler of his co-star. “She is the Queen of Comedy and done a lot of romantic comedies, but this doesn’t feel like a romantic comedy. It feels like an action driven comedy. She was playing a much bitchier, hard edged character than I think anyone has ever seen her do before and for me that is exciting.”
Aniston, best known as Rachel from Friends, or Brad Pitt’s ex wife, depending on your appetite for the tabloids, says she was attracted to the role because “it wasn’t your traditional run of the mill girl meets guy, guy meets girl.”
“It is an action comedy and a road movie with a little romance in there and a little suspense,” she said recently in a sit-down with Metro in New York City.
She was, however, taken by surprise by the physical demands of the production. Doing stunts in four inch heels isn’t as easy as it looks.
“Your adrenaline is going and you’re not really feeling it at the moment and then I’d get home and notice a bruise here and a callous here,” said Aniston, who adds she would consider other action roles in future. “Then there were the handcuffs. Try wearing those, attached to a car door for three days. Not fun.”
For Butler, a Scottish heartthrob best known for his sculpted abs and roles in violent films like 300, the challenge wasn’t the physical side, but breaking the action star stereotype.
“My break in America was Attila the Hun, which went into Time Line, Tomb Raider, Reign of Fire and at that point I loved doing that, but it’s not like when you are still making your way in the business that people go, ‘Tomb Raider, Oh my God, the guy should be in a comedy.’ I was waiting for the right opportunity. I thought I don’t want to dive in with something crappy. I wanted to wait until I’m lucky enough to get the right script that felt right.”
