Vin Diesel is a Witch Hunter in the appropriately named “The Last Witch Hunter,” Christopher Plummer hunts Nazis in “Remember,” while Brie Larson searches for freedom in “Room” and Bill Murray looks for redemption in “Rock the Kasbah.” Richard reviews them all with “Canada AM” host Beverly Thomson.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
There haven’t been many laughs coming out of Afghanistan lately and I’m sad to report the new Bill Murray comedy, “Rock the Kasbah,” doesn’t rectify that situation.
Murray plays Richie Lanz, a rock ‘n’ roll manager who’s been around so long he worked with Eddie Money back when he was still known as Eddie Mahoney. Based out of a dowdy home office in Van Nuys, California, he only has one real client, cover band singer Ronnie (Zooey Deschanel). When the offer of a USO tour of Afghanistan pops up he jumps at the chance but almost as soon as they land Ronnie splits, taking Richie’s cash and passport.
Stranded, he parties with American gun runners, the self titled Ammo Kings of Kabul (Scott Caan & Danny McBride), hangs out with a hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold (Kate Hudson) and before finally hiring a mercenary named Bombay Brian (Bruce Willis) to smuggle him out of the country.
To raise Bombay’s fee he agrees to smuggle ammunition into the rural Paktia province. When things go wrong he winds up in a small village where he hears the beautiful voice of Salima (Leem Lubany), an Afghan girl who sings Cat Stevens’ songs in secret. Always a hustler, Richie isn’t going to let the lack of credentials stop him from plying his trade. Sensing her talent he takes her on, guiding her through to the top of Afghan Star, an American Idol knock-off.
Everybody loves Bill Murray. That is a fact. Unarguable. He has woven himself into the fabric of popular culture both on screen and off. If he’s not opening a movie he’s going viral, getting videoed at some random dude’s bachelor party providing marital advice. He’s everywhere and is usually a welcome presence but lately I’ve begun to feel that his career is in a bit of a “Groundhog Day” loop. Time after time he has returned to a familiar formula: crabby guy alienates everyone around him only to have a warm and cuddly epiphany by the time the credits role. Frank Cross, Phil Connors, Vincent MacKenna or Richie Lanz, the character names change but their journeys are essentially the same.
Normally audiences don’t care, Murray is such an icon it’s enough for him to simply show up and snark his way through a few funny lines and VIOLA! instant classic. It’s a crowd-pleasing recipe but it runs dry in “Rock the Kasbah.” Strapped with an improbable and occasionally insulting premise (although it is VERY loosely based on the true story of Setara Hussainzada) and a third act twist into misplaced social commentary Murray’s charm falls flat. With his message of tolerance director Barry Levinson certainly has his heart in the right place but the movie is off key and unfunny.
In a recent interview Mel Gibson said he’s out of the business of financing his own films because, “I’m not a fool.”
Neither is Zach Braff.
Both must be worth big bucks—Gibson from the movies, Braff from starring on 175 episodes of “Scrubs”—and could likely use some of their own capital to make their own movies but Gibson says he’s out of the game completely while Braff used the popular crowd sourcing site Kickstarter to raise money for his latest.
“Wish I Was Here” is part of the small—but growing—trend of celebrity driven films paid for by contributions from the general public. The almost-mid-life crisis story raised $2 million in just forty eight hours (ultimately procuring $3.1 million of a reported $5.5 million budget), attracted an all-star cast—Kate Hudson, “Frozen’s” Josh Gad, Mandy Patinkin and “The Big Bang Theory’s” Jim Parson—and some backlash from critics who felt that crowdsourcing should be left for artists who aren’t also starring in giant Disney movies.
Fact is, “Wish I Was Here’s” backstory is a bit more interesting than the story on the screen.
Braff plays Aidan, an underemployed actor whose life is unraveling. His kids are about to be kicked out of Hebrew school because his father (Patinkin), who has been paying the bills, has been diagnosed with cancer and can no longer afford the monthly payment. His wife Sarah (Hudson) is supportive of his acting dream but nearing the end of her tether. Brother Noah (Gadd) prefers cos play over actual emotions and his two kids (Joey King and Pierce Gagnon) are maturing faster than he is.
“Wish I Was Here” plays like two movies. The first forty-five minutes is a cleverly written comedic look at Aidan as a manboy with far more responsibility than he can handle. It’s ripe with gentle character based laughs that emerge from the situations and don’t feel forced.
It’s only in the second half when Braff (who co-wrote the script with his brother Adam) allows sentiment to get in the way of the movie’s momentum. Despite Patinkin’s line, “Eventually when things get tragic enough they circle back to comedy,” the final forty-five minutes, which deal with the loss of Aidan’s father, takes a darker tone. That’s OK, life sometimes changes on a dime, but the cleverness of the set-up is replaced with mawkishness.
Sometimes it works. Hudson’s heartfelt “tell your sons you love them” speech to her-father-in-law is shot simply with lingering close-ups on the actor’s faces. The scene has an intimate in-the-moment feel and is very moving.
Less so is Gadd’s big moment, (VERY MILD SPOILER ALERT), a Comic Con sequence that is a bit too quirky to fit the tone of the film that surrounds it.
By the end credits the movie worked for me more often than not, but I wished that there were fewer clunky moments. For every scene that rings emotionally true—and there are quite a few of them—there is another that feels forced. The beauty of “Wish I Was Here” lies in the former, and certainly not in the passages that feel left over from another, lesser quirky indie comedy.
“They Came Together,” a new satire starring Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler, is the last romantic comedy you’ll ever need to see. A pastiche of every rom com cliché, it’s a movie about sex and the city. Or maybe about what women want. Or perhaps it’s about friends with benefits. Actually, it’s about love, actually. Imagine one part “Airplane” and one part of every Kate Hudson romance and you get the idea.
Heading up a who’s who of a comedy cast, Rudd and Poehler play Joel and Molly, an unlikely couple who fall in love at first sight. He’s an executive at a candy company, she runs an independent confectionary shop called the Upper Sweet Side.
His company is trying to drive her store out of business so they can control NYC’s candy lucrative market, but despite their differences they find some common ground. “You like fiction books, too? No way!”
They also do all the things that people in rom coms do, but with a twist. In the standard “What am I going to wear montage” Molly ends up trying on a dozen outfits before deciding on a suit of armor. Joel sprints to declare his love for Molly only to wind up in a sword fight with her jealous ex-husband (an unexpected, but hilarious Michael Shannon). Meeting her parents takes a turn when they are revealed to be white supremacists there’s even the mandatory Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year’s montage. The only thing missing is Julia Roberts’s trademark guffaw.
Bookending the whole thing is a dinner conversation where Joel and Molly describe how they met to friends Karen (Ellie Kemper) and Kyle (Bill Hader).
Poking fun at romantic comedies is easy but for the most part “They Came Together” does it well. It hits a bull’s eye time after time with the tropes plucked from rom coms but presented with a spin. For instance, Joel plays basketball with his pals, each of whom gives him romantic advice, but none have names, they are simply introduced by the rom com trope they represent.
When “They Came Together” riffs on the absurdities of the genre it works, but too often it winks at the camera and becomes a little too self aware. With their looks and chemistry, Rudd and Poehler are rom com ready, but occasionally their eagerness to sell the joke gets in the way of letting the laughs and the parody happen naturally.
Ultimately, for all its insight and style—pitch perfect rom com soft lighting and pop soundtrack—“They Came Together” is stretched a little thin at feature length. As a skit or a short film it might have been a cutting parody of an over-worked genre. At eighty-three minutes it is harder to love.
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.
Fool’s Gold is a microcosm of star Matthew McConaughey’s career. His “Sexiest Man Alive” good looks make him a natural for romantic comedy, while his Greek God physique lends itself to action adventure roles. He done both before so Fool’s Gold should be a welcome hybrid of his particular skills. Unfortunately the combo of having to look good while romancing Kate Hudson and doing dangerous looking stunts is too much of a good McConaughey thing.
He stars as Ben Finnegan, professional beach bum and treasure hunter fixated on finding 40 chests of sunken treasure lost in 1714 off the coast of Florida. In the search for the booty he loses his wife Tess (Kate Hudson), their boat, and, by the time they actually start to search for the treasure, our attention.
The movie needs a treasure map of its own to find its way through the silly plot involving billionaire Nigel Honeycutt (Donald Sutherland), his celebutante daughter, Gemma (Alexis Dziena), a backer in the form of a violent rap star (Kevin Hart) and a rival treasure seeker with a preposterous Southern accent named Moe (Ray Winstone). Even these good actors can’t make this wannabe screwball comedy work.
Predictable in the extreme, with ham fisted direction, clumsily staged action sequences and a characterization of an African American rapper that crosses the line from stereotyping into something bordering on racism, Fool’s Gold takes a premise that could’ve worked—good looking people in bathing suits searching for gold in against a backdrop of sun and fun—and bungles it completely. Not even legendary treasure hunter Indiana Jones could find a good movie buried under this mess.
With its fabulous scenery—set in Florida it was actually shot in Australia—and a beautiful yacht where a good chunk of the action happens, Fool’s Gold looks like one of those movies that was actually much more fun for the cast to shoot than it is for the audience to watch.
Trust me, there’s no treasure to be found anywhere in this movie.
On a recent episode of 30 Rock, Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) joked that he made a North Korean propaganda film directed by Kim Jong-Il rather than appear in a Kate Hudson film. It was a funny joke on a show known for its irreverent take on celebrities, but like all good jokes there’s a hint of truth to it.
Of course Hudson is still a popular actress; capable of headlining any Hollywood rom-com, but this is more a question of what might have been.
How did an Oscar nominated actress who once said, “I’m not a big fan of romantic comedies,” end up with a CV littered with toxic titles like Fool’s Gold, My Best Friend’s Girl and Bride Wars?
Sure, she has a sunny smile and girl-next-door appeal, but anyone who saw her sweet and wonderful turn as Penny Lane in Almost Famous rues the day she decided to aim for the MTV Best Kiss Awards rather than Academy Awards. Surely she can do more than stand on a beach while a shirtless Matthew McConaughey runs into her open arms.
It’s not all bad news in Kate’s career, however. This weekend she is firmly rooted in rom-com land with Something Borrowed, the kind of fluffy confection she specializes in, but lately there have been signs that she’s making some effort to stretch her comfort zone.
Cinema Italiano, her exuberantly fluffy all-singing-all-dancing tribute to 1960’s pop music and style, was one of the best things about Nine, the musical version of Federico Fellini’s classic 8 ½, and The Killer Inside Me, a violent, hardboiled crime story are both steps in the right direction, but they’re baby steps.
I want to be a Kate Hudson fan. I really do. But I need convincing that she wants me to be a fan and taking the easy route isn’t going to do that. Even her old co-star Matthew McConaughey has smartened up and realized that rom-coms are a faulty foundation to build a career on. His last film, the drama The Lincoln Lawyer, earned him the best reviews and most notice of his recent career.
I’d like to see Kate stretch in that way. Watch Almost Famous again and see the heartbreaking pathos she brings to every frame of that movie.
That’s the stuff careers and legends are built on and she has the talent and the know-how to give us more of that.
Since the beginning of filmed entertainment, 25,367 weddings have been portrayed on the big screen.
OK, I just made that number up; it’s probably way more than that. It seems the only thing people enjoy more than going to a wedding is seeing a wedding on the big screen. At least that’s what the producers of this weekend’s Bride Wars are banking on.
Weddings are a movie staple and as Katrina Onstadt pointed out on cbc.ca, they can define the tone of the whole film. “(A) movie that starts with a wedding will always be gloomier than that which ends with one” she wrote.
It’s an astute observation. Comedies tend to build up to the big ceremony while dramas often use the walk down the aisle as a starting point for conflict. The elaborate wedding sequence that kicks off The Deer Hunter is the opening salvo in a movie Roger Ebert called “a progression from a wedding to a funeral.” Once again, the going gets grim after the I dos.
Probably the most famous wedding in film history, though, is one that never gets to the vows. The wedding scene at the end of The Graduate is a classic but the scenes that make it memorable weren’t shot as originally planned.
Director Mike Nichols originally intended for Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) to loudly bang on the church windows to disrupt the wedding between his love, Elaine (Katharine Ross), and her intended, but in rehearsal the windows rattled so ominously someone panicked and yelled, “Everybody out!” Hoffman suggested spreading his arms out and cautiously tapping on the glass with open hands. “The clincher,” Hoffman said, “was the reviews all saying this was Benjamin’s Christ moment. It was a fix. That’s all it was.”
In a subtler, but equally memorable, moment, Elaine and Benjamin dash from the church, laughing, fleeing convention toward an unsure future. Then, suddenly, they stop laughing as though the consequences of their actions have just sunk in. It’s a powerful moment that caps a terrific movie, but again it wasn’t planned. As they shot the scene Nichols was so overbearing the two actors instinctively clammed up and sober expressions appeared on their faces. In post-production, Nichols liked their transition from cocky confidence to uncertainty so much he kept it in.
Ironically, when the film opened in Portugal censors felt the ending set a bad example for kids and clipped the last few minutes. That version ended with Elaine obeying her parents and marrying the blonde frat boy. Portuguese audiences may have missed the whole point of the movie, but at least were treated to the thing most paid to see — a big wedding scene.
The only thing more popular than going to a wedding is going to see a wedding on the big screen. My Big Fat Greek Wedding is one of the highest grossing independent films ever and movies like The Wedding Singer, Father of the Bride and Four Weddings and a Funeral have ridden the bridal train all the way to the top of the box office. This weekend 20th Century Fox is hoping that a combination of bridal bouquets and star power will pack ‘em in to see Bride Wars, a new comedy starring Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway.
They play Liv and Emma, childhood friends with the shared fantasy of June weddings at The Plaza Hotel. When it comes time to tie the knot with their respective fiancées it looks as though that dream will finally come true. Dates are booked, dresses are purchased and flowers ordered. Everything is perfect until a scheduling error is discovered—their wedding dates had been booked for the same day—and one of them must change to another venue. When neither is willing to move dirty nuptial tricks ensue and the bride wars begin.
Bride Wars is like an extended episode of Bridezillas with more appealing leads. The old cliché about temperamental brides is amplified by a thousand, pushing the limits of how far brides will go to make sure their perfect days is, in fact perfect.
Even though it is set in a world were being engaged is the most important thing in a woman’s life—just one of many old fashioned ideas wedged into the script—the movie isn’t really about weddings, or the horrible things these two do to one another. It’s actually about friendship and finding a person who will always love you no matter what. It’s a good thing there’s some weightier subtext here because the comedy side of things pretty much falls flat.
Kate Hudson can do this sort of material in her sleep, and brings some energy and charm to the role but little else. Candice Bergen continues her winning ways as a supporting actor who steals every scene she’s in. As in The Women and Sex and the City she provides the film’s best line—it begins with, “A wedding marks the first day of the rest of your life… you have been dead until now…”—and generally shows up the younger actors in every scene.
As for Anne Hathaway, Bride Wars feels like a giant step backward after her delicate and layered performance in Rachel Getting Married. I know girls just wanna have fun, and after serious turns in Rachel and the psychological thriller Passengers she perhaps was looking to hone her comedy chops, but Bride Wars plays along the same lines as a sitcom and we’ve simply come to expect more from her.
There is even some talk in the blogosphere that this stale performance could actually harm her chances with Oscar voters à la the Eddie Murphy Norbit snafu. Many blame his failure to take home an Oscar for his work in Dreamgirls on Norbit, which was released the same weekend that many voters were filling out their ballots. Let’s hope the Academy gets it right this time and chooses to celebrate Hathaway’s star turn in Rachel and not punish her for taking on thoroughly average work like Bride Wars.
Bride Wars marks the beginning of the January doldrums. After an exciting movie season that saw the release of interesting movies like The Wrestler it’s always a bit of a slap in the face when the b-material gets dumped into theatres. Bride Wars is little more than a sitcom premise stretched to feature length.
