In recent years the R-rated comedy has fallen out of favor, pushed out of movie theatres by hunky but fully clothed, spandex-clad superheroes. In her new movie, Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence attempts to bring soft-core comedy and innuendo back to the big screen with “No Hard Feelings,” a throwback to a time before #MeToo when raunchy romps like “American Pie” and “Not Another Teen Movie” bridged the gap between mainstream movies and stag films.
Lawrence plays Montauk, Long Island Uber driver Maddie, a young woman with only a few dollars in her bank account and even fewer options to earn more after her vehicle gets repossessed. “I’m an Uber driver and I don’t have a car,” she says. “I’m going to lose my house.”
With no job and no prospects, she answers a Craigslist ad posted by Laird (Matthew Broderick) and Allison (Laura Benanti), the wealthy, eccentric helicopter parents of withdrawn nineteen-year-old Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). The overbearing couple, who keep track of their kid via GPS on his phone, fear he is too withdrawn and ready to attend Princeton University in the fall. “He doesn’t come out of his room,” says Laird. “He doesn’t talk to girls. He doesn’t drink.”
The deal is simple: If Maddie will date Percy, and bring him out of his shell, they’ll give her an old Buick they haven’t driven in years.
“So, when you say ‘date him,’” Maddie asks, “do you mean ‘date him’ or ‘date him’?”
“Date him,” Laird says, “date him hard.”
“I’ll date his brains out,” she promises.
The plan doesn’t get off to a promising start after Percy, fearing that Maddie’s advances are actually a kidnapping attempt, pepper sprays her. As time passes, however, Maddie and Percy’s friendship goes beyond contractual.
“No Hard Feelings” aims to find a sweet spot between racy comedy and heartfelt friendship story and misses the mark on both counts. The silly premise dampens whatever authentic moments Lawrence teases out of the bland script, and the metaphors—i.e.: the old Buick may be broken down, but there’s nothing wrong with it, or Maddie, that a bit of love and tenderness can’t fix—are so heavy handed, they flatten out whatever sincerity is lurking in the shadows.
Lawrence and Feldman are both better than the material, and what success, and laughs, the film has are owed to their performances. As the movie struggles to create a feel-good vibe in the last reel, Lawrence’s considerable charisma comes in handy, but the predictable and ultimately contrived story feels outdated and overdone.
If nothing else the new animated film “Wonder Park” will teach kids how to use and possibly overuse the word “splendiferous.” Good lessons on self reliance and facing fears abound, but “splendiferous” appears so many times it’s as if the screenwriters earned a bonus every time a character utters it.
Precocious ten-year old June (Brianna Denski) spends most of her days hanging out in a world of imagination. Encouraged by her loving mother (Jennifer Garner), June is a mini P.T. Barnum, inventing a fantasy theme park, Wonderland, “the most splendiferous park ever,” using nothing but bendy-straws, stuffed animals like her monkey Peanut and her creativity.
When her mother falls ill and has to be hospitalized June puts away childish things, putting Peanut and all of Wonderland into boxes. Looking after her father she becomes obsessed with running the house. Concerned he cannot survive without her, she plays hooky from math camp, creating a diversion so she can get of the bus and cut through the woods to get home. On the way she discovers a discarded amusement park ride that transports her into the land of her imagination.
But things aren’t quite how she imagined them. Her beloved stuffed animal mascots are on the run from hoards of chimpanzombies determined to destroy the park. As the architect of the park her imagination will be put to the test as she searches for a way to restore harmony to her beloved Wonderland.
Even at just one hour and twenty-six minutes “Wonder Park” feels padded. Music montages and several frenetic action scenes stretch the story to feature length but there is much to like nonetheless. Good messages about the power of imagination to help work through life’s challenging moments and self-belief are sincere and powerful—“There is wonder in all of us!”—but it is the film’s willingness to expand beyond the eye-distracting action scenes into more personal territory that earns it a recommend.
The mother’s illness sub-plot is handled subtly and carefully but drives the entire story. “I got so scared of losing her,” June says, “that I lost myself.” It’s poignant and more heart-tugging than you might expect from a movie featuring a talking porcupine (John Oliver, doing some fun voice work).
“Wonder Park” is a movie that respects its audience. That understands children can handle complex ideas about real life and for that, it is splendiferous.
To hear Hollywood legendary Warren Beatty tell it, casting Lily Collins as the lead of his latest film happened in a blink.
The movie is Rules Don’t Apply, a nostalgic look at an aspiring actress, her limo driver boyfriend and Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire they both work for. There were no formal auditions for the film, just Beatty’s gut instinct and “the blink.”
“I believe very much in what I call the blink,” says Beatty. “That is the superiority of the unconscious knowledge as compared to conscious knowledge. The knowledge that when we sit and we really give it some thought, the thought we feel it is due. That thought can be misleading when we could have trusted our initial instinct, the blink. I think the unconscious has a lot more intelligence in it than the conscious.
“It was a blink with Lily. I can only say I loved the way she looked. I loved the way she sounded. I loved the way she talked. There was an integrity about her I felt I could believe in this circumstance and at the same time she looked like someone to me who Hollywood would want to exploit.”
Collins plays Marla Mabrey, wannabe movie star and “devout Baptist beauty queen from Virginia.” On the surface the twenty-seven-year-old doesn’t have a great deal in common with her on-screen character but the actress says she understood Marla immediately.
“I could relate to it,” she says. “Starting out acting in Hollywood, very wide eyed, innocent, naïve. Wanting to please everyone. Having my mom there with me. Marla was very adamant and passionate, determined and steadfast. All these things I think I was when I started.”
The actress, who has three movies lined up for next year including Okja with Jake Gyllenhaal and To the Bone with Keanu Reeves, calls working with Beatty a master class in acting. She even kept a journal on set. “I have all these tidbits of information. Things I witnessed that I can now draw on. I would have been a fool not to.”
In particular Beatty taught the star how to think differently about breaking down a script.
“Whenever we would do a scene he kept saying, ‘What are you doing? What is your action? What is your intention?’ At the beginning I read the script as someone who had never broken it down in the way he had, and I’d be like, ‘Right now she’s really emotional. She’s sad. She misses her mom.’ He’d say, ‘Show me what that looks like.’ I can’t because that is an adjective. ‘OK, put it into words. Put it into a verb.’ As soon as I started breaking down a scene based on verbs, it didn’t matter if I cried when it said ‘Marla cries,” because as long as my intention was the same as what her intention was, whatever naturally occurred, occurred. Nothing was fake. Nothing was put on. I think audiences are smart, they can tell. If something seems fake or put on they will not associate with it.
“I soaked in everything,” she says. “Even when I was tired I subconsciously I soaked in everything because I thought, ‘It’s a joy and an honour to be in this situation.’ He could have just picked someone else so I need to take in everything I can.”
“Rules Don’t Apply” star and director Warren Beatty wants you to know that his latest film is not a biopic of Howard Hughes. The legendary Hollywood figure—Beatty not Hughes, although the term could ply to either—has long wanted to make a movie about the reclusive billionaire but this isn’t it. Instead it is a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of 1950s Tinsel Town in which Hughes is not the star, just the most interesting character.
Lily Collins plays Marla Mabrey, a Southern Baptist girl with dreams of being a Hollywood star. A contract with Hughes’ RKO Pictures got her halfway there, now she needs to meet Hughes (Beatty) and get a part. Until then Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich), a personal chauffeur assigned by RKO escorts her around town to make sure she stays out of trouble. “If you don’t drive them, you can’t keep your eye on them.”
Romance soon blooms, leaving the two in a perilous spot as both their contract stipulate that they won’t become involved with members of the extended Hughes corporate family.
Meanwhile Hughes remains an elusive, shadowy figure in Marla’s life. The eccentric businessman is juggling dozens of starlets, who he has stashed all over town, some bankers with $400 million in ready cash and a hostile takeover by his business partners. Hughes’s antics and obsessions with everything from the Spruce Goose to Baskin-Robbins’ banana-nut ice cream, keep the young lovers separated but will the oddball’s behaviour change their lives?
“Rules Don’t Apply” isn’t a biopic—the movie telegraphs this with an opening quote from Hughes: “Never check an interesting fact”—or a farce or, strictly a romantic comedy. For better and for worse it is its own thing, a nostalgic Warren Beatty film that basks in the glow of old Hollywood courtesy of DP Caleb Deschanel and terrific costume and set design. As a look back to what Los Angeles was like when Beatty first hit town it’s an engaging slice of ephemera. Unfortunately, the story and the characters are slightly less engaging.
Collins and Ehrenreich are charismatic, interesting actors who make the most of the moments offered them. Trouble is, the film too often shifts focus. Is it the story of Marla’s ambition, of Frank’s potential get rich quick scheme, or Hughes’s foibles? It’s all that and feels cluttered, as though not all the moving parts are necessary to keep the movie’s engine in gear. It never quite works up the head of steam it needs to commit fully to its farce DNA, but when it works it works very well.
In front of the camera Beatty shines as Hughes, reminding us why he became a movie star in the first place. Confident and bold this is a much different Hughes than we saw in “The Aviator.” Beatty’s take on the character is a broad, often comedic, occasionally tragic look at a man trying to stop both his personal and professional life from unravelling.
Behind the camera Beatty gives us moments to savour. When Marla’s mom (Annette Bening) announces they must leave Hollywood, her daughter hugs her and sweetly says, “I’ll help you pack.” It’s a sly bit of character work, simply staged that tells us that Marla has the strength to cut her mother loose in pursuit of her dream.
“Rules Don’t Apply” is a handsome movie that lives up to its name. The strict rules of romantic comedy, drama and biography don’t apply here. It’s a wistful confection, sometimes frothy, sometimes idiosyncratic, that feels like it might have sprung from the era it portrays.
Richard is mentioned in the Toronto Star article “Warren Beatty remains precise and in control about all things, especially sex” by Peter Howell. Read the whole thing HERE!
It’s re-make a rama at the multi-plex this week. Kong is still doing big business and two other retreads are joining it on theatre marquees. The Producers started life as a very funny film by Mel Brooks starring Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel. Thirty years later a musical version of the story of the worst play ever mounted on the Great White Way helped revitalize the real-life Broadway. Unfortunately I don’t think the film version of The Producers will work the same magic in movie theatres and reverse the slump that theatres chains have been experiencing this year.
Fans of the stage version of The Producers will be pleased to have a faithful adaptation of the musical, starring Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick and several of the original Broadway cast, but stage and film are two different mediums, a fact that seems to be lost on director Susan Stroman. As a choreographer Stroman has a shelf full of Tony awards and has worked at the very highest levels on Broadway. As a film director she is a great choreographer. Her film version of the play feels like she simply pointed a camera at the stage and yelled action. There is little effort made to open the film up and take it outside the proscenium arch. When the movie does stray from the box-like confines of the stage we get our best sequences—a chorus line of elderly women on walkers in Central Park and a lavish production number for Broderick’s “I Want to be a Producer” number.
Lane and Broderick bring considerable charm and energy to their roles, but it feels like they are playing to the back of the house rather than to a camera. Ironically, The Producers, a story so rooted in the tradition of Broadway, would have benefited from a more Hollywood treatment.
Rodents have a long distinguished history on the big screen. There’s Ben, the leader of a pack of vicious killer rats who inspired the 1972 movie of the same name, Stuart Little an orphaned mouse voiced by Michael J. Fox, and written by Oscar nominee M. Night Shyamalan in one of his less sinister moods. Ratatouille starring Remy the gourmet rat, Ron Weasley’s Scabbers the rat from the Harry Potter movies, The Rescuers’s Bianca and Bernard voiced by Eva Gabor and Bob Newhart and Master Splinter the radical rat who is also the father figure to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. One rodent, Mickey Mouse even won an Academy Award back in 1932. Add to that list Despereaux, a big eared mouse with even bigger aspirations in The Tale of Despereaux a new animated film starring Matthew Broderick and Dustin Hoffman.
The movie, based on the Newbery Medal winning series of children’s book by Kate DiCamillo, begins its convoluted story with Roscuro (Dustin Hoffman) a charming merchant marine rat who inadvertently scares the Queen of Dor to death. After the King banishes rats from the kingdom forever he is cast out to the underworld of Ratland. Meanwhile the movie’s hero, a misfit mouse with huge ears named Despereaux (Matthew Broderick) has also been expelled from his home only to end up in the dungeon of Dor castle. As he schemes to escape his underlying qualities of chivalry and loyalty emerge and his fate becomes intertwined with that of Roscuro, a bumbling servant girl (Tracey Ullman) and the castle’s princess (Emma Watson).
That’s the Reader’s Digest version of the story. It’s amazing how many plot points the filmmaker’s were able to cram into Despereaux’s 90 minute running time. The comings-and-goings of all the characters may confuse younger viewers but shouldn’t challenge 8-12 year old kids. I think, though, that most children regardless of age will be taken with the characters and the elegant animation.
Despereaux doesn’t feel like other recent animated hits like Shrek, which relies on pop culture references as a source of humor or even the brilliant WALL-E with its environmental message. Despereaux is more old fashioned than that; more like a “Once upon a time” Grimm’s fairy tale. The humor in the film comes from the characters and the situations, not belch jokes or double entendres.
Layer on top of that uniformly excellent voice work from an all-star cast which includes Matthew Broderick, Emma Watson, Dustin Hoffman, Tracey Ullman, Sigourney Weaver, William H. Macy Kevin Kline and Stanley Tucci with important messages about being yourself and redemption and you have, in a season filled with heavy weight dramas for adults like Revolutionary Road and Doubt, one of the few all-ages movies for the entire family.
To fully appreciate WarGames, the Matthew Broderick film now celebrating its 25th anniversary with a special edition DVD, you have to cast your mind back to a time before computers dominated everyone’s work space. It’s a Cold War thriller about a teenager who unknowingly kicks off the countdown to World War III by playing a computer game. Made at a time when computers were still perceived as strange, high tech gizmos it played on people’s distrust of technology and perceived Russian threat.
These days the movie plays like The Brat Pack Meets Dr. Strangelove. It remains an engaging thriller, well constructed and acted, but the technology involved now looks so out of date, so hopelessly archaic it harkens back to a time when calculators were considered high tech.
It all looks terribly dated but director John Badham sticks to a traditional and timeless thriller set up, concentrating on character rather than the technology. It’s a smart approach that keeps the intrigue front-and-center, making the ancient looking computers secondary to the overall story. This focus on plot and procedure keeps the story fresh despite being a quarter of a century old. The technology angle is all rather silly and seems really alarmist to today’s eyes, but in an age of identity theft the idea that computers can cause harm is still relevant.
Matthew Broderick shines as 17-year-old David Lightman, a social outcast who uses his technological skills to hack into his high school’s computer to change his grades. Opposite him is Ally Sheedy as the perky Jennifer Mack, David’s teenage crush who gets caught up in the action. Also look for Dabney Coleman as a cantankerous computer-reliant defense specialist.
It’s been a quarter of a century since “Shall we play a game” briefly became a popular catchphrase, and while WarGames doesn’t strike the technophobe-Cold War-chord it did back in 1983 it does stand up as an entertaining teen thriller.
