Posts Tagged ‘Mira Sorvino’

STUBER: 3 ½ STARS. “throwback to the odd couple buddy movies of yore.”

I recently had a conversation with someone who hires people to work at a large financial institution. Qualifications? Math and people skills are high on the list, as are attention to detail and honesty. His killer question, the one that separates the candidates who will move forward to a second or third interview from those who won’t is deceptively simple. “What’s your Uber rating?” That’s right, in a word that increasingly places a star value on random performance, a ride-sharing service driver you may have only met once can determine your employment future. “Stuber,” a new comedy starring Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista, begins with a star rating and ends in an odd couple comedy.

Bautista is Vic, an LAPD detective on a mission to capture Teijo (Iko Uwais), the heroin dealer responsible for the death of his partner Sara Morris (Karen Gillan). When Teijo resurfaces during a Los Angeles heat wave Vic prepares to take him down. Trouble is, he’s just had Lasik surgery and can’t see. Fortunately, his daughter Nicole (Natalie Morales) installed the Uber app on his phone.

Enter Stu (Nanjiani), a sardonic retail clerk, with a crush on his best friend Becca (Betty Gilpin), a part time job driving for Uber and a license plate that reads FIVESTARS. Ironically, he also has a comically low star rating, the result of a string of one-star reviews left by drunks and racists. “I can’t drop below four stars or I’ll lose my job,” he says.

He picks up Vic, takes him to the scene of a murder and, desperate for a five-star review hangs around, getting deeper and deeper into trouble. “If you want five stars,” says Vic, “keep the motor running.”

“Stuber” is more than just product placement for ride-sharing. Equal parts action and gags, it feels like a throwback to the odd couple buddy movies of yore.

Let’s play Retro Fantasy Casting. Imagine it’s 1985. You have an action-comedy about a hulking cop and a motor-mouthed cab driver. It’s violent, rough and raunchy. Sounds perfect for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Eddie Murphy. You get the idea.

The premise is as dated as Koosh Balls but like those colorful rubber balls, it’s still fun. Arnold and Eddie likely would have dialed back the pop psychology somewhat—“You give people your Glock,” says Stu, “not your love. That’s your problem.”—and upped the grit, but the other buddy movie puzzle pieces are very much in place.

These movies are all about chemistry and Bautista and Nanjiani bring it. Physically they’re Laurel and (a pumped up) Hardy and their size differential leads to some laughs. Bautista’s Mr. Magoo routine offers up some good opportunities for pratfalls but it is Nanjiani who really provides the comedy in this action-comedy. His is a steady comedic approach, with a drily hilarious delivery that wrings laughs out of lines that aren’t funny on the page. “I’ve done things tonight you wouldn’t believe,” is a standard line in movies like this but out of Nanjiani’s mouth it becomes a laugh line.

“Stuber” doesn’t reinvent buddy cop wheel but it does take it out for a spin and it’s a fun ride.

Mira Sorvino finds the ‘pinch that creates the ouch’ By Richard Crouse Metro Canada Friday July 6, 2012

UNION-SQUARE_Mira-Sorvino-ShopaholicMira Sorvino has never forgotten the words of her acting coach: “You have to find the pinch that creates the ouch.” Those words resonated with her when she was creating the character of Lucy, a bi-polar New Yorker in the drama Union Square.

“You have to come up with something you feel strongly about,” she says. “So you have to form scenes or story points in your head with things that did something to you viscerally and that preloads your ammunition so when you get to those parts it all has the resonance its supposed to.”

To find that resonance, she spent a week exploring the character with director Nancy Savoca. “It was a rehearsal week in which Nancy kind of transmitted to us the world she was depicting in this movie.

This is about women and she talked about relatives of hers. Not specific to anyone, she’s changed everything, and she wouldn’t tell us which parts were true and which parts was fiction. She had aunts who were ‘nervous’ and my character Lucy is ‘nervous.’ She said in the old days when someone was bipolar they used to call them ‘nervous.’ Through her stories and her oral transmission she gave us the vibe of everything and then we talked over backstories, but we didn’t really rehearse.”

The film tells an intimate story about estranged sisters played by Tammy Blanchard and Sorvino, one about to be married, the other about to have a nervous breakdown. Sorvino, an Academy Award winner for her work in Mighty Aphrodite, says she wasn’t sure how audiences would react to Lucy.

“In the first 10 minutes of the film I got worried that we were going to lose the audience,” she says. “She’s up and down and up and down. In the beginning I think it was written in the script that she broke down crying seven times, and I thought that would be too much. I think now it’s like five or four-and-a-half.”