Where has Renée Zellweger been? From her breakthrough in “Jerry Maguire” to “My Own Love Song” in she was a fixture on the big screen, making twenty-five movies in fifteen years. Then, in 2010, she disappeared from view.
Zellweger is back this weekend in a big way. “Bridget Jones’s Baby” sees her return to her signature role twelve years after starring in the second instalment of the series, “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.”
Released on the 20th Anniversary of the first Bridget Jones novel, the new film has Bridget pregnant but unsure whether the father is her true love Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) or Jack (Patrick Dempsey), a handsome, rich American, she had a one night stand with at a music festival. “This is it!” exclaims the forty-three soon-to-be-mom. “More to the point who’s is it?” The happy trio work through nine months of questions and prenatal classes before the bundle of joy arrives and Bridget’s question can be answered definitively.
The six year vacation has not loosened Zellweger’s grip of her most famous character. She slips back into Jones’s skin and it’s a welcome return. The things that made Bridget lovable in the first place are in place—like the self-depreciating humour—but they are tempered by a contentment, more or less, with her life. The search for Prince Charming continues, but her attitude toward men and their place in her life has developed since we saw her last. Make no mistake, this is a rom com, but, largely due to Zellweger’s charming performance, the emphasis is on the comedy and not so much the romance.
It’s a screwball comedy that relies on coincidences puns, double entendres, slapstick and likable characters for its appeal. Light and breezy, it’s “Sex and the City” with English accents and without the cynicism. Dempsey and Firth are polar opposites, the yin and yang of Bridget’s life, and both bring some funny moments and are good foils for Zellweger. Better yet is Emma Thompson, who also wrote the script, as Bridget’s snarky paediatrician. She pops in and out of the movie, leaving laughs in her wake.
By the time the end credits roll “Bridget Jones’s Baby” begins to feel just a tad over long. It tilts too often toward the corny and crowd pleasing, but, having said that, it’s nice to see the franchise allow Bridget to love herself for a change. Ultimately (AND THIS IS NOT A SPOILER) it doesn’t matter who the father is. The underlying message is one of girl power and empowerment. Bridget Jones has come a long way, baby.
In the Heart of the Sea features less of Chris Hemsworth than we’ve seen on screen before. He’s in virtually every scene, but for much of the film the usually bulked up Thor star is set adrift in a raft, starving and physically much less imposing than usual.
The movie is an old-fashioned whale of a tale. Literally.
Based on the true story said to have inspired Moby Dick, it’s about whalers battling not only repeated assaults from the one whale who fought back, but also malnourishment and dehydration.
At sea for three months in tiny whaleboats the men are pushed to the edge of sanity, taking drastic steps to survive.
To convincingly play a starving sailor Hemsworth trimmed 33 pounds off his already toned 6’2 3/4” frame.
“My crazy diet would make you pass out from exhaustion,” he said. At certain points he was eating just 500 or 600 calories — that’s less than a combo lunch meal at most fast-food places — in the form of a boiled egg, two crackers and a celery stick a day.
Hemsworth and his underfed cast mates passed away the time with conversations “about our favourite foods and what we would eat when we finished the film.”
The actor says losing that amount of weight isn’t something he’d like to do again, but adds, “by those final sequences when we were supposed to be exhausted and emotional. We were feeling that way off screen too, so it helped.”
Dramatic weight loss isn’t new — actors have been yo-yo dieting for roles for years — but doctors say rapid body mass reduction can lead to malnutrition, maladies like gallstones and worse. In other words, as Christian Bale who dumped 60 pounds for his role in The Machinist says, “It ain’t great for your health.”
Still, actors take on dramatic diets to aid in their dramatic work. Anne Hathaway dropped 25 pounds by food deprivation and exercise to make Les Miserables while Matthew McConaughey survived eating only Diet Coke, egg whites and a piece of chicken a day to play AIDS patient Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club. According to The Playlist he stopped dieting when “people stopped asking if he was all right and started suggesting he seek help.”
Just as common are actors who gain weight. Russell Crowe gained 63 pounds to play a CIA bigwig in Body of Lies, George Clooney gained 35 pounds for Syriana and Renee Zellweger gained 30 pounds for Bridget Jones’s Diary, lost it, only to regain it for the sequel.
Jared Leto who lost 40 pounds to play Rayon in Dallas Buyer’s Club, gained 67 pounds for the film Chapter 27 by drinking melted pints of chocolate Haagen Dazs ice cream mixed with olive oil and soy sauce “to get me bloated even more.”
Why do actors alter their bodies? Some call it dedication while cynics suggest it’s an easy Oscar. Physical transformations (plus acting talent) brought Robert DeNiro, Charlize Theron and McConaughey to the winner’s circle.
But some actors have sworn off manipulating their weight. Jim Carrey turned down a role in the Three Stooges biopic that would have required him to gain 40 to 50 pounds and Tom Hanks blames gaining and losing weight for roles with him developing Type 2 diabetes.
“I’ve talked to a number of actors who have gained weight for roles and — just out of the sheer physical toll on one’s knees and shoulders — no-one wants to do it again,” he told the BBC.
Read Richard quoted in a recent Canadian Press article by Victoria Ahearn!
“As film critic Richard Crouse puts it, the definition of what it is to be a movie star has changed in the social media age. Some major celebrities are no longer the big box-office draws they used to be and they’ve had to put more effort into the promotional circuit, such as late-night TV appearances.
“It used to be that you’d announce a Tom Cruise movie and people would be lined up around the block to see it, and that no longer holds true unless the movie happens to be called ‘Mission: Impossible’ and then people will go see it with him in it,” says Crouse, a journalist and author who has two syndicated weekly columns in the Metro newspaper and a syndicated Saturday afternoon radio show on Newstalk 1010 in Toronto…” Read the whole thing HERE!
Leatherheads takes us back to 1925 when college football ruled while the allegedly professional players were mostly thugs who played drunk and thought nothing of brawling during regulation play. They were kind of like hockey players only without the sticks.
George Clooney, who also directed the picture, is Dodge Connolly, the over-the-hill captain of the Duluth Bulldogs, a rough and tumble team on the verge of bankruptcy. To increase the team’s popularity he recruits college ball’s most popular player, Princeton’s Carter “The Bullet” Rutherford (The Office’s John Krasinski). Carter isn’t just famous as a ball player, he’s also a war hero who apparently got a whole platoon of Germans to surrender. He the all-American hero, but one Chicago Tribune editor thinks his story is too good to be true and sends impish reporter Lexie “I’m not really the homemaker type” Littleton (Renee Zellweger) to “break the myth of the boy hero.”
As Lexie searches for her story, Carter and Connolly become rivals on the field and for Miss Littleton’s affection.
As a director Clooney nails the period and the conventions of screwball comedy. Taking a page or two from the playbooks of Howard Hawks, George Cukor and Frank Capra, the masters of the madcap genre, Clooney hits most of the right notes. He populates the movie with colorful characters in great looking clothes, sets up a love triangle and even throws in some farce. The movie looks great, touched with a beautiful nostalgic glow and the dialogue is snappy—it’s just too bad the pacing isn’t.
For all its attention to period detail and the splendor of the production design, Leatherheads falls flat, devoid of any of the free-for-all spirit of the rowdy brand of football that is the basis of the story. The cast hands in nice performances—Zellweger’s pouty lips are perfect for the period and Clooney has put away serious George in favor of the pratfalling goofy George—but they are often undone by scenes that last too long. Look up the definition of screwball comedies and you’ll see the word “snappy” used to describe both the pace and the dialogue. Clooney only got it half right.
Marketing wise Leatherheads should have had been a field goal. You have football for the guys and George Clooney for the gals, but despite Clooney’s obvious love for the genre it feels more like an incomplete pass.
Beatrix Potter wrote dozens of books with titles like The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Appley Dapply’s Nursery Rhymes. Released at the turn of the last century, these stories about mischievous animals illustrated with Potter’s charming watercolors were as incredibly popular with kids as Harry Potter is today.
Miss Potter, a new movie starring Oscar winner Renee Zellweger as the author, focuses on Potter’s personal life, which was tumultuous as her books were placid. Buckling against 19th century mores the headstrong writer chose not to marry until age 47, preferring the company of her imaginary friends to real life. The movie leads us through the publishing of her first book, her battles with overbearing social climbing parents, an engagement to her first fiancé, played by Ewan McGregor, and her subsequent retreat to the English countryside. What emerges is an interesting, but incomplete portrait of the legendary writer.
Zellweger is a ringer for Potter, pulls off a convincing English accent, and succeeds in making Potter’s eccentricities seem plausible, but for all the technical aspects of the performance there isn’t much warmth here. Zellweger’s stiff upper lip hides any real emotion, and the few flashes of personality that find their way past her stern façade only hint at the reservoir of emotion underneath.
Overall the movie is well constructed, if a little incomplete. Director Chris Noonan, whose last film, Babe, was eleven years ago, shows us the major events in Potter’s life, but lacking is the passion. It makes for a decent family film, although I doubt that kids will be too taken with the love story and the English reserve, but feels like less than the sum of its parts. Potter was a 19th century rebel who championed the ecology and used her vast wealth to preserve 4000 acres of farmland. She was an active and shrewd marketer of her own books and even did some scientific research on lichens that, one hundred years after she wrote it, was given credence by the British Linnean Society. Only mildly engaging, this stiff Masterpiece Theatre treatment of her life doesn’t do justice to Beatrix Potter or her legacy.
New in Town is a romantic comedy in the mould of every other romantic comedy made since Harry met Sally all those years ago. The genre is so familiar that saying upfront that Renee and Harry end up in a clinched embrace as the credits roll isn’t a spoiler, it’s a given. The trick with these kinds of movies is to make the journey, how the unlikely couple gets together, different and interesting.
Renée Zellweger is Lucy Hill, a Miami based business consultant sent to oversee the restructuring of a manufacturing plant in the snowy Minnesota town of New Ulm. She’s a fish out of water that’s never seen snow up close and personal and thinks that you light a fireplace with a switch on the wall. “I’m stranded in this frozen wasteland,” she says. She looks down on the townsfolk and their quaint Fargo-esque accents and is determined to do her job and “not get personally attached to this town or anybody in it.” Her icy attitude begins to melt as she warms up to Ted Mitchell (Harry Connick Jr.) a handsome local man. Then when she’s ordered to close down the plant and put the entire community out of work, she’s forced to re-evaluate her big-city values.
To freshen things up the screenwriters have set the action in Minnesota, perhaps the least sexy of all 50 states. Any list of dream rom com locations begins with New York, is rounded out by Paris with London coming in a close third. The good state of Minnesota is unlikely to make the cut, and unfortunately New In Town won’t do much to change that state of affairs.
Actually shot in Manitoba, the film is placed against a backdrop of snow and ice, only occasionally finding a modicum of warmth as the relationship between Renee and Harry heats up, and even then its predictability is likely to leave you as cold as the setting.
The location isn’t the movie’s only problem. Early on it’s clear that there aren’t any characters here, just clichés. The people of New Ulm are the kind of stereotypical small town folks that only exist on the big screen. They’re unsophisticated gullible rubes, too nice for their own good and prone to colorful phrases like “Oh for cryin’ in a beer cheese soup.” (I don’t know what it means either….)
Zellweger is a cold blooded shark in Manolo Blahniks, a stuck up city snob straight from Central Casting. Connick isn’t required to much more than smile and look rugged in his plaid shirts. At least he pulls off the smile.
Most shocking is J.K. Simmons as plant foreman Stu Kopenhafer. Simmons is a great character actor who was the best and funniest thing in Burn After Reading, the most recent Coen Brothers film, but this is the most blatant “for the paycheck role” of the year so far.
Couple clichéd characters with predictable situations and you have New In Town, a forgettable movie that will raise the occasional laugh from generous audiences, but is probably best regarded as a rental.
Down with Love is an homage to the 1960’s Rock Hudson / Doris Day “battle of the sexes” sub-genre. The filmmakers have captured the look – Renee Zellweger’s clothes look like they were just uncrated from a time-capsule discovered in Jackie O’s closet circa 1963 – but falter when it comes to the tone of the film. The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead, if you know what I mean. The actors, likeable though they may be, have none of the ease that Hudson and Day had with this sort of material. The kitsch-o-meter is dialled up to 10, but only Ms. Zellweger’s impressive speech near the end where she reveals her elaborate plot to snare the lusty Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor) has the sense of campy fun that this whole film desperately needs to succeed. Down with Love tries hard, but is winking so firmly at itself, it threatens to give itself a black eye.
Ron Howard’s mostly true story of Jim Braddock is a depression era Rocky. It follows Braddock’s career from his early days as a contender for a light-heavy weight title through to the dark Depression years when injuries and age prevented him from making a living in the ring right up to his amazing comeback in the ring when he became a symbol for courage in a country “that had been brought to its knees.” This is a big, good looking movie that seems to scream Oscar, except that it is a bit too long and relies too heavily on boxing movie clichés that we have seen before. The performances, however, are quite good. Paul Giamatti plays Braddock’s manager Joe Gould with a lot of energy, while Renee Zellweger redefines the term “mousey” in her portrayal of Braddock’s wife Mae. At the heart of the movie is Russell Crowe who shines as the humble, but driven Braddock. Crowe could be nominated for Best Actor for just one scene in this movie–where he goes back to a club frequented by his old boxing associates to beg for money from his former friends to pay his electrical bill.
More than any other film genre romantic comedy suffers from a bad case of predictability. How many times have we seen two unlikely people beat the odds to become a happy couple by the time the credits roll? Dorky Harry meets beautiful Sally. Pretty Woman of the Night seduced by suave rich guy.
It’s déjà vu all over again.
The trick to making a good rom-com is to make the journey — how the characters wind up locking lips at the film’s end — interesting.
New In Town, the latest from Renée Zellweger does this by moving the action out of New York, where all great romantic comedies are set, to Minnesota.
This location twist is often used in the most common type of romantic comedy, the trademarked Drew Barrymore rom-com. On film Drew has fallen in love in Hawaii (50 First Dates), Boston (Fever Pitch) and everywhere in between.
The breakdown for a Barrymore romance is simple. Act One sees the quirky couple meet. Sparks fly. Act Two has the pair falling in love under unlikely circumstances. Things go great until a confrontation leads to separation. Act Three contains the Grand Gesture. He or she, depending on the movie, moves heaven and earth to win the other back. Insert happy ending.
Barrymore, of course, isn’t to blame for the state of rom-coms. Neither is Kate or Reese. They’re just mimicking an age old formula.
Trouble in Paradise, an Ernst Lubitsch classic from 1932, follows the structure and it could be argued that Shakespeare was the architect of the rom-com.
So why, after half a millennium, do romantic comedies still thrill audiences? I think it’s primal. Deep down we all love a happy ending and while real life relationships might not always work, it’s assured that when Harry meets Sally, it will be forever. That kind of certainty, no matter how unreal, keeps us coming back for more.
Where has Renée Zellweger been? From her breakthrough in “Jerry Maguire” to “My Own Love Song” in she was a fixture on the big screen, making twenty-five movies in fifteen years. Then, in 2010, she disappeared from view.
