Looking for a funny, sweet romantic comedy that doesn’t descend into treacle or formula? Then go see Nia Vardalos’ My Big Fat Greek Wedding and watch Vardalos and John Corbett (Sex and the City, The Visitor, Nothern Exposure) fall in love amidst the foils of family expectations. There are laughs big and small in the script written by Ms. Vardalos and the direction by Joel Zwick avoids the expected. Michael Constantine, who I haven’t seen in quite awhile, plays the Greek father who only wants to continue his family’s heritage and Lainie Kazan his wife who understands a daughter should find her own way, regardless of what the father says.

Just short of 50 years from now, due to the effects from a new form of narcotic taken by their mother while pregnant and some assistance from genetic engineers, a few children are born with the ability to tap into the common gestalt when so serious a tear as murder is going to occur and literally see the event in advance. Technology allows their minds to be tapped and tied into computer systems. Max von Sydow plays Burgess, the scientist who develops this combination into a new type of police force that can prevent murders from happening. The system has been under test for six years and has cleaned up all the murders in Washington, DC, and a referendum to approve national expansion is only days away.

That’s the background for Minority Report, the heavily hyped film starring Tom Cruise as the top Precrime cop and directed by Steven Spielberg. A good film though not quite up to the hype or fawning reviews. Like Blade Runner and Total Recall, this is another movie based on a Philip K. Dick short story; like those all that’s really kept is the basic premise, a slight tilt towards the dark side, and major character names.

Cruise is not bad, actually, given a much better script and character than he had last time out in Vanilla Sky. Hot new actor Colin Farrell is okay but his character is a little too obvious. von Sydow is beyond acting, he’s made so many movies over the years that he just is the character. Samantha Morton isn’t called on for more than very obvious facial emoting but does that well enough.

Spielberg puts huge visuals up on the screen, a ot of very cool stuff that appeals to the technogeek in me, but after awhile this distracts from the story and hurts the movie. Though I surely wouldn’t mind having one of the jet packs the cops fly around on. One of my companions complained mightily about the slightly grainy quality of the film, which I suppose was a choice affected by the director too.

Joshua has an interesting take on MR, Cruise, and Spielberg.

Not quite as good as, say, The Bourne Identity but worth seeing.

Took me a few years and the urging of The Sweet One to finally catch up with this quirky German production. Run Lola Run stars Franka Potente and Moritz Bleibtreu as pait of young lovers caught up in circumstances threatening him with death at the hands of his ruthless drug dealer boss. They have 20 minutes to come up with 100,000 Deusche Marks that he was to deliver but lost.

Director Tom Tykwer has Potenta (Bourne Identity) literally running for Bleibtreu’s life. Three times he retells those 20 crucial minutes, from the phone call from him to her explaining until the scenario runs out. Though the starting point, with Potente hanging up the phone and racing out of her apartment, is the same, each runthrough quickly takes a different turn. Lola’s father is featured in a short subplot and gives Tykwer a strong mirror story. He’s involved with a woman at work and his results more or less reverse Lola’s. As the director himself explains: “It is this woman’s passion alone that brings down the rigid rules and regulations of the world surrounding her. Love can move mountains, and does. Over and above all the action, the central driving force of this film is romance.”

Like most movies, this one has fans willing to be more enthusiastic and detailed than me.

Recommended

If you’re asking, the answer is yeah! Chris Rock, Anthony Hopkins, you say to yourself, “That’s a strange pair.” Sure it’s been done before, think Eddie Murphy with Nick Nolte (the bud says think Murphy with Dan Ackroyd), but Bad Company does it good. Sure the basic plot is hokey and sometimes predictable but what did you expect?

For my $9, the key here is the script by Jason Richman and Michael Browning. Neither has written anything of substance that’s been produced before (6 Days, 7 Nights doesn’t count for shit in my book) and to hit one out of the ballpark like this is rather surprising. There were lots of little things, mainly in the script, that give me this feeling, extra bits that one doesn’t expect in a big bang summer action movie. Props to director Joel Schumacher too (Falling Down with Michael Douglas, the Clooney/O’Donnell Batman & Robin) for getting the goods from Hopkins and Rock, the car chase though high grass, allowing Rock to come up with his own material where appropriate (such as when he tells off CIA honcho played by John Slattery for talking down to him); would you ever have guessed that Schumacher started his Hollywood career as a costume designer?

Some knockout eye candy too: Garcelle Beauvais (NYPD Blue) shows us her extremely fine body in shower and lingerie scenes, even if the scenes don’t do much to move the plot along. Okay, they do give context for another attempt on Rock’s life, another chance for Hopkin’s and team to shoot off their guns. Much of the movie is set in and around Prague and we get some beautiful visuals from the historic buildings, cityscape, and countryside too.

There are lots of laughs, lots of action, lots of technology to back up the actors–this is a Jerry Bruckheimer film (Blackhawk Down and Pearl Harbor, to give you some idea). The movie cost a lot of money to produce, though not nearly as much as Pearl Harbor, which is good because it isn’t doing too well at the box office, but you do see it on screen.

Recommended for action fans

You know, between the taskmaster and the boys kicking balls, there just hasn’t been much time for movies lately. But I want to tell you, even if your busier than me, you need to make time to get out of the house and down to the cinema to see The Bourne Identity. There’s a simple reason: it’s an excellent movie, maybe the best big money film of the year so far.

Matt Damon plays Jason Bourne (well, he’s sort of Jason Bourne, we never do really know) and Franka Potente (Run Lola Run) plays Marie, the $20,000 taxi driver while Chris Cooper, with all of Texas in his mouth, leads the hunt for them. All three really act, which is not particularly something you look for in a straight action movie, and they don’t use a lot of computer effects or wire-aided martial gymnastics as crutches.

Julia Stiles, apparently glad to have a role where she’s not playing a high school hottie, plays a CIA agent running an illegal Paris office; she doesn’t even get to look that hot and in the one scene where we see her full on, she looks sort of hippy. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, who played Simon Adebisi on Oz, shows up as a deposed African dictator trying to blackmail the bad CIA people into putting him back in office. Walt Goggins from this season’s surprise hit, The Shield, plays a CIA desk jockey. Clive Owens (The Croupier), a fellow member/victim of an experimental CIA drug-enhanced warrior program gone bad, tries to take down Damon but in the end just isn’t good enough.

One reason for the good result is that it comes from a strong source: a great novel by Robert Ludlam, who also exec produces or at least gets a credit for that. Scriptwriter Tony Gilroy has a great pedigree–Bait, Armageddon, The Devil’s Advocate, and Extreme Measures–but doesn’t really need to add much here. Director Doug Liman is the man, showing surprisingly good form in his first big action flick; you wouldn’t think Go and Swingers would have prepared him for this. But he crunches Damon and Potenta through car chases, assaults, and traps, twisting them time after time, until finally Damon can turn the tables on Cooper. Limon often uses Damon’s face full of confusion, guarded yet confident, to fill the screen. Good job!

Highly Recommended

I’ve read three of Nick Hornby’s four novels (and I’m looking for a copy of the fourth) and I thought the first film I saw based on one of them was terrific–I thought High Fidelity, starring John Cusak, was one of the best films of the ’90s. But given the flood of summer movies and the pace at which they drop out of the cinemas, I worried that I might miss this one until it arrived on DVD. But a meeting dragged me up to San Francisco and ended just in time for The Sweet One and I to take in a pre-dinner show at the Metreon.

About a Boy is, like High Fidelity, the story of a man (Hugh Grant plays Will) who refuses to grow up but is shown that what he’ll gain by doing so far outweighs any loss. In this instance by 12 year old Marcus. The movie starts with a pair of voiceovers, from Will and Marcus, that give quite different perspectives on the proper path in life. Will says that John Donne, who said “No man is an island,” was full of it. In our modern age, with a little bit of money and just the right attitude, one can live nicely as an island. Marcus figures just the opposite is true but he never had the chance to find out what money can do. His mom (Dad is a long gone doofus who apparently only shows his face at Christmas) is depressed and suicidal and Marcus decides that what people need, him in particular, is backup; that’s why the standard family has two parents. So he attempts to recruit Will off his island and into the nuclear unit. The movie shows how their worlds collide and their orbits change.

Grant is a fine casting choice for Will, just the right age and a suitable world weary face, though one wonders what Will has to be weary of. Nicholas Hoult doesn’t try and give us a slick, 12 year old as short adult performance as Marcus, he gives a very genuine, awkward resonant performance. Toni Collette, who came to our attention in the wonderful Muriel’s Wedding, is Marcus’ mom, who uses her eyes to show the depth of her character’s depression. Rachel Weisz plays the love interest but isn’t given enough to do, outside of one good restaurant scene, to really matter. The Weitz brothers, Paul and Chris, co-wrote and co-directed the film, moving up in class from their American Pie series, showing they can handle adult material too–there isn’t even a flash of skin to be seen–taking just enough from the novel to give us substantial growth for all three main characters and maintain a solid pace for the film’s 100 minutes.

Definitely Recommended

I know, I’m just as surprised as you that I waited 16 days to see Attack of the Clones too. What the hell. We did make the extra effort to drive to San Jose and see it at a digital projection theater. Not incredible but nice to have, worth driving a few extra minutes if you live near one of the 20 theaters across the country which have it.

Don’t bother to see it if you expect logic and amazing acting. This isn’t that kind of movie. The special effects are state of the art and the integration of digital creations with real people is undetectable. Yoda, as many others have said before, rocks. The aliens of planet Kamino, scientists who create the clone army, are amazingly beautiful and you will believe the characters are people in suits even though they’re not. Hayden Christensen, the 20 year old Anakin, did not meet my expectations for the role and Ewen McGregor is usually a much better actor. Christopher Lee just rocks and at 80 years of age shows no signs of slowing up (remember his Sarumen in Fellowship of the Rings?).

Will George Lucas direct Episode Three as he has One and Two? I kind of hope he doesn’t. As good as the technology is here, he seems too enamored of it and we end up with weaker acting and plotting than ought to be the case. Still…

Recommended