Category Archives: romance

Notes on a Scandal

Posted on January 13, 2008

This 2006 drama is a twisted, dark romance from writer Patrick Marber and director Richard Eyre and stars Dame Judith Dench, Cate Blanchett and Bill Nighy with a meaty supporting role for teenager Andrew Simpson. Marber and Eyre are highly regarded for their theater work so it’s no surprise that dialog and body language are far more significant than would typically be the case.

Notes on a Scandal covers the term when Sheba (Blanchett) arrives as the new arts teacher at a London high school where Barbara (Dench) is an institution nearing retirement and 15 year old Steven (Simpson) is enrolled as a 10th Year student. Being so pretty and vivacious Sheba is someone everyone else wants to get close with, and her marriage to the much older, yet loving and caring, Richard (Nighy) doesn’t an obstacle to either friendship or romance.

Barbara, who also provides much needed narration, certainly doesn’t see Richard or Sheba’s two children as problems for the “special” relationship she wants with the newcomer. After all, her last intended young lovely friend scampered away rather than suffer the attention.

Sheba, well, she would have done just fine if she’d only stopped herself from acting on forbidden desires but temptation, as Greg Allman sang, “is a loaded gun.” So hard not to fire at least one bullet, then one more and another and another and then you get sloppy, which is when someone’s bound to see your mess.

Barbara, of course, has been paying Sheba special attention so we’re not surprised when it’s her eyes that do and that’s all this spider needs for springing her trap. Aging predators can’t catch prey as well or as easily; Barbara should’ve learned this from her last result but is desperate not to be alone for her last years.

As I said, this is a very dark movie but quite a good one: Dench, Blanchett and Marber all got Oscar nominations though they lost to Helen Mirren (who played another aging British monarch), Jennifer Hudson (Dreamgirls) and William Monahan (The Departed), respectively.

Definitely worth watching now that Notes has come to premium cable.

recommended

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Because I Said So

Posted on November 5, 2007

An out and out chick flick, this was our Saturday night date movie with TS1 even bringing the fresh popcorn. A fun way to spend a couple of hours after a day full of English and American football–Liverpool had another crap 0-0 outing but USC reached back for a nice 24-3 rebounder–and Mandy Moore is growing on me as a nice young actress

Moore costars with Diane Keaton in Because I Said So, a slight romantic comedy whose twist is that Keaton is not only Moore’s overbearing mother Daphne, she’s afraid her own life is over at 60 (her birthday party is a key scene) without her ever having had an orgasm. Lauren Graham and Piper Perabo play Moore’s character Milly’s two slightly older, better adjusted sisters so you can imagine the locker room scene is very male viewer friendly.

Daphne despairs of the 20-something Milly ever finding the true love she never did–the girl’s father was “the wrong choice”–and so she posts a single ad asking for suitors for her daughter. Interviewing applicants in a hotel lounge she finds one good man, an architect named Jason (Tom Everett Scott), and has an arrogant conversation with Johnny (Gabriel Macht), leader of the jazz combo playing there.

Milly of course meets both men and, this being the 21st century, sleeps with both after a decent/minimal number of dates. Johnny turns out to be a better match, though appearances and mom disagree. Hilarity ensues. Daphne meets Johnny’s dad (Stephen Collins) and learns what an orgasm feels like. Milly and Johnny’s five year old son Lionel hit it off instantly. Jason never does figure out how to get the stick out of his ass.

Fairly standard stuff but nicely done.

recommended

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My Super Ex-Girlfriend

Posted on July 16, 2007

Ivan Reitman has directed many funny movies, including Stripes, both Ghostbusters, Twins, Kindergarten Cop, Junior and Dave and writer Don Payne comes out of the Simpsons camp (and also co-wrote this summer’s F4: Rise of the Silver Surfer) so the creative pedigree is certainly strong. Actors Luke Wilson, Eddie Izzard and even Anna Faris have made their share of decent comedies.

In which case you shouldn’t be surprised that My Super Ex-Girlfriend is pretty darn funny. Mashing up the superhero/supervillain conflict with a romantic comedy and today’s computer F/X returns a potent combination that Reitman, whose Ghostbusters flicks flirted with similar territory, and Payne deliver fully.

Matt Saunders (Wilson) has a history of falling for slightly crazy chicks and when he meets Jennifer (Uma Thurman), the Clark Kent front identity of superhero G-Girl, he gets crazy on a. Whole. ‘Nother. Level. Jennifer falls for him quick and hard after Matt chases a purse snatcher for several Manhattan blocks but this is her first crush since the day back in high school when she and her friend Barry were in the woods making out and a strange meteor crashed near their car. Touching the rock transformed Jennifer into a superpower (and a superhottie) via otherwise unexplained radiation, and she left Barry in the dirt. Not at all happy about that, Barry becomes her arch-nemesis Bedlam.

G-Girl reveals her true self to Matt but this lady has a case of jealousy that matches her powers and he breaks up with her. Bad move. But Matt really loves his co-worker Hannah (Faris) and while comforting her after she catches her model boyfriend in bed with two or three women he finally tells her. So they hook up, which superstalker G-Girl sees an, er, terminates by tossing a live shark into Faris’s bedroom, many floors up in a high-rise.

Bedlam uses this behavior to convince Matt the only answer is tricking Jennifer into touching the meteor again, which experiments show will return the radiation to it. Matt pretends a reconciliation and at dinner gets her to touch the rock. Bedlam, of course not so nice as he pretended, is about to kill them both when Faris turns up, a catfight ensues and the women both touch the meteor before Bedlam can (again).

This is really funny. Thurman is not really that good at broad humor but does very well as the straightman to Wilson and Faris. Also helping out is Rainn Wilson as Matt’s superhorny best friend, though his advice seems as often calculated for his amusement as actually helping Matt.

recommended

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Stranger than Fiction

Posted on November 13, 2006

I’ve never thought as much of Will Ferrell as other folks. Don’t get me wrong, I think he can be very funny but he goes in a direction that grates on me just a bit too frequently as in last year’s hit Talladega Nights. In Stranger than Fiction, though, he plays against type, no farce, no sniggers, no childish stupidity. Frankly I’d love to see the outtakes and footage from just after the director called cut as Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Dustin Hoffman (at least) must have been laughing their asses off and there were some scenes where I expect they must have been barely able to keep a straight face.

As others have mentioned, this film shares a black, through the looking glass sensibility with movies written by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) though this one, in the end, makes more sense. Maybe its a tad more conventional though writer Zach Helm certainly doesn’t much play to Hollywood cliches.

To a large degree this movie is the one which shows Will Ferrell can actually act and not just play the goof. Adam Sandler had Punch Drunk Love, Robin Williams had Dead Poet Society, Steve Martin A Simple Twist of Fate, most comic actors sooner or later try to break out of the genre from which they find their initial successes and StF, to me, is that part for Ferrell even if it is still a comedy since not once does he break out a goofy line or try to sneak in a physical gag. I really respect him for that.

Credit to director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, the Johnny Depp starrer Finding Neverland) as well for making sure we stay interested in the story of a man who, after all, is about as boring as a man could be. Harold Crick gets up in the morning, eats the same thing, counts toothbrush strokes, takes a bus to work (he’s an IRS auditor), comes home to a lonely dinner, TV and sleep. One wonders what he does on weekends! Of course having a famous author begin to narrate the guy’s life (Emma Thompson as Kay Eiffel) helps grab the audience, and Eiffel herself is having troubles too.

Throw in a delicious baker (Gyllenhaal) who somehow connects with her IRS auditor and Dustin Hoffman as a literature professor who tries to help Crick figure out what kind of story he’s in, and who happens to be an expert on Kay Eiffel, and there’s humor bursting at the seams.

definitely recommended

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Grace of My Heart

Posted on September 4, 2006

I always thought that this sweet, musical movie deserved a better reception than it got but I guess in 1996 people were more interested in Kurt Cobain’s still fresh suicide than a look 40 years back. There must be something to it if Marty Scorsese put his name on as executive producer, right?

Grace of My Heart, written and directed by Allison Anders, uses the real life of singer/songwriter Carole King as its framework/jumping off point for Anders to explore life of a woman in the music business from the ’50s through the ’70s. King was a key member of the Brill Building songwriting crew, coming up with hundreds of hits–in partnership with first husband Gerry Goffin–for groups as diverse as the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” Bobby Vee’s “Take Good Care of My Baby,” Little Eva’s “The Locomotion,” (later turned into a hard rock classic by Grand Funk Railroad), the Chiffons’ “One Fine Day,” the Monkees’ “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” the Drifters’ “Up on the Roof,” and Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman.”

But King always wanted to be a singer. Numerous records she made flopped until, of course, her titanic megaseller Tapestry broke most chart standards. Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon came along two years later and rewrote the books but for awhile she was as big as any act. King married again in the mid-70s; sadly her husband ODed just a year later and she retreated to Idaho for many years.

Illeana Douglas’s Denise Waverly is a Philadelphia steel hieress (nee Edna Buxton) and not a Brooklynite like King but she quickly partners and falls in love with Eric Stoltz’s beatnik wanna-be Howard Cazsatt, indicated by the annoying chinhair Stoltz wears and the watered down Marxist rhetoric he spouts during post-coital cuddling. Eventually, she walks in on him having sex with some unnamed tramp as their newborn naps in a crib at the foot of the bed.

She moves on to an affair with a married man of her own, an Alan Freed-like radio DJ, but he too leaves her in the lurch. Finally, her boss (an underwhelming John Turturro) gets her a one shot record deal as an attempt to get her back from Self Pity Land, with Brian Wilson Jay Phillips (Matt Dillon, who seemed to be taking the same drugs Wilson used back in the ’60s) to produce it. Of course they fall in love but Wilson Phillips goes off the deep end, literally here, walking into the surf with no board.

One ticket, one way, for Self Pity Land! Denise takes her daughter, her babysitter and the babysitter’s little son from a beach house in Malibu to a commune so they can plant vegetables and meditate in the mud for half a year until Turturro show up again to talk her out of her self-absorbed misery. The kids are just happy to get hamburger and fries for dinner. Denise dusts herself off and makes a platinum-seller that even her hoity-toity mom finally approves of.

Grace is better than this sounds. There is a bit of cliche in how Douglas keeps falling for the same type of guy and the ending is a little happily ever after, its not a perfect film. But Douglas, for once playing the lead and not the best friend or best friend’s wife, shows that she can act, given a chance. Sort of how King showed she could be the star, eh? And Anders includes dark touches honestly, like the reaction to the film’s version of the Shirelle’s controversial abusive love song and Phillips’ descent into madness.

recommended

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High Art

Posted on July 7, 2006

The New York art scene has always been fertile ground for a certain type of movie or novel, and the 1998 High Art fits neatly in that hole. Radha Mitchell plays Syd, an aspiring assistant editor at a photography magazine and, through a plumbing leak, meets Ally Sheedy, her upstairs neighbor.

Sheedy’s Lucy was a photography wunderkind, but burned out a decade before, a trust fund baby happy to spend her days snorting heroin with her German actress lover (a very different Patricia Clarke) and a few friends. Syd doesn’t recognize Lucy’s name, she’s that young, but recognizes art when she sees it. After being shown a book of her published photos, Syd gets Lucy and her bosses to agree to a cover article with new work from Lucy.

Syd and Lucy of course fall for each other. In their society–I assume writer director Lisa Cholodenko intended the title to riff on our mental image of high society–being a lesbian is no trouble but snorting heroin always has a price.

Cholodenko, who also made Laurel Canyon, does an excellent job of showing us the claustrophobic world these women live in. The dialog is really spot on, particularly for some of the secondary characters like Lucy’s genteel Jewish mother (Tammy Grimes) and her bosses at the magazine (Anh Duong, David Thornton).

And who can argue with seeing Radha and Ally getting busy?

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Spanglish

Posted on November 15, 2005

James L. Brooks has made some classic films over the years including As Good As It Gets, Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News plus he’s a co-creator of TV standouts The Simpsons, Taxi and The Mary Tyler Moore Show! Adam Sandler, on the other hand, has not. Okay, some of his movies have been funny (The Waterboy, Happy Madison) and even a couple that are a step above the pre-teen level (The Wedding Singer and especially Punch-Drunk Love) but nothing of the mature, life-affirming nature of Brooks’ oevre.

So we didn’t run out to the cinema to fork over $10 each to see Spanglish when the reviews were, well, half-hearted at best and no friends gave positive (or any) reports. Watching it, though, made me wonder why it didn’t get a better response. This is more the story of a young, unwed Mexican mother trying to make a life for her daughter in a strange land than anything to do with Sandler, and Paz Vega does a superb job as the woman who doesn’t even speak English until nearly the end.

Vega gets tangled up in the lives of Type A mom Tea Leoni, the nearly Zen monk-like Sandler and their two kids. Leoni doesn’t work but needs help taking care of her smart but slightly chubby daughter Berniece, (barely visible, so hard to characterize) younger son George and alcoholic, faded, drunk but able to care and give the occasional bit of sage wisdom singing star mom (Cloris Leachman). Her own daughter, the same age as Leoni’s, cannot resist the lure of wealth so easily but is still the most well-behaved teenager I’ve ever seen.

Anyway, the plot is not so much the point here as the performances Brooks is able to bring out from the cast. Leoni and Leachman are no surprise, and Vega is experienced if unknown in the US (and gorgeous, like Penelope Cruz without the zero percent body fat), but Sandler and the kids are an unexpected pleasure. Particularly Sarah Steele as Berniece but also Shelbie Bruce as her Latina counterpart.

recommended

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Sip si 32 doe

Posted on January 4, 2005

Released in America with the title Beyond Hypothermia, 1996 Korean gangster flick Sip si 32 doe faces off an emotionless female assassin (Wu Chin Lin) and a passionate Korean mobster (Han Sang Woo), with a seemingly witless noodle vendor caught in the middle. The American title apparently refers to the assassin’s barely alluded to subnormal body temperature though there’s also the opening scene in which she does the business from inside an icehouse fortuitously located above and across the street from the location of a hit.

The theme here is human connection–she has none, not even with her ‘mother’; he is consumed by his, determined to avenge the killing of the boss he failed to protect; and the noodle man has lost all human warmth and then is drawn into her stuttering romantic (sexual?) awakening. Plot is minimal: the assassin does several jobs, one is killing the triad boss, and after each job she returns at closing time saying nary a word but nonetheless enchanting the noodle man. She was seen and chased after the triad killing, gets away, and yet (we’re never told how) word gets back to him on how to contact her handler. From there the explosive collision is inevitable.

But that isn’t really a criticism because Sip si 32 doe is all about visual imagery and violent interaction as a modern mode of ballet. Perhaps such an assessment is old hat by now but director Patrick Leung really does an excellent job with it. Even the final gun battle has sensibility different from what Americans first came to know through the work of Leung’s mentor John Woo; there’s very little evidence of such Woo trademarks as a gunman, preferably the protagonist, jumping across an opening between shielded spots blazing away with two big handguns.

All in all this is a worthwhile film for genre fans though I might have enjoyed it more with the original Korean (or Chinese?) dialog instead of the dubbed English.

recommended

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Much Ado About Nothing

Posted on August 9, 2004

Kenneth Branagh came blasting out of England in the ’80s, promising to be the next Olivier. One of the ways he chose to use his new-found clout is to bring versions of all of Shakespeare’s works to the screen. From 1993, Much Ado About Nothing is one of the comedies and probably one of my favorite movies ever.

Branagh, who wrote adaptation and directed, plays Benedick, a nobleman in the service of Don Pedro (Denzel Washington). Pedro and his men visit Seigneur Leonato, the Governor of Messina, and his family; in his party are his brother John (an evil Keanu Reeves) and Claudio (Robert Sean Leonard), a young, sweet, naive boy who is in love with Leonato’s daughter Hero (an enchanting Kate Beckinsale). Benedick is matched with Leonato’s niece, Beatrice, played by an amazing Emma Thompson.

The key plots are: Claudio and Hero’s love match, which John keeps trying to sabotage and Benedick and Beatrice’s pairing, a match that Don Pedro and Leonato conspire to arrange despite the sharp, antagonistic attitudes of the married in real life couple. The characters have complex relationships and with only eight major roles almost all are well developed, Hero and Don Pedro the main exceptions. Michael Keaton, in a minor turn, is a great Dogberry.

Beyond the sophisticated humor and terrific acting, Branagh as director has brought a beautiful, radiant vision of the Italian countryside on screen. Almost as if he had the lighting crew put a second Sun in the sky–which is something one of the digital FX houses might be able to do today but not a dozen years ago.

absolutely recommended

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Shrek 2

Posted on June 13, 2004

Rack one up for the Sweet One, this was not a movie I would have chosen on my own. Shrek 2 is moderately amusing but nowhere near the revelation the original was. The whole scheming Fairy Godmother bit put me off though it drove the plot and I generally find Jennifer Saunders quite inventive. Eddi Murphy thumbs up, Mike Myers mostly good, Cameron Diaz okay, John Cleese walked through it. High quality animation is no longer anything more than the ante required to sit at the table–Katzenberg and company had better come up with much more for the third and fourth installments. But my wife really enjoyed it and that’s good enough for my Sunday afternoon.

mildly amusing

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