As usual, the titles link to trailers or other movie clips
Despite knowing her talent, I am not a
fan of Barbara Streisand (if you want to know why, check this out, from ForAmerica.org):
And as far as the recent spate of comedy stars goes,
I’m also not a fan of Seth Rogen. I
heard his character in the “comedy” Observe
and Report was quite dark with a disturbing mean streak. In fact, if it was left up to me, I never
would have picked this movie. However,
we have a rule that whoever gets to pick the movie for our weekly movie night,
the rest of us have to watch it. My niece picked this, and since it was the day before Mother’s Day, it was a rather apt
choice since it was a movie about a mother and her grown son on a road
trip. I was actually pleasantly
surprised. It wasn’t crass, and was one
of the most agreeable comedies I’ve ever seen Rogen in, and was not a waste of
two hours like most modern comedies. In
fact, I wish more comedies were like this, but unfortunately, the critics and
audiences just seem to want The Hangover
Part 7 these days. They seem to find
a film like this trite, and actually prefer “crass”. Despite its low ratings on Rotten Tomatoes,
from critics and audiences alike, it was one of the better films I saw in May.
This was much better than I thought it
was going to be, and Julianne Hough and Josh Duhamel were good in it. The critics complained because it was
“another Nicolas Sparks sudser”, this one reminiscent of Enough with Jennifer
Lopez or Sleeping with the Enemy with Julia Roberts since they’re all about a woman
moving and trying to get away from their abusive husbands. There are a few interesting twists and turns,
especially the ending (though it made critics roll their eyes, as expected). In the end, it’s not a monumental film-going
experience, but just an enjoyable time at the movies, and that’s all it was
meant to be. As Nicolas Sparks movies
go, since it has aspects of a thriller, this one was just a little
different. The actors made it work. And the kids were cute.
Eh, this was a cute but throwaway nature
documentary from Disney. It was kinda
short. An orphaned chimp is adopted by
the leader of a group in the midst of a war with another group. (This is what they consider a “G” rating
these days? Death and war? I know a lot
of little tykes that might be traumatized by this tale of an orphaned monkey
whose mother is killed during an ongoing series of vicious battles with another
group of chimps!)
Tim
Allen narrates the tale, and he was alright, though I found it quite irritating
when he brought in his “Tim the Toolman Taylor” character on occasion, and
rolled my eyes when he did his trademark “Ooh, ooh, ooh!” It just didn’t pack the emotional punch of a
similar old doc I remember called People
of the Forest narrated by Donald Sutherland, where an orphaned chimp
actually died after his mother was killed!
That one stayed with me over the years.
We like Robert Downey Jr., and I had
liked him in a few older romantic comedies he starred in, notably The Pick Up Artist, Chances Are, and Heart and Souls. But we had never seen this old romantic
comedy in which Marisa Tomei’s character was told long ago that her future
husband was named Damon Bradley. On the
verge of marriage, an old friend of her fiancé’s turns out to be none other
than Damon Bradley, currently traveling in Italy, and she whisks off to at
least get a glimpse of her “soul mate” before committing to marriage. Once in Italy, she meets Downey’s character
Peter Wright, who falls instantly in love with her, gets wind of her kooky
obsession, and then pretends to be Damon Bradley. He tells her pretty early on that he is not
Damon Bradley, she balks, and then he spends the rest of the movie trying to
convince her that, Damon Bradley or not, he is the man of her dreams. The movie is romantic and Downey Jr. and
Tomei have sparks onscreen, and Bonnie Hunt as the best friend that accompanies
Tomei to Italy makes it that much better.
The idea is cute, while at the same time making the main character a bit
of a loony tune.
Not the Disney classic, which I actually
found rather shrill, or the Tim Burton 2010 version that was actually a sequel
and that I already named as a favorite in my journal, but an early Hollywood
production from 1933 featuring (get this) Gary Cooper as the White Knight and
Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle! The film
was impressive for being such an early production, but suffered mainly from the
main problems that plagued the Disney version in my opinion. Alice jumps from one silly event to another
with hardly any narrative structure to tie these isolated events together, so
there is no point. Oh, there’s the build
up to a confrontation with the Red Queen, but even this seems like just one
more weird and ridiculous adventure, and both tales end rather abruptly with
Alice waking up and realizing it was all just a dream. It didn’t work for that season of Dallas, and this is equally
pointless. Perhaps that’s the purpose of
the “literary nonsense” genre, but it doesn’t translate all that well to the
screen (and no, it didn’t work for The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy either).
Tim Burton’s sequel worked mostly because they found a way to make the
narrative work, so that it wasn’t just a series of non-related events. Burton’s sequel had a beginning, a middle,
and a satisfying ending in which the main character learns from these events
and changes, and so do some of the other characters, such as Johnny Depp’s Mad
Hater; this is something sorely missing from these other versions.
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