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Review
If you're going to make a weepy, there's no reason you can't make it with intelligence and insight as the makers of "My Sister's Keeper" have done. The audience manipulation -- if one wants to call it that -- comes from your understanding of these people and how this particular family operates in an atmosphere of love and mutual concern. The tragedy that forces its way into their midst is fought with tenacity, and the conflicts within the family are portrayed in such a manner that no one is a bad guy.
A film about a child with leukemia understandably has a small theatrical audience. Indeed, Jodi Picoult's novel, on which Jeremy Leven and director Nick Cassavetes' screenplay is based, might seem more at home on television, where illness, doctors and hospitals somehow feel less alarming. But "My Sister's Keeper" does benefit from a sagacious big-screen treatment: It allows for nuances and takes time to focus this story of an illness on all the people it affects.
The movie begins with a bit of misdirection when 11-year-old Anna (Abigail Breslin) sues her parents. It looks like you're headed into a fascinating legal drama dealing with a thorny ethical issue.
Anna has always known she is a "donor child." When her parents, Sara (Cameron Diaz) and Brian (Jason Patric), discover their first daughter, Kate (Sofia Vassilieva), has leukemia, they choose to conceive another child through genetic engineering who would be a perfect genetic match with Kate. Thus, Anna can donate blood or whatever else is necessary to keep her elder sister alive.
The two girls love each other dearly, so Anna never complains. Then, 11 years into this routine, Kate's kidneys are failing and she'll need one of Anna's. Anna finally says no. She hires a big-shot lawyer (Alec Baldwin), whose face adorns billboards and buses all over Los Angeles, and goes to court seeking her "medical emancipation." But her mom, who gave up a law practice to care for her ailing daughter, will make a ferocious opponent.
The movie isn't about a court battle. The film moves back and forth in time to show how decisions were made and how this illness impacts everyone, including older brother Jesse (Evan Ellingson), who at times feels overlooked because of his sisters' relay team in body parts. The movie reflects back on the joys and sorrows of a family and how love can be just as strong whether the answer is yes ... or no.
The film takes time giving you the background on everyone, and that includes the judge (Joan Cusack) who will decide the issue and a fellow cancer patient (Thomas Dekker) who becomes Kate's love interest.
OK, maybe everything is a little too neat, too perfect. If you're going to be in a hospital, you would want David Thornton's Dr. Chance for your doctor. He's compassionate, honest, smart and -- this element veering into science fiction -- always available for consultation.
You would want your mom to be running over everyone else's feelings in fighting for your life. You'd want a dad who continues to do his job -- as a fireman, no less! -- even though the illness marginalizes him within his own family. You'd want a brother and sister this loving, but would that ever happen?
The ugliness of the illness also is not depicted in detail. Even the vomiting is mostly offscreen. And the ending is dragged out unnecessarily. It is the one occasion where you might legitimately complain about manipulation.
Nevertheless, the actors work with a beguiling earnestness. Diaz goes without any discernible makeup and even shaves her head at one point (so her daughter won't feel "ugly" following chemotherapy.) All the work pays off: This family feels like a family and not an ensemble thrown together in the casting process. When they gather around Kate's hospital bed, the whole things seems very real. Thus, the tears.
Review
Near the beginning of Colette’s novel Chéri, she gives her young lover a necklace with 49 pearls. We can imagine there is one pearl for every year of her age. Her lover is 24 years younger than she. Therefore, 25. Six years pass. In a way, the movie "Chéri" is about how 25 and 49 are not the same as 31 and 55. Colette tells us their tragedy is they were destined to be the only perfect love in each other’s lives, yet were not born on the same day.
The success of Stephen Frears’ film "Chéri" begins with its casting. Michelle Pfeiffer, as Lea de Lonval, is still a great beauty, but nearing that age when a woman starts counting her pearls. Rupert Friend, as her lover Chéri, is 27 and looks younger — too young to play James Bond, although he was considered. They are both accomplished actors, which is important, because "Chéri" tells a story of nuance and insinuation, concealed feelings and hidden fears.
Lea is a courtesan, currently without court. She has a lot of money and lives luxuriously. Chéri is the son of a courtesan, Charlotte Peloux (Kathy Bates). She and Lea have been friends for years; courtesans may be rich and famous, but they cannot really talk freely with women not like themselves. Lea was constantly in the life of her friend’s son, named Fred but called Chéri ("darling") by one and all. One day, Madame Peloux comes to her and asks her to take in the boy. She does not quite say (as Lee Marvin tells a whore in "Paint Your Wagon") "I give you the boy. Give me back the man," but she might as well have.
Chéri is far from a virgin, but he needs some reining in. It turns out he accepts Lea’s saddle quite willingly. What begins as lovemaking quickly becomes love, and they float in a perfumed world of opulent comfort, Lea paying all the bills. The two things a courtesan cannot ever do are really fall in love and reveal what she is really thinking. Lea fails at the first.
You need not be told what happens in the story, or how thoughtless and cruel Chéri can be when it suits him. Be content to know that Lea knows sooner and Chéri later that what they had was invaluable and irreplaceable. Chéri became Colette’s most popular book because of its air of describing familiar lives with detached regret, and that is the tone Frears goes for: This is not a tearjerker, but a record of what can happen when people toy with their hearts.
How well I remember that day in 1983 when I walked across Blackfriar’s Bridge in London and came upon an obscure little used book shop and inside discovered a set of the works of Colette, small volumes, bound in matching maroon leatherette, with cloth bookmarks. I have been in awe of her writing ever since. When Donald Richie, the great authority on Japanese cinema, was moving to a smaller flat in Tokyo and had to perform triage on his library, he gave away Shakespeare, because he felt he had internalized him, but could not bring himself to give away Colette.
Colette, who was 81 when she died in 1954, is probably best known to you as the author of Gigi. After leaving an unfaithful first husband, Colette, already a successful author, supported herself as a music hall performer, knew many courtesans in the era of La Belle Epoque, had affairs with women, shocked tout le monde with the first onstage kiss between two women, married the editor of Le Matin and was divorced at 51 after she had an affair with his 20-year-old stepson. So Chéri is not entirely a work of the imagination.
Colette’s many books are considered difficult to film because much of what happens is based on emotions rather than events. This is a challenge Frears and his screenwriter, the British playwright Christopher Hampton, have accepted. The film is about how to behave when you live at a distance from your real feelings. It is fascinating to observe how Pfeiffer controls her face and voice during times of painful hurt. It is bad to feel pain, worse to reveal it; a courtesan has her pride.
The performances seem effective to me, including Bates as Charlotte, who like many an older prostitute plays a parody of her profession. Laugh, and the world laughs with you. The cinematography by Darius Khondji and costumes by Consolata Boyle are meticulous in evoking decadence. The most emotional moments at the end occur off-screen and are related by the narrator (Frears himself). That is as it should be. Some things don’t happen to people. They happen about them.
Review
The Islamic practice of stoning women and the Christian practice of burning them as witches are both born not from religious reasons but of a male desire to subjugate women and define them in terms of sexuality. Is this in dispute? Are there any theologians who support such actions? Of all the most severe punishments of both religions, this is the one most skewed against women, and the one most convenient for men.
To be sure, no witches have been burned at the stake in many long years, and few ever were. But women are still stoned to death in some Islamic countries, including Iran, where “The Stoning of Soraya M.” is set. The practice survives in backward rural areas, and the law turns a blind eye. It is rare, and Iran denies it, but the French journalist Freidoune Sahebjam’s best-selling The Stoning of Soraya M. (1994) appears to be quite authentic. A woman really was stoned to death on trumped-up adultery charges, brought for the convenience of her husband, who desired to marry a young girl.
Cyrus Nowrasteh’s “The Stoning of Soraya M.” does not dramatize this story in a subtle way. You might argue that the stoning of a woman to death is not a subtle subject. But it would be helpful to have it told in a way that shows how almost the entire population of a village allows it to happen, even though most of them know of the woman’s innocence and her husband’s vile motives. How does a lynch mob form? Instead, we’re given a village populated primarily by overacted villains and moral cowards.
Against them is one strong voice: the widow Zahra, Soraya’s aunt. She’s played by Shohreh Aghdashloo, the Oscar nominee from “House of Sand and Fog” (2003). She knows all the players and all the motives and publicly calls them on it, to no avail. She’s a “crazy woman,” says the husband, Ali (Navid Negahban). The phrase crazy woman can fall easily from the tongue, and it’s worth remembering that in Victorian England a wife could be locked in an asylum for life on only her husband’s signature (see the great novel The Quincunx).
Ali the husband is an immoral monster. His intended child bride has not been asked if she wants to marry him; the marriage has been arranged. The village mullah goes along because Ali threatens to blackmail him about an old prison sentence. The mayor knows it is wrong and doubts Allah desires it but lacks the courage to do much more than mutter.
The stoning sequence itself is one of the most unbearable experiences I have had at the movies. I learn it lasts nearly 20 minutes. Soraya (Mozhan Marno) is buried in a hole up to the waist. Village boys collect stones of a good throwing weight in a wheelbarrow. We see blow after blow, as blood pours from her face and body. She accepts this as her fate, as indeed it is. She did nothing that was not innocent and kind.
The stoning took place in 1986, after the Islamic Revolution. Fundamentalists were in power then and enforced their strictures. The measures they introduced are being challenged today in the streets of Iran, and similar extremism is the practice in our dear friend Saudi Arabia. Those with objections fear crushing reprisal. The enforcers have power, position and wealth to gain and dare their enemies to go against what they say is God’s will.
The message is that if a religion requires practices that seem evil to its members, they should resign from that religion. If it condones a death penalty that is visited unequally on members of a specific gender, race or class, it is immoral. There cannot be a reward for following it blindly, because only a thoughtful choice has meaning. At heaven’s gate you cannot say, “I always followed the herd.”
“The Stoning of Soraya M.” has such a powerful stoning sequence that I recommend it if only for its brutal ideological message. That the pitiful death of Soraya is followed by a false Hollywood upbeat ending involving tape recordings and silliness about a car that won’t start is simply shameful. Nowrasteh, born in Colorado, attended the USC Film School. Is that what they teach there? When you are telling the story of a woman being stoned to death, you may not be able to use everything you learned in class.
Review
Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker is a full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender, and twists your guts into a Gordian knot. Set during the last month in the year-long rotation of a three-man U.S. Army bomb squad stationed in Baghdad, it may be the only film made about Iraq—documentary or fiction—that gives us a true sense of what it feels like to be on the front lines of a war fought not in jungles but in cities, where bombs rise up from the ground instead of raining down from the sky, every narrow alley portends an ambush, and every onlooker is a potential insurgent. It's an experiential war movie—one that calls to mind the title of the 1950s docudrama series You Are There—but also a psychologically astute one, matching its intricate sensory architecture with an equally detailed map of the modern soldier's psyche, a diagram of what motivates the volunteers in a volunteer army.
The movie begins with a typically bracing set piece in which the soldiers of Bravo Company's Explosive Ordnance Disposal team come upon an IED planted in the center of a busy Baghdad marketplace. When their remote-controlled bomb-detonating robot hits a snag, the team's affable leader (Guy Pearce) dons a thick Kevlar suit and attempts to set the charge manually. He does not return. His replacement, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), is a career soldier of an entirely different breed, one who prefers to handle bombs up close and personally instead of by remote control, and whose Kevlar suit is part of his daily wardrobe—not just for special occasions. At first glance, Sgt. James seems like the closest thing to a stock character—the gonzo alpha male living out his childhood cowboy fantasies—in a picture markedly devoid of small-town rubes, poetry-quoting intellectuals, or any other easily reducible war-movie "types." But like most things in The Hurt Locker, there is considerably more to him than meets the eye. Beneath his blustery macho surface, he may be the movie's most intricately wired explosive device.
Written by former Voice columnist Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker belongs to that subset of Bigelow's work—including her biker-gang debut The Loveless and the bank-robbing-surfers caper Point Break—devoted to the ethos of hyper-masculine communities, the men who choose to live in them, and those who emerge as their leaders. Sgt. James is one such character, and Bigelow, Boal, and especially Renner excel at showing us how his reckless displays of bravado are both a coping mechanism and an addiction, a battlefield genius and a form of madness. A secular god with sports hero stats (873 disarmed bombs and counting!), he inspires envy in some, contempt in others, and both in the men under his command—two comparatively by-the-book sergeants (very well played by Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty) who also want to prove their mettle as men of war, as long as they go home in one piece. But for James, who has an ex-wife and child waiting for him somewhere, the adrenaline-rush alterna-reality of Iraq is vastly preferable to the home front, with its prison of domestic responsibility. Like the jacked-in wire trippers of Bigelow's futuristic Strange Days, he yearns for something more visceral, more cinematic than everyday life.
With her strength of revealing character through action, Bigelow comes closer to the tradition of Anthony Mann, Sam Fuller, and other bygone practitioners of the classic Hollywood war movie than to today's dominant breed of studio A-listers, who create (mostly incoherent) action at the expense of character. Not that The Hurt Locker, which I take to be the best American film since Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, much resembles any war movie we've ever seen before. Here, combat is more often a solitary rather than a group endeavor—a lone man tracing a rat's nest of wires back to its source, or exchanging long-distance fire with a single sniper across a vast desert expanse.
There is little, if any, talk about patriotism or homeland security, and there are fewer American flags on display than in any American war movie in memory. When The Hurt Locker premiered last fall at the Venice and Toronto film festivals, this prompted some observers to tag it as an "apolitical" war picture, which is really a way of saying that Bigelow's film is mercifully free of ham-fisted polemics. Instead of setting out to prove a point, it seeks to immerse us in an environment—something Bigelow does with a conceptual rigor usually associated with those directors whose work is confined to film societies and art houses.
Time is Bigelow's organizing principle here—the time left in Iraq for the men of Bravo company (displayed on the screen as chapter headings throughout), the time that ticks away between the discovery of a bomb and its eventual disarming or detonation, and the time that, in those unbearably tense moments, seems to stretch out indefinitely toward the horizon. War may be hell, but in The Hurt Locker, it's also an incredibly pellucid waking dream.
Review
JENNIFER Lynch, the spawn of David Lynch, has returned to spew "Surveillance," which is either a ludicrously bad movie or a parody of same. Either way, it's pretty funny.
Julia Ormond and Bill Pullman play FBI agents who arrive in a small town on the ol' lonely highway to grill cops and motorists about a murder rampage/traffic wreck. Much debate about who might be telling the truth suggests the aim is a grindhouse "Rashomon."
Entirely gratuitous violence, a masked freak, a chuckling maniac, girl-on-girl action and screamingly bizarre dialogue ("Bring the butter! We're gonna have toast!") amp up the camp factor in a second film from the woman who gave us the 1993 cinematic anti-legend "Boxing Helena." Unlike Lynch's father's latest, "Inland Empire," this one isn't a bore. It may enjoy a life in the after-midnight slots of obscure pay-TV channels.
A viewing state of nonsobriety is strongly recommended.
Review
With machines that are impressively more lifelike, and characters that are more and more like machines, "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" takes the franchise to a vastly superior level of artificial intelligence. As for human intelligence, it's primarily at the service of an enhanced arsenal of special effects, which helmer Michael Bay deploys like a general launching his very own shock-and-awe campaign on the senses. Otherwise, little seems new compared to the first installment, except that this version is longer, louder, and perhaps "more than your eye can meet" in one sitting. It will reap similar B.O. rewards worldwide.
Kicking off where the initial entry ended, part two of an eventual trilogy continues to carry Hasbro's toys and cartoons of the '80s to the heights of 21st-century CGI and moviemaking technology. Focusing even more on what auds seemed to appreciate last time around -- that is, the stupefying sight of colossal alien robots morphing quite realistically into earthly contraptions, and vice versa -- the plot serves as merely a pretext to showcase lots of well-designed creations, which run the gamut from a remote-control toy car to an actual Stealth fighter.
After a prologue set in 17,000 B.C., we once again team up with U.S. Army grunts Capt. Lennox (Josh Duhamel) and Sergeant Epps (Tyrese Gibson), now members of an elite squad called NEST, which uses humans and Autobots to hunt down rogue Decepticons across the globe. Hoping to free their leader, Megatron (voiced by Hugo Weaving), who was previously imprisoned at the bottom of the ocean (why he wasn't melted down into scrap metal is a question only franchises can answer), the baddies are hoping to uncover the remaining shards of the powerful cube ("the Spark") that was destroyed at the end of the first pic.
As was the case before, nerd-cum-hero/heartthrob Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) happens to hold the key to the Decepticons' shot at world domination. Only this time, he's left both his goofy parents (Kevin Dunn, Julie White) and hot mechanic g.f. (Megan Fox) behind for a college whose students all look like twentysomething actors, and whose frat parties seem to take place at expensive strip clubs. In fact, on his first night out, Sam is treated to a sort of lap dance by a Decepticon posing as a nymphomaniacal freshman -- one of several more overtly sexual nods in this episode (including a shot of John Turturro in a G-string).
Cutting schematically between the military's efforts to thwart the Decepticons and Sam's prophesying tics (scribbling foreign symbols, speaking in tongues) provoked by the Spark, the opening hour culminates in a massive, forest-set battle that leaves the Autobots' leader, Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen), ripe for the junkyard.
Like the other extensive combat scenes -- including a closing, all-out war that appears to take place in the same desert location as in the first movie -- the sheer amount of ripping steel, exploding mechanical parts and mutating vehicles of all shapes and sizes is something to behold. Industrial Light & Magic's superb handling of these sequences, which are like a little boy's playtime fantasy taken to Wagnerian proportions, are the veritable centerpieces of a narrative that makes little effort to set up the fights.
The effects are captured in varying earth tones by d.p. Ben Seresin ("Best Laid Plans"), who does a terrific job matching the CG and live-action sequences, while delving into Bay's usual combo of a few slow-motion dramatic moments and lots of widescreen, airborne pandemonium. Likewise, a new team of editors pieces everything together seamlessly.
A few surprises arrive in the second half -- involving bigger, deadlier pieces of metal, including a character, the Fallen (Tony Todd), that gives the pic its title -- when the action heads to Egypt and Jordan. But returning scribes Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman -- joined this time by Ehren Kruger ("The Ring," "The Brothers Grimm") -- seem to be mining conventional motifs from "The Mummy" and "Indiana Jones" series.
Although the writers propose a similar dose of tongue-in-cheek dialogue for Sam, his parents and his techie roommate (played by Ramon Rodriguez of "The Wire"), the actors often have to shout it over constant music or thunderous bursts of crunching hardware. LaBeouf has a few strong moments during the college-set scenes, and Turturro -- whose character has been demoted from a government agent to a butcher in a Brooklyn deli -- once again offers some much-needed zaniness in the heavy later stages.
But the true stars here are the Transformers themselves, who continually steal the spotlight from the flesh-and-blood cast, even in scenes of tragic death or comic relief usually reserved for real actors.
"If God made us in his image," ponders Optimus Prime early on, "then who made him?" If such a question seems to be hinting at a veritable Autobot creation myth, it may explain why humans here have become backseat drivers to these extremely cool cars.
Camera (Deluxe color, widescreen), Ben Seresin; editors, Roger Barton, Thomas Muldoon, Joel Negron, Paul Rubell; music, Steve Jablonsky; production designer, Nigel Phelps; supervising art director, Jon Billington; art director, Julian Ashby, Naaman Marshall, Ben Procter; set designers, C. Scott Baker, Jann K. Engel; set decorator, Jennifer Williams; costume designer, Deborah L. Scott; sound (Dolby Digital/DTS/SDDS), Geoffrey Patterson; supervising sound editors, Ethan Van der Ryn, Erik Aadahl; re-recording mixers, Greg P. Russell, Gary Summers; visual effects supervisor, Richard Kidd; visual effects, Industrial Light & Magic, Asylum, Digital Domain; special effects supervisor, Wayne Toth; stunt coordinators, Kenny Bates, Bob Brown; associate producer, Matthew Cohan; assistant directors, K.C. Hodenfield, Bruce Moriarty; second unit director, Bates; casting, Denise Chamian. Reviewed at Odeon Leicester Square, London, June 15, 2009. (In Los Angeles Film Festival -- Special Screenings.) MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 149 MIN.
Review
Dawn-of-time music thunders portentously from the soundtrack as a band of primitive hunters track down a wild boar. For about 30 seconds of "Year One," we could be watching a drama - or something even more ridiculously straight-faced and somber, such as a historical re-enactment in a TV documentary. And then one of the hunters screws up, badly, and we meet Jack Black as Zed, an overly confident, loudmouth caveman who somehow can't find his place in prehistoric culture.
"Year One" has one joke, but it's a good one, played for many variations over the course of an often very funny comedy: It's the contrast between the modern sensibility embodied by Black and Michael Cera and that of a brutal, early period of history. The comedy turns on the spectacle of a pair of modern-seeming people who keep finding that their best attributes - wit, sensitivity, loquaciousness, inventiveness - are completely useless in a world in which courtship consists of hitting a girl over the head with a club and dragging her back to the hut.
Black and Cera's comic styles are quite different. Onscreen, Black's persona tends to be self-promoting and easily exasperated, a character in constant collision with his environment, who acts before he thinks and tries to get by on bluff. Cera, by contrast, is watchful and paranoid, sardonic and full of dread, and thinks hard before he commits himself in any direction. These contrasts make them a superb comic duo, and so does their one similarity: They both operate under the implicit assumption that the world is a threatening place that must be mastered, either by forceful action (Black) or careful thought (Cera).
Actually, Black and Cera have something else in common: They are both very skilled, very precise comedians. In the case of Black, this is well known, and in the case of Cera, it's no surprise, considering his performance in "Superbad." Still, it's a striking thing to find a 21-year-old actor with such self-assurance, such innate timing and such a thorough understanding of himself as a screen entity. Even Buster Keaton and Chaplin didn't really get under way until they were about 25.
Director Harold Ramis, who wrote the story and co-wrote the screenplay, never lets "Year One" settle. He keeps the plot moving, introducing new elements and finding new opportunities for comedy. He mines each environment for laughs and moves onto another, and he doesn't worry about anachronisms.
And so the two cavemen, presumably living about 20,000 years ago, come down from the mountains and run into the farmers, Cain (David Cross) and Abel (Paul Rudd).
Soon we find ourselves in early biblical times, with Zed and Oh (Cera) running into Abraham (circa 2000 B.C.) at a crucial moment. "We are the Hebrews," Abraham announces, "righteous people, but not very good at sports."
Abraham tells them about Sodom and Gomorrah, which he describes as horrible cities in which people drink and celebrate all day, and where the women are so licentious that sex is given freely, to anyone, just for the asking. Watch Black's face as he hears this description. His eyes practically roll up into his head as he tries to figure out how to politely ask for directions.
"Year One" is not always laugh-out-loud funny, but it's always lively. After 30 years of writing and sometimes directing some very fine comedies ("Groundhog Day," "Analyze This," "Caddyshack," "Ghostbusters," "Animal House," "Stripes"), Ramis knows exactly what it takes to hold an audience's attention in comedy. Every character is made vivid and absurd, from the breezy but wicked Cain, to the righteous but oblivious Abraham (who thinks everybody should want to be circumcised), to the flamboyant (and hirsute) high priest of Sodom (Oliver Platt).
Ramis never lets his guard down, never gives the audience a chance to relax, even if it means hanging a lead character upside down and making him urinate on his own face. There's no vulgar or not vulgar here, just funny or not funny. "Year One" shows what has been true since the beginning of time: that it's anything for a laugh.
-- Advisory: Sexual situations and crude humor.
Review
Bottom Line: Diverting romantic antic about a sham engagement is sparked by the bright chemistry and comic timing of Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds.
Sandra Bullock is one of the most likable and skilled comedians in movies today, but she hasn't had a comedy hit since the first "Miss Congeniality" nine years ago. That's about to change with "The Proposal," an engaging, well-crafted lark that proves "high concept" isn't necessarily a tired tactic.
Bullock also is talented enough to play convincingly against her genial image here as the proverbial boss from hell, Margaret Tate, a hard-driving New York book editor. Choreographer-turned-director Anne Fletcher ("27 Dresses," "Step Up") delivers a well-paced, highly attractive production. Summer audiences, especially the female segment, should have no hesitation accepting this "Proposal."
Peter Chiarelli's script borrows a page or two from "The Devil Wears Prada" in the opening scenes, as Margaret's fearsome reputation literally precedes her among her frantic office staff. Chief among these is her younger, underappreciated assistant, Andrew Paxton (Ryan Reynolds), who harbors his own ambitions to become an editor.
Margaret has been so focused on her career, she's neglected a few legalities and is suddenly informed that she faces deportation to her native Canada. Desperate to keep her job, she impulsively "confesses" that she and Andrew are engaged to be married. Andrew grudgingly agrees to the charade, on condition that he finally gets that book editor position.
The forced romance coincides with a major family celebration back in Andrew's hometown of Sitka, Alaska, where, Margaret discovers, the Paxton tribe is a very big, affluent deal. Andrew's mother, Grace (Mary Steenburgen), is warm and welcoming, but his formidable dad, Joe (Craig T. Nelson), who has always resented his son's rejection of the family business, is skeptical about this older woman in Andrew's life.
And then there's Annie, the outspoken and mischievous 90-year-old matriarch played with scene-stealing ebullience by TV icon Betty White. Also in the mix is Gertrude (Malin Akerman of "Watchmen"), the sweet, pretty Alaska girl Andrew abandoned for the big city.
Chiarelli's script mines all the fish-out-of-water humor of the business-dressed, cell phone-dependent Margaret's immersion in the more laid-back and sometimes downright odd culture of picturesque Sitka (actually doubled by towns in Massachusetts).
Starting the film as a borderline caricature of an unpleasant workaholic, Bullock convincingly peels back the layers of Margaret, revealing the pain behind her steely facade and the vulnerability that surfaces as she and Andrew get to know each other better amid the tense masquerade. By midpoint, we're actually rooting for this erstwhile office gargoyle.
It helps immeasurably that Bullock has tremendous chemistry with Reynolds. The former TV actor and "Van Wilder" cutup has been getting a lot of work lately but hasn't quite broken through as a star. "The Proposal" should remedy that.
He matches Bullock's comic timing note for note and conveys all of Andrew's frustration, exasperation and growing attraction to Margaret. (His remarkably fit physique also is a boxoffice plus.) The situations might be formulaic, but the teamwork of the two leads brings them to sparkling life.
Review
Not everything works in Woody Allen’s first New York–based movie in five years (he’s gone European). Whatever Works feels like something out of time and, worse, out of step. Hell, Allen wrote the script back in the 1970s for Zero Mostel. The grumpy old Jew at the center of this comedy of complaints — divorced physicist and two–time suicide attempter Boris Yellnikoff — is played not by Allen, 73, but by Larry David, 61. Allen wanted to go younger and angrier. Enter David, the fulminating joke engine of Curb Your Enthusiasm, whose Boris kvetches at the camera (meaning us) just like Allen’s Alvy Singer did in Annie Hall in 1977. “The universe is expanding,” a worried young Alvy tells his mother. Her retort, “What is that your business?” is a call to arms. Boris has made the universe his business. He thinks we’re racing toward extinction while space and time laugh at “our sad little hopes and dreams.”
(Watch Peter Travers' video review of Whatever Works.)
Boris is moving on down from the East Side to a funky crib near Chinatown. He rants at colleagues (Michael McKean, Conleth Hill) and kids he calls “submental cretins.” Allen’s characters have trouble expressing rage. As Woody said in Manhattan, “I grow a tumor instead.” Not Boris. He rails against the “mindless zombies” eating away at the city’s intellectual life.
(Get more news and reviews from Peter Travers on the Travers Take)
Into the toxic space of this misanthrope comes Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), a runaway Dixie beauty queen just past jailbait age. Think Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s before she started hooking. Wood is totally beguiling in the role, absorbing Boris’ cynicism but still charming him into marriage. Though we never see Boris macking on his bride, there is an “ew” reference to Viagra. The laughs fly when Melody’s God–fearing mom, Marietta (the captivating Patricia Clarkson steals every scene she’s in), hits the Big Apple to bring her baby home and stays to become hilariously corrupted. And that’s it for spoilers. On its way to an ending of surprising serenity, Whatever Works stutters and stumbles. Allen is covering familiar ground, and the timely reference to Obama just seems wrong. But no true movie fan will want to miss the comic mind–meld of Woody and Larry. On that level, at least, there’s no need to curb your enthusiasm.
Review
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Thanks to the smart, expertly shot documentary "Food, Inc.," I now know why it's so hard to find a supermarket tomato that tastes like, well, a tomato. That's because tomatoes, like so much of our food, aren't farmed or grown as much as they are engineered to satisfy rigid corporate and economic mandates.
And don't get producer-director Robert Kenner started on beef, chicken, pork or that No. 1 public enemy: corn -- the manipulated mass production of each is concisely and rivetingly scrutinized here.
Suffice it to say, after the film's disturbing glimpses inside the meat industry, along with its blunt indictment of fast food giants, you'll think twice before eating just about anything nonorganic.
This is, of course, a good -- and doable -- thing, even if the handful of multinational companies that control the bulk of our nation's food supply won't be thrilled with Kenner's vivid portrayal of their near-Orwellian methods of doing business. The U.S. government doesn't get off scot-free here either.
The film also gives an eloquent array of writers, activists and farmers time to enlighten us about the perils on our plates, but not without offering hope for a safer future. "Food, Inc." is essential viewing.
Review
THE hills are alive with the sound of skiers screaming for their lives as they battle a battalion of Nazi zombies left over from World War II.
It's not that the seven horny young vacationers (one couple gets it on in an outhouse) weren't warned.
On their first night in a remote cabin in the Norwegian Alps, they have a visitor who cautions, "There's an evil presence here."
There sure is, and it takes the form of uniformed Nazi troops driven into the hills by locals during the war, never to be seen again -- until now.
Under director/co-writer Tommy Wirkola, "Dead Snow" recalls countless other splatterfests, especially Sam Rami's 1983 "The Evil Dead."
But Wirkola keeps the narrative taut, wasting not a frame; and he throws in funny moments, one involving a Nazi's icky intestine. Matt Weston's cinematography adds to the twisted charm.
