This Means War

Chris Pine (Star Trek, Unstoppable) and Tom Hardy (Inception,Warrior) play CIA agents whose brotherly bond is tested when they fall for the same girl, played by chick-flick veteran Reese Witherspoon (Water for Elephants, Legally Blonde, Sweet Home Alabama). She, in turn, falls for both of them – unaware that they know each other and are using the tools of their trade to surveil and sabotage her romantic encounters.

As Lauren struggles to pick one guy over the other, her best friend – played by Chelsea Handler (for all intents and purposes, as herself) – offers a myriad of crude, crass and comical advice. The love triangle turns dangerous for everybody when a bad guy with a grudge against FDR (Pine) and Tuck (Hardy) tracks them down to Los Angeles, where the obligatory gunfight and car chase ensues. Thus, the action-adventure part.

The plot is thin. The acting is shallow. And I don’t really buy Witherspoon’s character ending up with either of these guys. But what can I say? I still kinda liked it. Chalk it up to the post-Oscar-nom February Fluff Factor. And the eye candy.

The Vow stars Channing Tatum (Dear John, Step Up 2) and Rachel McAdams (The Time Traveler’s Wife, Morning Glory) as Leo and Paige, a couple of newlyweds whose vows are put to the test when Paige emerges from a coma with severe memory loss. She does not remember her husband – at all. As Leo struggles to woo Paige all over again, Paige struggles to reconcile a past that she remembers, with a present that’s a total blank.

The ingredients are all there for a classic chick flick, but the batter is only half-baked. Tatum and McAdams are cute and endearing early on, but the chemistry between them fizzles as the storyline takes some turns that feel predictable, forced, or unconvincing.

The Vow is inspired by a true story, so that’s enough to amp up the sap factor and keep you rooting for the couple – in real life as well as on-screen. But don’t be too quick to drag your Valentine to this one. You’ll both have more fun at the shallow but more entertaining This Means War (a romantic action comedy with sneak previews on Valentine’s Day and opening nationwide on Friday).

The Kevin we need to talk about is the demon child born to young Eva and Franklin played by Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly. From the beginning, he torments his mother and acts like the angel when his dad is around. And so of course, Dad doesn’t believe Mom when she speaks ill of her child. Kevin manipulates Eva and revels in her pain, but he’s not a horror movie character like Damien in The Omen. Instead, this is a more nuanced character and the story unfolds in flashback. As the film begins Eva is struggling to cope with her post-catastrophe life. Someone has thrown red paint on her car and her house and she is heading out to interview for a menial job at a travel agency. In bits and piece we learn that Kevin killed a bunch of his schoolmates in a Columbine-style massacre, and as much as Eva knew how damaged her son was, she was powerless to do anything about it.

Watching We Need To Talk About Kevin is like watching a train wreck. You know exactly what is coming and yet it is so well done, you cannot look away. Fortunately, the major part of the violence is off screen. Tilda Swinton is amazing as a mother who is trying everything she can to get through to the son whose psycho inner life only she knows. And the two boys who play the son as a young boy, then as a teenager are scary good at portraying a very smart little monster. It is hard to recommend this to most people because the subject matter is so disturbing, but it has stayed with me. It is unlike anything else I’ve seen. And if you can get past the basic idea of it, it is amazingly good film making.

 Man on a Ledge

Sam Worthington plays Nick Cassidy, an ex-cop who’s sent to prison for stealing a giant diamond from a wealthy and shifty businessman (Ed Harris). When Nick is allowed to attend his father’s funeral, he pulls off a daring escape and plants himself on the ledge of a high-rise hotel in Manhattan and proclaims his innocence. A police psychologist who ‘lost’ her last jumper attempts to talk him down, as a whole other series of events unfolds in a building across the street.

That’s all you’ll get out of me plot-wise.

Man on a Ledge is reminiscent of the 1998 movie The Negotiator with Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey. Both involve dirty cops, conspiracies and who-can-you-trust conundrums. The acting in The Negotiator was more intense, but Man on a Ledge does manage to keep you on the edge of your seat, with the constant sensation that you might fall off. So if you have vertigo or a fear of heights, rent The Negotiator instead.

If you’re in the mood for a combination thriller, psychological drama and heist movie that doesn’t cut too deep, then take the leap and catch Man on a Ledge.

The plot is a convoluted, and I get pretty tired of watching a woman get knocked around by men, even if she can take care of herself and ends up dispatching them one by one. Haywire will certainly not go down as one of Soderbergh’s hits. It isn’t a total miss, but it could use the some of the intelligent plotting of Traffic, or some of the wit of Ocean’s Eleven. Mostly it suffers from the lack of a female star who could make you care that everyone is trying to killer her. I’d say wait to watch this one on an airplane.

A Better Life is the story of an undocumented Mexican father and his teenage son living in East Los Angeles. Single dad Carlos played by Bichir works as a gardener and is struggling to take care of his son Luis (José Julián), though they don’t see all that much of each other. Luis is busy being a teenager, hanging with his friends who are headed towards becoming gang bangers, while Carlos works long hours around rich white people in Beverly Hills and Malibu. When his partner decides he’s ready to retire back in Mexico and sells him his truck with all his tools, Carlos grabs the chance to move up in the world and give his son some real security. But when the truck and tools are stolen, Carlos and Luis are forced to work together to hunt them down.

While the script is at times a bit heavy handed with its message about the the class divide and the injustices of the immigrant experience, the film really belongs to Carlos. His love of his child informs everything he does, and when it seems that he will be separated from Luis, you know he will do whatever he has to to get back to him. A Better Life was directed by Chris Weitz who directed The Twilight Saga: New Moon, but also another touching male bonding film, About a Boy. He knows how to fill very small scenes with meaning. And Demián Bichir’s performance is exceedingly earnest, rivaling Jean Dujardin (The Artist) for expressiveness, though in a much more subtle way. The film definitely has an indie vibe – character driven with a story intimate in scope. It is worth seeing. It may or may not get another life in theaters now that it has the nomination, but for this movie DVD viewing would be fine. Bring tissues.

If you watch Weeds, you will recognize Demián Bichir as Esteban Reyes, mayor of Tijuana, drug boss, and father of Nancy’s baby.

The Iron Lady is one of those flashback retellings of a life that is just a little too constructed and non-contextual for my taste. We meet Maggie Thatcher in her last days as she is suffering from dementia and wandering around talking to her dead husband (Jim Broadbent). As she putters around the house alternately dealing with her many handlers, her grown daughter, and the ghost of Mr. Thatcher, she looks back over her political life, and her rise to become the first and only female Prime Minister of England. She begins as a very working class girl, the proverbial shopkeeper’s daughter who gets into Oxford and then scratches her way into the male dominated political field and all the way to the top. Along the way, she marries and has twins, but mostly they are peripheral. The conspicuously missing piece is what drove this woman and what was really happening around her. Why were they rioting in the streets? Why did she hate unions? What was it about the Falklands that was worth having hundreds of young men die? I think this may be one of those scripts that assumes the audience knows the history. (We Yanks did not.)

There is a scene near the end where she is so over-the-top horrible to one of her long-time political allies that she turns the whole party against her, but we don’t know why. Was it the early onset of dementia or was she drinking? Or maybe she was just a bitch? The film has lots of little moments that don’t quite make sense. You also have no sense of what is historic fact and what is total fiction. I think there is probably a great story to be told about Thatcher. Sure, I hated her politics, but she was charismatic and intelligent enough to make it to the top despite her class and her sex, and to stand among the most powerful people of her time. Sadly, The Iron Lady does not do her justice. Meryl aside, I’d skip it.

As of this writing Meryl Streep has been nominated all over the place and won the Golden Globe for her performance.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

First-time actor Thomas Horn (a former Kid’s Week champion on Jeopardy!) plays Oskar Schell, a possibly autistic boy whose father (Tom Hanks) dies in the collapse of the World Trade Center. A year later, still reeling from the loss, Oskar finds a key hidden among his father’s belongings. He’s convinced that his father meant for him to find the key – and the lock it goes to. So Oskar embarks on a mission/journey that takes him through the five boroughs and into the homes and businesses of a vast array of characters who are all struggling in one way or another. It kind of reminded me of Pay It Forward.

Oskar is distant with his mother (Sandra Bullock), but he does allow one person in on his plan: a mute old man (superbly played by Max von Sydow) who lives at his grandmother’s apartment building across the way.

The movie starts off slow – and stays that way for well over an hour – but it packs a powerful emotional punch in the end. If you could judge a movie by the number of tissues I massacre in the final five minutes, then Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close would get a thumbs-up. However, since the first two hours failed to bowl (or bawl) me over, I can only give it an “eh”.

Joyful Noise

The two women rarely see eye-to-eye, and it gets even worse when G.G’s rebellious grandson Randy (Jeremy Jordan) comes to town and sets his romantic sights on Vi’s “good girl” daughter Olivia (Kiki Palmer).

Ultimately, everyone must work together to achieve harmony if they are to have a prayer of winning the prestigious Joyful Noise national church choir competition in Los Angeles. The whole town is counting on them. Can they do it?

If you have a little faith in Hollywood endings, you probably know the answer.