It’s time to play the music. It’s time to light the lights…

It’s been more than a decade since Kermit and the gang were together on the big screen and this movie’s plot is all about reuniting them. It begins with a trip to the now decrepit Muppet studios in Hollywood by the world’s biggest Muppets fan, Walter (a Muppet himself although he doesn’t realize it yet), and his friends Gary (Jason Segel) and Mary (Amy Adams). While they’re there, Walter overhears a plot by nefarious oilman Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) to gain ownership of the place so he can tear it down and drill for oil.  Walter is devastated.

The only way to save the studio is for Kermit the Frog to come up with ten million dollars. Walter, Gary and Mary track him down at his run-down Bel Air mansion and convince him he’s got to try to do it. They set out to find the rest of the gang so they can stage a Muppet telethon to raise the money. The first stop is Reno, where Fozzie Bear is performing with a “tribute” act called “The Moopets.” They track down Gonzo, who’s now a plumbing magnate, and Animal, who’s in rehab for anger management. Then they tell us it’s ”time for a montage” as they pick up the rest of the cast – except for Miss Piggy. She proves a bit more difficult to convince. After all, she’s built a new life for herself as the plus-size editor of Vogue in Paris.

Then it’s a race against time to convince a network, any network, to air their telethon and find a celebrity host. Will they get the show together in time? Will they raise the money to save the studios? It’s a Muppet movie – what do you think? It’s all about the journey, not the destination with the Muppets. And there are classic Muppet elements all along the way: musical numbers – some that, admittedly, I thought dragged a bit – characters breaking the fourth wall – like that “time for a montage” reference – and celebrity cameos galore.

For me, a Muppets fan from back in the day, it was just right and it plays well to the next generation too. My eight-year old movie companion says he loved it too because it was “funny and so cool.” He particularly enjoyed when Miss Piggy jumped on Kermit, and Fozzie’s fart shoes were “hilarious and so farty that they made me laugh like heck!” This movie’s a winner for all ages. Enjoy the show!

Mark Wahlberg is a knockout as boxer-on-the-rise “Irish” Micky Ward. But it’s Christian Bale who really steals the show as Micky’s half-brother and trainer, Dicky Ecklund, a former boxer himself whose addiction to crack cocaine threatens to sink his own life and career – and possibly Micky’s too.

The women of The Fighter are powerhouses in their own right. Melissa Leo (from Homicide: Life on the Street) is absolutely amazing as Micky’s mother and manager. She is the matriarch of a large Irish brood near Boston that closes ranks around Micky and Dicky when “outsiders” like Micky’s girlfriend Charlene (Amy Adams) intrude on their dysfunctional family dynamic.

Melissa Leo

Amy Adams

For some reason, I didn’t expect to like Adams (Enchanted, Doubt, Junebug) in this movie, but she more than holds her own. I just hope that Adams and Leo don’t cancel each other out in the “best supporting actress” category come awards time. They are both very good.

The Fighter is ultimately a gritty feel-good movie that will surely draw comparisons to Rocky (the first one – not two through six!), Cinderella Man, Ali, Raging Bull and whatever other boxing films may come to mind. But that’s okay. The genre lends itself to tales of inspiration, redemption, guts and glory. And this movie has all those things. Thankfully it’s not too heavy on the blood and gore, and there’s enough comic relief to balance the intensity. Sure, The Fighter has some elements of predictability that can’t be avoided when you’re dealing with a screenplay based on a true story, real-life characters (in every sense of the word), and a well-documented journey toward a championship match. But overall, I am firmly in The Fighter’s corner.

Looking for a good chick flick rental? Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is the perfect little piece of fluff. Set in London between the wars, it stars Frances McDormand as Guinevere Pettigrew, a middle aged governess who is let go from her job with no severance. The agency won’t give her another assignment, but she overhears a phone call about a job working for an American singer/actress and pretends to be the “social secretary” they were looking for. The American actress named Delysia (sounds like delicious) Lafosse is played by the ever-bubbly Amy Adams.

Delysia is young, pretty and ambitious. She is living with a nightclub owner (Mark Strong), flirting outrageously with a young theater producer (Tom Payne) to get the lead in his next play, and actually in love with a piano player (Lee Pace) who works with her at the nightclub. And juggling all these men and her very busy social schedule requires some help. Guinevere steps in, gets a quick makeover from her new boss, and just like Mary Poppins, she helps Delysia and everyone else sort out their problems. Of course, she mostly uses her common sense honesty, which seems quite foreign to all the high society folk that Delysia hangs out with.

Added to the mix is a handsome ladies’ underwear designer played by Ciarán Hinds who takes a shine to Guinevere, but has a fiancée who knows her secret. The entire film takes place in just one day and takes Guinevere from the streets to high society and back. But fear not, love wins out for both of the girls. Frances McDormand is lovely as Miss Pettigrew and Amy Adams is perfectly cast as the flighty ingénue. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is not deep, but it is a nice, sweet diversion for a couple of hours.

I would say rent this if you are a big Amy Adams fan, or if you are needing to feel like your life is at least better than some other people’s. Just once, I would like to see Amy Adams get mad or bitchy. I don’t think she can. And to me that makes roles like this somewhat beyond her. You want to see something affect that sunny demeanor and nothing does, even when her sister nearly destroys the company. Maybe it isn’t her fault; could be the contrived script or the new director, but I really don’t care who is at fault. The rest of the cast, especially Emily Blunt as the sister, are very good. I put this in the skip it pile.

In a nutshell, George is married to Madeline, an outsider art dealer in Chicago. She hears about a great artist who just happens to live in the same town as her husband’s family somewhere in North Carolina. They go to see the artist and she meets his family for the first time. Mom is a bitch. Dad silent. The brother pissed off at the world. And the Amy Adams character Ashley is married to the pissy brother. She is the only one that talks to anyone and she is very childlike, very pregnant and about to give birth. There is a bit of intrigue about whether a New York gallery is going after the artist the gallery owner is there for. But that works itself out. We never find out why everyone is so disfunctional. There is no big scene or confrontation. This was also nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for best first screenplay. All I can figure is the pickin’s were slim that year. I did watch it all the way to the end, hoping that something would happen. [***SPOILER ALERT***]

Something does happen. Ashley loses the baby. But nothing happens. Her husband, mother-in-law, and father-in-law all leave her in the hospital and George stays to comfort her. Then he and his wife leave to go back to Chicago. Do not bother sitting through this dreck. Released in 2005.

The story is two women separated by 50+ years find themselves at loose ends and both of them find their salvation through food. Julia Child happens to be stationed with her Foreign Service husband in France and boredom takes her to cooking school at the Cordon Bleu which leads her to write that first cookbook which launched her onto the American culinary scene. The Julie is Julie Powell, a young woman just about to turn 30, working for some government agency dealing with the 9/11 victims, who decides to take a year and cook her way through Julia Child’s first cookbook and blog about it. It is a way for her to reignite her once promising writing career.

Cutting back and forth between the modern Julie’s trials and tribulations and Julia’s mostly wonderful escapades we are supposed to draw some connection, yet there really isn’t any. They are very different women with very different attitudes and lives. Amy Adams as Julie is not entirely lovable. Sure, you want her to succeed, but mostly, you just want the story to get back to Julia and her husband played wonderfully warm and sexy by Stanley Tucci. It’s like the Julia part is the meat with a wonderful buttery sauce and the Julie part is, well, just a side dish. Julie has mean girlfriends and a not so nice Mom and a dreary job. All she really has is the blog and a nice husband. But Julia lives in Paris, or Marseille or Oslo, having been stationed in China before. She has a life. She goes to the Cordon Bleu and shops at the street markets in Paris. That’s the meat. And she is alive to the ends of her toes. It is one of those performances where you feel sorry for the other actors in the movie. Meryl must have had such fun with this role. We all do our Julia Child impressions, but she got to get inside it and live it.

Be prepared to leave hungry, but not for anything without butter. I am sitting here craving a baguette and butter to dip into a big pot of boeuf bourguignon. I do have my very nice glass of red. And my cookbooks. Time for a dinner party.

“Life itself is the proper binge.” –Julia Child

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