• Review: “The Great Gatsby”
  • Review: “Mud”
  • Review: “The Place Beyond the Pines”
  • Review: “Ginger & Rosa”
  • Review: “Stoker”
  • Review: “Side Effects”
  • Review: “Mama”
  • Review: “Zero Dark Thirty”
  • Review: “Gangster Squad”
  • Review: “Les Misérables”
  • Review: “This Is 40”
  • Review: “Any Day Now”
  • Review: “Anna Karenina”
  • Review: “Silver Linings Playbook”
  • Review: “Hitchcock”
  • Review: “Lincoln”
  • Review: “Life of Pi”
  • Review: “Flight”
  • Review: “Skyfall”
  • Review: “Argo”
  • Review: “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”
  • Review: “Looper”
  • Reviews: “Arbitrage” and “The Master”
  • Review: “The Words”
  • Review: “Celeste and Jesse Forever”
  • Review: “Lawless”
  • Review: “The Campaign”
  • Review: “Total Recall”
  • Review: “To Rome with Love”
  • Review: “The Dark Knight Rises”
  • Review: “Moonrise Kingdom”
  • Review: “Magic Mike”
  • Review: “The Amazing Spider-Man”
  • Review: “Brave”
  • Review: “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”
  • Review: “Prometheus”
  • Review: “Snow White and the Huntsman”
  • Review: “Bernie”
  • Review: “The Dictator”
  • Review: “The Raven”
  • Reviews: “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” and “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”
  • Review: “Chimpanzee”
  • Review: “The Cabin in the Woods”
  • Review: “American Reunion”
  • Review: “Detachment”
  • Review: “The Hunger Games”
  • Review: “Casablanca” (In Re-Release; 1 Night Only)
  • Review: “Silent House”
  • Review: “Wanderlust”
  • Review: “This Means War”
  • Review: “Safe House”
  • Review: “The Woman In Black”
  • Review: “The Grey”
  • Review: “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”
  • Review: “Contraband”
  • Review: “Shame” and “Young Adult”
  • Review: “War Horse”
  • Review: “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”
  • Review: “Like Crazy”
  • Review: “Hugo”
  • Review: “The Descendants”
  • Review: “My Week with Marilyn”
  • Review: “J. Edgar”
  • Review: “In Time”
  • Review: “Take Shelter”
  • Review: “The Thing”
  • Review: “The Ides of March”
  • Review: “Dream House”
  • Review: “50/50”
  • Review: “Moneyball”
  • Review: “Abduction”
  • Review: “Drive”
  • Review: “Contagion”
  • Review: “The Debt”
  • Review: “Our Idiot Brother”
  • Review: “The Help”
  • Review: “Fright Night”
  • Review: “Beginners”
  • Review: “Crazy Stupid Love”
  • Review: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Tag Archives: ewan mcgregor

2012 Best Actress: Will it be Watts?

22 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

action, alvarez belons, best actress, disaster films, ewan mcgregor, indian ocean, juan antonio bayona, naomi watts, the impossible, tom holland, tsunami 2004

the-impossible-movie-review

“Water Works”

Grade: B

TWO ASPECTS OF Juan Antonio Bayona’s disaster film “The Impossible” will haunt you.  The first is the tsunami itself, which slammed into south-west Asia on the 26th of December, 2004, killing nearly a quarter-million people and leveling scores of luxury hotels.  “The Impossible” begins and ends with the Bennett family, Maria and husband Henry (Ewan McGregor), flying to and fro a high-end Thai resort where they open Christmas gifts and lounge poolside. The film’s first fifteen minutes are the lull before the storm and Bayona is even able to extract a frisson of terror out of something as quotidian as a red rubber ball that the Bennett boys – Lucas, Thomas, and Simon – bop around the pool area; they’ll soon find themselves floating out to sea like the ball itself.  Wilson!  A loose page is blown out of the book Maria is reading and gradually, the vacationers notice that something sinister is in the air.  One of the most terrifying images is of the palm trees just beyond the hotel walls being felled, one after another, as the Indian Ocean violently overruns the lazy sunbathers.  Bayona gives us numerous underwater shots in which we see a soup of twisted metal, palm trees, bodies, automobiles reduced to matchbox cars, even a drowned elephant.

The-Impossible-PosterBeyond such verisimilitude, which is agonizing indeed, there is also Naomi Watt’s performance as Maria, a doctor who has temporarily hung up her stethoscope to raise her three young sons while living abroad in Japan.  Bayona built the biggest water tank in Europe to simulate the disaster and, currently making the rounds on TV talk shows prior to Oscar night next month, Watts reports that she was strapped to a chair, submerged, and brought to the brink of drowning in order for the director to elicit true terror from her.  But Watts’s performance is a marvel not simply because of her lung-busting cries – she gave us plenty of those one decade ago in “The Ring” – but because of her relationship with Lucas (Tom Holland), the eldest of her sons. There’s that uncomfortable moment when Lucas is ashamed to see his mother’s mangled and exposed breast; there’s another when Maria insists on helping an abandoned boy whom she and Lucas hide in the treetops. Dehydrated, leg badly injured, Maria shares a soda can with the two boys and stares up at the younger one like he’s a cherub on high.  A good actor, like a good tennis partner, brings out the best in her scene-mate and Watts is able to elevate Holland so that he, too, becomes the emotional core of “The Impossible.”  You don’t doubt for a second that it’s her love for Lucas and the other family members that keep her fighting for her life.

The film’s title is trite, the family’s reunion never really in question, and Bayona (“The22003 Orphanage”) either forgot or simply didn’t feel the need to close the film with the official death toll or some kind of acknowledgment that most, if not all, the tsunami-victims weren’t as lucky as the upper-class Bennetts who had health insurance and private planes at their disposal.  It’s as if every other survivor is put there to either facilitate or frustrate the family’s predictable reunion. The Bennetts are actually an Anglicization of the real-life family that survived the disaster, the Alvarez Belóns of Spain, and it’s a shame that European actors were swapped out for blond-blue-eyed ones. Nevertheless, it’s Watts who powers “The Impossible.”  That’s her kilowatts.

Reviews: “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” and “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”

26 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

david gelb, documentary, emily blunt, ewan mcgregor, fish, jiro dreams of sushi, jiro ono, kristin scott thomas, lasse hallstrom, middle east, paul torday, romantic comedy, rudyard kipling, salmon fishing in the yemen, simon beaufoy, sushi, tokyo japan, tom mison, yemen

“One Fish Two Fish”

“A FISH IS A FISH is a fish, right?” asks Kristin Scott Thomas incredulously, as the PM’s press secretary Patricia Maxwell in “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen,” a unique romantic comedy spawned by the Paul Torday novel and the unlikeliest of plots: a progressive sheik and fishing enthusiast (played by Amr Waked) dreams of one day creating a salmon run in the arid deserts of Yemen.  This not only entails the relocation of 10,000 North Atlantic salmon to Yemen but a way to improve the Middle East’s image amongst British voters.  The wealthy sheik has friends in high places, including his assistant Harriet (the lovely Emily Blunt) and Dr. Fred Jones (Ewan McGregor), a fisheries scholar brought on to jumpstart the project.  The possibility of a romance is floated: Harriet’s boyfriend (Tom Mison) has been deployed to fight overseas and Fred’s estranged wife is as cold as ice.  Because the film is directed by Lasse (“Chocolat” and “Dear John”) Hallstrom, “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” has a mildness to it, however, closer to monkfish than the pungency of salmon.  Well performed and paced, Hallstrom’s fish-of-the-day is a total original: it swims upstream whereas most rom-coms are mere groupers and cling to cliché.

Another fishy film to wash ashore is David Gelb’s debut documentary, “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” which centers on sushi-master and octogenarian Jiro Ono, chef and restaurateur who runs this tight ship: a basement-level establishment called Sukiyabashi Jiro in the Ginza district of Tokyo where just 10 patrons at a time will pay upward to 30,000 yen to belly up to the bar.  Gelb’s film elevates the chef to the level of demigod; watch as he instructs his diligent sons, especially Yoshikazu who weathers his father’s blows and manages the restaurant along with a team of aspiring chefs told to massage octopus for hours on end and handle fatty tuna like it’s fine china.  Gelb’s dreamy documentary really crests when it leaves the table: it’s not, of course, a study in sushi but in Chef Ono’s incredible dedication to his art.  It’s more a study in character and the determination to perfect one’s craft than a loving look at what’s on the plate.

With both these fresh catches in mind, it’s worth recalling the famous lines of Rudyard Kipling whose separatist song goes like this: “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.”  In both “Salmon Fishing” and “Jiro Dreams,” East meets West and that meeting place smells fabulously fishy.

The Best and Worst Films of 2011

02 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

aaron sorkin, amanda seyfried, brad pitt, bridesmaids, charlize theron, christopher plummer, comedy, crazy stupid love, drama, drive, ewan mcgregor, george clooney, hugo, jason reitman, jessica chastain, joel shumacher, justin timberlake, kristen wiig, martin scoresese, michael fassbender, moneyball, nicolas cage, nicole kidman, oscars, owen wilson, paris, ryan gosling, sarah jessica parker, sean penn, shailene woodley, take shelter, taylor lautner, the descendants, the help, The Ides of March, the tree of life, thriller, trespass, woody allen, young adult

THE BEST FILMS OF 2011:

1.       “Midnight in Paris” (written and directed by Woody Allen) – Whoever thought you’d someday utter the words “Woody Allen” and “magical” in the same sentence?  After all, it’s been a long time since his “The Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985).  America’s greatest living filmmaker gives us not just his biggest box-office hit in forty years but the longest running movie of 2011.  A delightfully literary meditation on time travel and the Lost Generation.  No one can assemble a cast like Allen; Owen Wilson channels Allen without parodying his jokes and gestures in the City of Lights.

2.      “Drive” (directed by Nicolas Winding Refn) – This ultra-violent vehicle for Ryan Gosling, as the anonymous “Driver,” is a rough patch of LA noir, vicious and thrilling.  It also solidifies Gosling as the most versatile leading man to watch – politically mercurial in “The Ides of March” and a sartorial stallion in the comedy “Crazy Stupid Love” – in 2011.  “Drive” is on track to become a lasting cult favorite.

3.      “Take Shelter” (dir. by Jeff Nichols) – A harrowing meditation on paranoia and climate anxiety with the indomitable Michael Shannon (a sure-fire contender for the Best Actor Oscar) as an Ohio man coming apart.  Jessica Chastain (“The Help,” “The Debt”) was the ingénue of 2011, giving here, as a foil to her bubbly Southern belle in “The Help,” a restrained performance as the wife of a man either mentally ill or clairvoyant.  You decide.  Another powerful psychodrama, set in the heartland, from the writer-director of “Shotgun Stories.”

4.      “The Tree of Life” (written and directed by Terrence Malick) –  It appears only the “little things” in life matter to Malick (“Badlands,” “The Thin Red Line”).  His moving meditation on childhood, love, family, dinosaurs, Texas, the cosmos that had Americans demanding a refund must be worth the price of admission.  Believe it or not, in 2011, many movie-houses had to enforce their NO-REFUND policy for those left dazed and confused by 2011’s only poem-on-film (also the Palme d’Or winner at Cannes).  Costar Sean Penn even admitted that he had no real idea what Malick’s movie is about.  Actors!  Like any thoughtful work of art, it demands a lot from its viewer, but this tree’s roots stretch far and wide.

5.      “Bridesmaids” (dir. by Paul Feig) – Sure, it’s the female “Hangover” – replete with scatological slip-ups and crudely sexual candor – but “Bridesmaids” will get you to the church on time and, potentially, buzzed on the drive there.  Kristen Wiig dropped the over-the-top personae she brings to life on “Saturday Night Live” and surrounded herself with a hilarious ensemble cast that turned the chick-flick genre on its head.  That image alone of Wiig riding the automatic gate to Don Draper’s love pad is comic gold.

6.      “The Descendants” (directed by Alexander Payne) – After reading George Clooney boast to Rolling Stone that he’d be “surprised” if “The Descendants” didn’t go on to become a Best Picture nominee, I went into a showing of Alexander Payne’s new dramedy with my critical force-field up.  Yet its achingly honest tone and gallows humor eventually win you over.  Clooney’s light is less intense than newcomer Shailene Woodley as his truth-telling daughter.  The family bonds forged here feel real rather than Hollywood hokum.

7.      “Beginners” (dir. by Mike Mills) – It’s hard to believe that the man who, nearly fifty years ago, played Georg van Ludwig Von Tropp in “The Sound of Music” has the gumption, not to mention the joie de vivre, to play a newly widowed man who belatedly comes out of the closet.  Playing Plummer’s son, Ewan McGregor is on hand to scratch his head and find love (and roller-skate) for himself.  Mike (“Thumbsucker”) Mills based the comedy on his father’s own coming out and cancer.  A more cross-generational cancer comedy than the also entertaining “50/50.”

8.      “Young Adult” (dir. by Jason Reitman) – After stumbling with “Jennifer’s Body,” Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody (“Juno”) reestablishes herself by drawing up the virtually unlikable Mavis Gary, a “prom queen psychopath bitch” (lovingly described by a fellow native of Mercury, Minnesota unhappy to see her back in town and trying to break up a marriage).  Theron embodies another kind of “Monster” while Patton Oswalt delivers the laughs as a self-described “fat geek” who shares the most surprising love scene of ’11 with a wine-stained, cutlet-wearing Theron.

9.      “Hugo” (dir. by Martin Scorsese) – While contemporary Steven Spielberg stretched himself thin with “The Adventures of Tintin” and the mawkish “War Horse,” Martin Scorsese focused his attention – his 3-D attention, no less – on his first children’s film.  “Hugo” has a timeless feel, capturing the hurly-burly of an urchin inhabiting the walls of a Parisian train station and the advent of the motion picture in the age of Georges Méliès.  Is there anything Martin Scorsese can’t do? Oh, that’s right: comedy (see, or don’t see, his “After Hours” of 1985).

10.     “Moneyball” (dir. by Bennett Miller) – After last year’s “The Social Network,” screenwriter Aaron Sorkin hits another home-run with Brad Pitt  as Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane.  Even a sports-phobe like myself could connect with a script this dizzy with details and  dialogue for grown-ups.  It’s probably time Pitt picks up his first Best Actor Oscar and why not for a willful film that venerates all of you who think outside the box – or better yet, the diamond?

THE (VERY) WORST FILMS of 2011:

1.    “Abduction” – Sorry, Twi-hards, but Jacob Black of the Twilight Saga film series committed a serious error here in the lobotomizing tale of a kid raised, unbeknownst to him, by secret agents.  Lautner is far from ready for his close-up, Mr. DeMille.  He has the vacant, Neanderthalic gaze of Kim Kardashian’s short-lived husband, Kris Humphries.  If only “Abduction” had felt as short as that marriage.

2.    “In Time” – A perfectly acceptable script from Andrew Niccol (“Gattaca”) was marred by the calling-it-in acting style of Justin Timerblake who, like Taylor Lautner, is best kept in the chorus.  Costar Amanda Seyfried resembles a dyspeptic goldfish as she and Timberlake chase across rooftops, trying to beat the clock in “In Time.”  An acting malfunction.

3.    “Shame” – For some inexplicable reason, Michael Fassbender is being praised for playing a Manhattan professional addicted to sex in the impotent “Shame.”  Never has sexuality been so boring, characters so undeveloped, and a narrative so negligible as in Steve McQueen’s self-serious sophomore effort.  If the audience isn’t laughing derisively by the time Brandon descends into an inferno of gay bars and Sapphic three-ways, they’re not paying attention.  I returned to the lobby to dispense liquid butter directly into my eyeballs to blur this nightmare of a “drama.”  Shameful, indeed.

4.  “I Don’t Know How She Does It” – The one-note Sarah Jessica Parker fails to mix it up a bit (again) in this wannabe feminist twaddle.  Parker plays Kate Reddy, a finance executive juggling professionalism and pampers.  If only Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha had helped with babysitting duties, we might not have had to once again sympathize with the saccharine sentimentality of white woman bourgeois guilt.  Far from a breadwinner, this is a bread-loser that confirms the old adage that indeed you can’t have it all.

5.  “Trespass” – What was Nicole Kidman thinking to team up with the execrable Nicolas Cage and hit-or-miss director Joel Shumacher (“Dying Young,” “Phone Booth”)?  Cage plays a businessman and diamond-dealer victimized, alongside wife Kidman, during a sadistic house invasion.  If it’s pointless violence you’re after, “Trespass” has more than enough gore to go around.  If you play this loudly in your house, your neighbors will likely call the police due to its vociferous gunfire and relentless female shrieking.

In a year belonging to Woody Allen, it’s worth remembering a line from “Annie Hall” (1977).  (It’s a classic older than I am with insights immemorial.)  In the following, replace “television shows” with “movies,” especially the soulless “Trespass”:

Annie, in California: “It’s so clean out here.”

Alvy (Allen): “They don’t throw their garbage away. They turn it into television shows.”

Review: “Beginners”

17 Wednesday Aug 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

beginners, christopher plummer, closet, comedy, ewan mcgregor, family, freud, gay, goran visnjic, gospel, jack russell terrier, mary page keller, me and you and everyone we know, melanie laurent, miranda july, no one belongs here more than you, the future, the sound of music, thumbsucker, walter kirn

“In Bloom”

Movie Review: “Beginners”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

IN THE BEGINNING was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God had a Son, and God said: “Son, I’m gay.”  This is the gospel according to Mike Mills’ new film, “Beginners,” inspired in part by the director’s own relationship with his father, Paul, who died of cancer in 2004 shortly after coming out of the closet.   Paul (or “Hal” as he’s known in Mills’ film) is played sensitively and memorably – Oscar voters take note! – by 81-year-old veteran actor Christopher Plummer.  That’s right, Christopher Plummer as in Captain Georg von Trapp in 1965’s “The Sound of Music” and pretty much every film since then.  What lends “Beginners” its charm is the smiling spryness Plummer brings to the role of a septuagenarian essentially reborn as the gay man he never got to be.  We see him, shirt unbuttoned, strolling a dance floor packed with younger men, and later, calling his son for some social cues.  “Oliver, they had some wonderfully loud music in the club tonight,” he informs him over the phone, “What kind of music is that?”  His son, in bed, replies reticently: “Probably house music.”  “Okay,” says Plummer, chuckling to himself as he writes this down in case he forgets, “House music.”

As Mills’ fictional stand-in, Oliver (played by Ewan McGregor) is a kind-hearted Los Angelino who inherits his father’s Jack Russell terrier named Arthur (played by Cosmo) after his dad dies at age 75.  Since the film is told nonchronologically, we’re sometimes given endings before beginnings, which keeps the memories of Oliver’s deceased parents alive and, well, amusing from start of finish.  In one flashback, a young Oliver is taken to an art museum by his eccentric mother Georgia (Mary Page Keller).  She’s asked to leave after imitating the geometric designs on display.  “What?” she asks her young son, “I’m not allowed to interact with the art?”  Now flash forward to the modern day where Oliver meets Anna (the ravishing Mélanie Laurent) at a costume party where Oliver, with Arthur in tow, is dressed as the good Viennese doctor, Sigmund Freud.  A mute Anna has laryngitis and communicates only through pen and paper.  Playing the analysand, she sprawls out on the sofa before him.  “I guess we should begin with your mother,” Oliver jokes.  A relationship soon blossoms to parallel the love story of Hal and his young boyfriend Andy (a shockingly plain Goran Visnjic in a pageboy haircut).

The first frame of “Beginners” features a white flower in full bloom followed closely by the grim imagery of death: Oliver cleaning out his father’s house in the Hollywood Hills, dragging garbage bags to the curb, and flushing his dad’s cancer meds down the drain.  There’s a love of whimsy and unpredictability in Mills’ “Beginners,” as well as in his 2005 adaptation of Walter Kirn’s coming-of-age story, “Thumbsucker.” Mills is probably better known, however, as Mister Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know” and the oddball short story collection, “No One Belongs Here More Than You”).  Director of “The Future,” July shares Mills’ love of social weirdness, and since we’re getting Freudian, Oliver’s mother sports a curly haircut uncannily similar to the real-life July’s.   

From the outset of “Beginners,” Hal’s Jack Russell is so preternaturally smart that he speaks in subtitles, a clever but gimmicky touch that kept the audience members around me giggling to no end.  Giving Arthur a tour of his apartment, Oliver sits him down, man-to-man, and tells him: “Look, it’s lonely out here, so you better learn how to talk with me.”  An alert-looking Arthur stares back, his subtitle reading: “While I understand up to 150 words – I don’t talk.”  What the bittersweet “Beginners” explores is that desire to talk, and to be heard, which seemingly spans age groups, generations, even species. 

Review: “Crazy Stupid Love”

08 Monday Aug 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

blue valentine, bromance, comedy, crazy stupid love, ewan mcgregor, Glenn Ficarra, i love you philip morris, jim carrey, John Requa, julianne moore, movie review, romantic comedy, ryan gosling, smurfs, steve carell, the hangover

“Isn’t It Bromantic?”

Grade: B (RENT IT)

IN CASE YOU hadn’t heard, the feet are the windows to the soul.  At least, the opening shots of “Crazy Stupid Love,” in which we see various couples engaged in playful games of footsy under restaurant tables, suggest as much.  The credits come to a screeching halt with the first sight of Mr. and Mrs. Weaver’s feet which, removed from each other and planted firmly on the floor, say a lot about their moribund marriage.  Worse, Cal Weaver (played by Steve Carell) is decked out in suburban dad-wear – khaki pants and New Balance sneakers – and unbeknownst to him, his wife has slept with a coworker (Kevin Bacon).  Yes, the thrill is gone for Emily Weaver (played by Julianne Moore) though she’s not sure she wants the single life either.  When the two can’t decide on a dessert, Cal suggests they simultaneously blurt out exactly what it is they’re craving.  But Emily doesn’t exude baked Napoleon, as Cal might have hoped, but “I want a divorce.”  How a good-natured guy like Cal can rescue and restore his marriage becomes the premise which “Crazy Stupid Love” pursues with entertaining results.  This is another comic success from “Bad Santa” writer-director team Glenn Ficarra and John Requa who, in 2009, debuted with the underrated “I Love You Philip Morris,” the story of a gay conman (Jim Carrey) who only has eyes for Ewan McGregor.

After free-falling into newfound bachelorhood after twenty plus years of marriage, Cal lands in a posh nightclub packed with beautiful and available women.  He becomes something of a dreadful fixture in the bar, however, as he drinks too much and bores strangers with the details of his breakup.  Carell’s delivery is pitch-perfect as we watch an inebriated Cal talking (slurring) to himself: “You know what word isn’t used much any more? Cuckold!  I was cuckolded by my ex-wife!  She made a cuckold out of me.”  And just as Cal becomes a social car-wreck from which you can’t look away, Jacob (Ryan Gosling) steps in to remake this lonesome loser into the Casanova he knows Cal has hiding inside.  In his crisp collars and tailored suits, Jacob isn’t just a clothes horse but a sartorial stallion.  Gosling is also like licorice for the eyes and even Cal is seduced; the two develop a deep and enduring bromance.  When he meets Cal at a LA shopping mall, Jacob throws Cal’s sneakers over the balcony before shepherding him through a new-clothes shopping spree, assuring him that Emily will rue the day she ever left him.  This is the capitalistic ethos personified: the road to romance runs right through your wallet.

The banal title notwithstanding, “Crazy Stupid Love” will charm you in large part because of Carell’s anxious everyman antics and the smirking ease of Gosling’s performance.  It’s good to see the latter lightening his pallette after last year’s pathos-laden “Blue Valentine.” The script is also layered with charming though familiar subplots. The Weavers’ preadolescent son, Robbie (Jonah Bobo), for example, has made a religion out of his babysitter Jessica (Analeigh Tipton) who is too infatuated with her employer Cal to notice.  Coincidences multiply in “Crazy Stupid Love,” which is cleverly plotted by “Cars” screenwriter Dan Fogelman, but perhaps too much so in the film’s final moments.  Set at a backyard BBQ, the resolution feels like a sitcom where loose ends are tied together too tightly.  Still, in a summer cinemascape occupied by Smurfs and penguins, it’s refreshing to see a romantic comedy aimed at grown-ups as crazy and stupid as we may be.

For my “Bromance Flix and the State of Dudedom” (2010 Film Review of “The Hangover,” et al) see:

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/’Bromance’+Flix+and+the+State+of+Dudedom.-a0216644249

Recent Posts

  • It’s Alive…with Mary Shelley!
  • A Rare & Exclusive Interview with Plague-Writer Daniel Defoe!
  • Sign Posts!
  • What Killed Jane Austen?
  • Was Austen a Holy Roller?

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 260 other subscribers

Top Posts & Pages

  • Review: "The Descendants"
  • A Rare & Exclusive Interview with Plague-Writer Daniel Defoe!

Jane Austen

action alien alpha dog amanda seyfried animals anton yelchin blue valentine bradley cooper brad pitt British literature bromance carey mulligan charlize theron chawton christina hendricks christopher plummer colin farrell comedy crazy stupid love daniel craig dickens dracula drama emma stone england ewan mcgregor family frankenstein freud gay george clooney hampshire hbo horror jack russell terrier Jane Austen jessica chastain john lithgow joseph gordon levitt jude law kurt cobain mad men madonna mansfield park mary shelley matthew mcconaughey michael fassbender naomi watts oscars paris paul rudd philip seymour hoffman poetry politics portsmouth pride and prejudice romantic romantic comedy romanticism ryan gosling science fiction september 11 sex shakespeare shelley steven soderbergh summer blockbuster the hangover the help the social network thriller tim burton true blood twilight viola davis

Blog Stats

  • 52,644 hits
  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments

Colin Carman Twitter

  • #M3GAN is MORE fun than Avatar & its budget was a third of Avatar’s catering M3GAN 2.0 - SNL youtu.be/MAprAHEw18I via @YouTube 1 week ago
  • RT @70RA: Bruce Springsteen - Tunnel of love "So somebody ran out Left somebody's heart in a mess Well if you're looking for love Honey I'm… 1 week ago
  • @MadonnaGreece Las Vegas Oct & Denver Aug 1 week ago
  • @austenquotebot But you didn’t really mean what you said, right Jane? Hail @austenquotebot @ChawtonHouse 2 weeks ago
  • RT @JennyBoylan: Good night from Belgrade Lakes, Maine. https://t.co/3PWYUa26pI 2 weeks ago
Follow @ColinCarman

Colin Carman

Colin Carman

Archives

  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • July 2019
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011

Blogroll

  • Cinema Train
  • Dan the Man's Movie Reviews
  • Fogs' Movie Reviews

Category Cloud

Film Reviews Jane Austen Pandemic Posts Poems and Plogs (Poem-Blogs) Uncategorized

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Colin Carman
    • Join 175 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Colin Carman
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...