Twilight Treat

I feel a little bad about harshing on Bella and Edward the other day, and anyway it's Robert Pattinson's birthday (he's 24), so here's a new clip from Eclipse. It doesn't have Bella or Edward but it has evil Dakota Fanning, and I just love evil Dakota Fanning.

It's on iTunes, click here.

What's playing: 5/14/2010

Summer blockbuster season continues this weekend with Robin Hood, starring Russell Crowe and directed by Ridley Scott. This is the team that brought us Gladiator ten years ago, and that made some money and won a bunch of awards, including the Oscar for Best Picture. Interestingly, the reviews for Gladiator were kind of middling, and Robin Hood is starting out that way too, with Kirk Honeycutt of the Hollywood Reporter marveling at Scott’s ability to tell a tale, while Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly thinks the whole thing is a stodgy waste of time. Also opening is Just Wright, a romantic comedy starring Queen Latifah as a physical therapist to sports stars, and Common as the NBA player who needs her help. (Probably they fall in love or something.) Not very many critics have seen this film, but the ones that have aren’t impressed. Finally among big openers is Letters to Juliet; starring Amanda Seyfried (Mama Mia, Dear John) as a traveler in Verona, Italy, who volunteers to answer heartsick letters to the fictional Juliet of Romeo and Juliet fame, and ends up playing Cupid to a woman (Vanessa Redgrave) and her long lost love. Again, critics aren’t wowed. If you’re looking for some fun, Iron Man 2 is hoping to continue its box office juggernaut this weekend, and did you hear about this little film, Babies? It’s a documentary about the first year in the life of four babies from around the world. It was a surprise hit last weekend, in a little documentary kind of way. Playing in scattered art house theaters around the country. Might be a nice antidote to blockbuster fever.

Me personally, I will probably see Babies. Our oldest is graduating from college this weekend, and my husband has gotten all sentimental on me. So it looks like Babies from here.

Tough Times in Twilight Town

My niece is a big fan of the Twilight movies.  I don't really get it, but they make a lot of money, so I've seen them, mostly out of curiosity.  This is what I think: Bella and Edward are a colossally boring couple -- far as I can tell, they have nothing in common,  mostly they just stare at each other, all infatuated and then Bella falls asleep and Edward stares at her until she wakes up.  Quite a pair.


But there's trouble in Twilight town: Summit Entertainment decided to turn the four Twilight books into five movies,  and because of that the lead actors (Taylor Lautner, Kristin Stewart and Robert Pattinson) all re-negotiated their contracts to get more money.  This upset a couple of the non-lead characters - specifically Ashely Greene and Kellan Lutz, who play Alice and Emmett Cullen.  They want more money too, a whole lot more, and Summit isn't so interested in negotiating with them.  Summit is known to play hard ball, they dumped Rachelle Lefevre after the first film when she attempted to up her salary and get some scheduling concessions.  


Now, the Emmett Cullen character doesn't bring much to the party (okay, I've read the books too.  My niece, remember?) but Alice is a bright light in the cast, with a useful ability to see the future.  So I think it would be risky to ask fans to accept a new Alice.  But then, it's possible that Twilight lovers won't notice; they seem mostly interested in Bella, Edward and Jacob.  And those three are in for the long haul.  

Review: Iron Man 2

Iron Man 2 roared into town this weekend, kicking off the summer blockbuster season with a fun loving bang. Is it as good as the original? Nah, but it’s pretty good. Robert Downey Jr. returns as charming bad boy Tony Stark, brilliant inventor of the Iron Man Suit. Tony’s been busy since we last saw him, taking on American’ enemies in his high tech armor, and he pretty much believes he has single handedly made the world safe for democracy. “I have privatized peace,” he announces without humility to a Senate Committee. America is grateful and Stark expects her to be, he loves being a superstar almost as much as he loves his electronically endowed superpower abilities. But the Pentagon isn’t so happy; they don’t like leaving American security in the hands of a single private citizen, and they worry that their dependence on Iron Man will make them look foolish when someone else – particularly an evil someone else – invents a copy cat suit of their own.

Enter Russian bad guy Ivan Vanko, played by a growling Mickey Rourke; Ivan’s father was on old colleague of Tony’s dad, and Ivan believes that much of the young Stark’s mega-billionaire success comes from work the two elder scientists did together. But Tony s jet setting around the world with adoring fans in his wake, and Ivan is stuck in Siberia; he was robbed, in other words, and besides being threatening and deadly, the Russian is a brilliant – if wildly demented – scientist in his own right, so he sets about getting even.

It’s a pretty thin story line, but it’s a clean, straightforward one; you never feel like the special effects guys sent the writers home early one day so they could slip in a lot of superfluous explosions. There are some inexplicable plot developments, like when Scarlett Johansson arrives on the scene; any comic book fan or anyone who read the plentiful advance press for this movie knows she is supposed to be the Black Widow, but that doesn’t really come up in this film. She’s called Natalie, and she’s a notary, or some sort of assistant, but she’s sultry and tough and dangerous in a fight, and at first Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) doesn’t like her but then she does, and then Natalie/Black Widow hangs out for a while with Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and none of it seems to matter. She does get a terrific action scene, though, where she spins, twists and kicks her way through a building full of highly trained hit guys, leaving no one standing, then breaks through a steel door, plops down in front of a computer and brilliantly unravels a complex bit of code, temporarily saving the day. (Now that’s a cool superhero – let’s have a movie about her.)

There are a couple of other challenges in the film, besides the evil Ivan: the gizmo that Tony Stark sticks in his chest wall to keep him alive is having a toxic effect on his blood, so he thinks his life might be in danger but he still can’t figure out how to tell old Pepper Potts he loves her. It’s tough to be a romantic superhero, but it it’s a blast to be Robert Downey Jr.; this brilliant actor takes such unconflicted, unapologetic joy in his superhero role that he alone is worth the price of admission. Playing in a record number of theaters all over the country. It doesn’t matter where you live, you can see this movie, probably right now.  B

Photo Credit: Paramount Pictures

City Island

Charming, lighthearted movie. Andy Garcia plays Vince Rizzo, the weary patriarch of a Bronx family – well, it’s not the Bronx, exactly, but City Island, a little strip of beachfront connected to the Bronx by an old fashioned bridge. Vince is proud of his roots in this little plot of urban land, living with his wife and family in the house his grandfather built, but the picturesque setting is about all that’s pretty here – the Rizzo family is a dissembling mess. Vince is a correctional officer, working in a prison, but he wants to be an actor, so he takes classes on the sly; wife Joyce (Julianna Margulies) is certain he’s having an affair. His college daughter Vivian (Dominik García-Lorido) is working in a strip joint and only pretending to go to school, and Vince Jr. (Ezra Miller) has a fondness for very unusual adult websites. They all manage to get along, uneasily, until Vince has an epiphany at acting class, and decides to invite a prison inmate into their home to finish up his sentence as a “guest’ of the Rizzo family; Vince claims he just wants to the kid to help him build a bathroom, but he’s hiding the truth: Tony Nardello (Steven Strait) is Vince’s son from an old relationship.

And that is one secret too many. Tony is naturally curious about why Vince has taken an interest in him and he easily senses that there is a lot of stuff not being said around the family dinner table. Not afraid to pry, the young stranger stumbles on one secret after another, stirring up an entertaining whirlwind of revelations.

There’s nothing serious going on in this movie; even though it seems to be tackling important family issues, nothing particularly profound gets said, we’re here for fun, not to learn a lesson. Still there is something very intimate about the way the story gets told, the characters are familiar, like old acquaintances or neighbors, and by the end you kind of want to join them for a beer. Andy Garcia turns in a solid performance as Vince; his movie audition scene is worth the price of admission. And Steven Strait, as Vince’s felonious son, is a bright light in every one of his scenes. Emily Mortimer also charms as Vince's encouraging actor friend.  City Island had a slow start at the box office but it hung on, got some good word of mouth and is playing in theaters all over the country. Check it out if you’re looking for a lighthearted night out.  B