‘Cause this can’t be her:

Ugh,
look at those arms! When you diet to the point of being unrecognizable,
I think it’s fair to say it’s time to stop and eat a donut.

Recently posted footage of David O. Russell and Lily Tomlin having a bit of a spat on the I Heart Huckabee’s set:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djT-RD30L7o

 
 
 
Wow. When I interviewed him back
during Huckabee’s press tour David was the nicest person, even noticing
how nervous I was and talking to me about options  for that kind of
thing afterward. (Namely, sedatives — he must have experience!) He
even kept me way beyond my allotted time despite his publicist’s
pleading. He was a little hyper…hmm. Guess I can see how that energy
can be used for evil instead of good.

Recently posted footage of David O. Russell and Lily Tomlin having a bit of a spat on the I Heart Huckabee’s set:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djT-RD30L7o

 
 
 
Wow. When I interviewed him back
during Huckabee’s press tour David was the nicest person, even noticing
how nervous I was and talking to me about options  for that kind of
thing afterward. (Namely, sedatives — he must have experience!) He
even kept me way beyond my allotted time despite his publicist’s
pleading. He was a little hyper…hmm. Guess I can see how that energy
can be used for evil instead of good.

The Hills May Have Eyes, but They Ain’t Gonna Have Legs

Now, maybe I’m out of touch, but how many kids do you think knew what "TMNT" was before
all the promotional toys came out? Hell, even my brain went ???
whenever I saw those bizarre initials. I’m thinking the majority of
this weekend’s audience comprised nostalgic parents using their wee
ones as an excuse to watch a cartoon.

I’m surprised Shooter didn’t grab more dough. Maybe the rest of its audience had to catch 300 first. (Or again.)

And
Wild Hogs — ugh.

I am pretty damn happy, however, about HHE2 pulling in only 10
mil…see, Hollywood, not ALL of your precious crap movies are
critic-proof. Maybe a little more promotion would have helped.

Anyway, it’s clearly time for more coffee. Grosses are first for the weekend and then overall. I suck with tables.
..>..>

See? No goddamn good for ‘Merica.

So I was listening to a classic rock station and I’m not afraid to admit it. Wait, that’s not the point. The point is that they were playing ZZ Top’s "Legs." My boyfriend and I are warbling along, gleefully croaking out "Whoa I want her/Shit I got to have her." But what we hear is "Whoa I want her/I got to have her."

Can they be serious? And not only was the already-muffled word "shit" erased, the whole beat disappeared. Nothing to hear here, kids!

And you thought radio was sorry before.

Vomiting yet?

The little girl in The Last Mimzy is
adorable – especially when she has a seizure and levitates like Linda
Blair. Parents should take Mimzy’s PG rating as seriously as the
movie takes itself, which, minus the pwecious stuff, is very.

Based
on a short story by Lewis Padgett (pen name of writing duo Henry
Kuttner and C.L. Moore), it tells of “sensitive little genius”
Emma (Rhiannon Leigh Wryn) and her pissy older brother, Noah (Chris
O’Neil), who are on a family vacation when they find a strange box on
the shore. The box opens itself up mechanically like an unfolded
origami project; inside there are rocks, a sluglike blob, a seashell,
and a stuffed rabbit.

As the kids play with these things they
discover that the toys, and soon themselves, have
magical powers. The bunny, for instance, talks to Emma in a
thick-but-cute alien accent, telling her its name is “MIM-zeeeee!”
and how to do things like set the rocks spinning in midair. Noah,
meanwhile, becomes an ace in science and accidentally causes a giant
blackout when he’s messing with the box’s contents, which attracts
the attention of Homeland Security (those idiots, the script seems to
be implying).

As their befuddled parents (Joely Richardson and a
phoning-it-in Timothy Hutton) furrow their brows with vague worry
about the goings-on, it turns out that Emma and Noah have been tasked
with saving the world from “pollutants that filled our bodies and
minds.” (Noah’s science teacher, played by The Office’s Rainn
Wilson, tries to clue the ‘rents in, but considering that his
explanation concerns Tibetan artifacts and propheticism, they
naturally scoff.)

Are you still with me? If not, don’t worry –
there are lots of lasers and other cool effects to keep you
entertained. Mimzy, directed by the co-CEO of New Line Cinema (and the guy who stupidly got on the wrong side of Peter Jackson),
Robert Shaye, isn’t terribly clear on how everything – also
involved is Alice in Wonderland, the Looking Glass, alternate
universes, and time travel – ties together, and when Noah exclaims
“We did it!” at the film’s end, you may not be sure what “it”
is. (You will know, however, that the story has no basis in reality
when a Homeland Security chief tells the family, “I don’t
understand this, but I know I’m sorry.”) Considering that parts are
frightening, parts are nauseatingly sweet, and it’s all confusing,
it’s not clear which demographic Mimzy’s aiming for. It does somehow
remain engrossing; still, the most succinct critique comes courtesy
of Noah’s teach: “That. Is. Weird.”

copyright 2007 themoviebabe.com

Bwah ha ha! Want some nachos to go with that cheese?

Reign Over Me revolves around 9/11, but
it’s likely the film won’t be known for that as much as it will be
for being Adam Sandler’s second attempt to go serious. Not Spanglish-
or Click-serious – think more along the lines of Punch-Drunk Love.
Writer-director Mike Binder certain did, as here Sandler’s character
is similar to the one he played in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2002 movie.
In a lighter moment Sandler might put it this way: “I’m Isolated
Crazy Man. Give me some candy!”

Charlie (Sandler) isn’t the easiest
person to reach out to, but his old college roommate, Alan (Don
Cheadle), tries to anyway after they run into each other one day in
New York. Charlie lost his wife and  kids in the Sept. 11 attacks and
has since shut down: Four years later, he hasn’t gone back to work as
a dentist, keeps dust covers over furniture from his former life, and
spends most of his time playing music and video games. He accepts
Alan’s friendship but soon gets selfish with it, acting like a child
as he teases his married friend into going out every night and not
coming home until way later than he wants to. When Charlie starts
taking the fun out of dysfunctional – he blows up at times,
especially when Alan asks questions about his family – Alan, who’s
also a dentist, is initially put off, but Charlie’s instability
ultimately makes him want to help his friend even more. Alan’s wife
(Jada Pinkett Smith) isn’t exactly thrilled with the situation.

It’s true that Charlie is a very ill
man, but viewers may find that they sympathize more with the
situation than the person. Binder nudges Sandler into full-on
eccentric mode with ratty hair, twitchy mannerisms, and an infantile,
mouth-full-of-peanuts delivery that’s irritating as hell. There are
moments of humor that make Charlie seem lucid and likable, but more
often he’s stubbornly uncommunicative and impossible for anyone but a
mental-health professional to deal with. Quite frankly, no matter how
sick you know a character is supposed to be, it’s difficult to watch
a regressing jerk (especially at a bloated two-plus hours). A
pushover like Alan isn’t fun company, either, though Cheadle as usual
brings an energetic charisma to the role of someone who tells his
wife he couldn’t come home all night because he was “stuck in
Charlie world.”

When Charlie begins to open up – to
Alan, to a therapist (Liv Tyler) – however, Reign Over Me improves
remarkably. (The title comes from the Who’s “Love, Reign O’er Me,”
which is what Charlie listens to on giant headphones when he wants to
shut out the world.) There’s eventually a glint in Sandler’s puppyish
brown eyes that makes his character seem playful and, finally,
compelling. The script also at last succeeds in wrenching sympathy
out of you: Charlie’s description of what happened that day will take
you right back to it, and after he’s arrested for assault, a brutal
hearing in which an attorney brings pictures of Charlie’s family
shows that maybe Charlie’s reaction to the tragedy isn’t so extreme.

When Binder makes the story about
Alan’s transformation, too, the film derails a bit: Suddenly, he’s a
closed-off husband and realizes he “doesn’t want to be that guy.”
There’s also a rather unbelievable happy ending to Charlie’s tale.
But your gut has already been successfully punched, and those winning
moments may be enough to make you forgive the movie’s flaws.

copyright 2007 themoviebabe.com

I love that you’re such a jerk

Flannel Pajamas is all about the red
herrings that one ignores when starting a seemingly fabulous new
relationship. The New York couple in writer-director Jeff Lipsky’s
drama hit it off on a blind date and swoon quickly to their wedding
from there – he saves her from her bathtub-in-the-living-room
apartment and says he wants to protect her; she, uh, says she loves
him a lot, especially when he’s paying her bills. He doesn’t like her
best friend and some of her family, but so what? They have luv, and
as some people allege, that’s all you need.

Except when it isn’t, of course. And,
if you’re watching from the outside, especially when you can’t see
what drew the pair together in the first place. Right from the
opening scene that shows that fateful first date, Stuart (Justin
Kirk) comes off as slick and smarmy, while Nicole (Julianne
Nicholson) seems kind of dim. Other characters so crowd the setup –
it’s a double date, plus Stuart’s brother and Nicole’s morally
scarlett best friend happen by – that the viewer is privy to only
one of their exchanges before the rest leave and they declare
outright that they like each other. The chat happens to be that
Stuart works as a theater marketer, which, as he nearly admits
himself, seems to mean professional liar: He does whatever it takes
to create buzz, even if it means inventing actor bios or tailoring a
show’s background story so it moves a bunch of rubes to buy tickets.
You expect the fresh-faced Nicole, who initially says she doesn’t
understand what exactly he does, to be put off. Instead she says,
“That’s so smart!”

If you manage to suspend disbelief,
though, and buy that something did in fact inspire them to start
drooling “I love you”s all over each other, Flannel Pajamas can
be an engrossing train wreck. (At 124 minutes, however, it’s at times
a slow-moving one.) Lipsky makes the movie feel like a play, a
collection of before-and-after scenes from a marriage that are
largely concise in their displays of happiness or trouble, with crisp
blackouts and set changes in between. So you see, for example, the
moment Stuart suggests she move in with him. And, later, Nicole’s
resentment when she goes to close the blinds before they get it on in
their new high-rise apartment, but instead gives in when Stuart
requests that she undress in front of the windows with the sun
shining on her. Throughout, she’s generally the sensitive and
emotionally open one, while he’s practical and prone to changing the
subject when a conversation starts to turn difficult.

Lipsky’s talky script certainly has
shortcomings besides the fact that their attraction seems merely
dialogue-deep. (Kirk bears partial responsibility for making Stuart
oily from the very beginning instead of just when things go bad, but
really, wouldn’t any but the most desperate woman run when a guy
trots out lines such as “Do you want a puppy? All I can offer you
is  my heart” right after they meet?) Auxiliary characters, such as
Stuart’s unstable brother, Jordan (Jamie Harrold), or the members of
Nicole’s family that Stuart doesn’t like, are also given jobs but
little-to-no development in the story, therefore many plot turns seem
out of nowhere. But thanks to Nicholson, many of the couple’s
awkwardly intimate scenes feel organic and much more realistic than
your average romantic portrait. She finds nuances in Nicole that keep
her from becoming unsympathetic – childish is worlds away from
childlike, and Nicholson paints her character warm, trusting, and
vulnerable instead of irritatingly naive. And though Kirk’s Stuart is
easy to dislike at the beginning of the relationship, he’s that much
easier to hate and, just a little bit, feel sorry for when it sours.
Kirk also shares a terrific scene with Rebecca Schull, who plays
Nicole’s mother: As the camera nearly imperceptively circling around
them, the two have a showdown when Nicole briefly ends up in the
hospital, with Schull displaying a clenched, withering smile as her
character tells her son-in-law that she never liked him and how bad
he is for Nicole. It’s an extremely effective verbal slap in the
face. And considering the superficial dancing that came before it,
the conversation is a moment to cheer – both for Mom and the film
itself.

copyright 2007 themoviebabe.com

Sorry, Joe, these people will just never be as good-looking as you

You can’t have a film about political
unrest without a character who wants to Make a Difference. In Beyond
the Gates, that character is Joe, a young British secondary-school
teacher whose privileged upbringing instilled in him a desire to live
in Rwanda and give back. Joe is there in 1994 and is witness to the
start of a situation the U.N. would debate semantics over and then
largely ignore: the genocide/not-a-genocide of some 800,000 Africans
during a 100-day period of civil war. He asks a Tutsi student who
explains to him that the attacking Hutus hate her people, “You
don’t believe that shit?” Later, when BBC cameras come around, he
tells her, “If they’re filming us, then no one can touch us!”

The Joes of the world are idealistic.
Incredibly naive. And annoying as hell. Well, the latter is probably
unique to this movie, though. This time he’s played by Hugh Dancy,
Blood and Chocolate’s (anyone?) chiseled, nonthreatening hunk with
big blue eyes and soft brown curls. His Abercrombie face quivers with
uncertainty when he and the school’s aging founder and priest,
Christopher (John Hurt), first hear of  a plane carrying the
presidents of Rwanda and Burundi was shot down, then with resolve
when he’s cocksure he can help the Tutsi who have taken refuge on the
gated school grounds, then finally with fear when he realizes the
situation is bigger than he. No matter how dusty or torn Joe’s
clothes get, that singular expression belies the socioeconomic line
that his mindset will never fully cross. He will never understand
what it’s like to be Them.

Unfortunately, Dancy’s casting combined
with David Wolstencroft’s thin debut script forces the viewer to
remain as detached as the rest of the world had been while the
atrocities were happening. Based on the eyewitness accounts of
writers Richard Alwyn and David Belton, Beyond the Borders is set in
(and was filmed at) the Ecole Technique Officielle, whose property
was turned first into a UN military base and then into an impromptu
shelter when thousands of Tutsis crammed themselves against its
gates. Christopher and Joe give the Tutsis food, water, medicine,
reassurance; meanwhile, Christopher’s  willingness to keep up the
struggle fades as he learns further of a coup and its bloodshed and,
more frustrating, realizes that the U.N. captain (Dominique Horwitz)
is taking the international mandate seriously: The soldiers are not
to fire unless fired upon, even as they witness Tutsis being macheted
to death. Eventually, they’re pulled from duty, taking all the white
expats on the base with them. Joe and Christopher agonize over
whether to stay or go.

Director Michael Caton-Jones (Basic
Instinct 2) isn’t afraid to get raw with this BBC production. Unlike
2004’s glossier Hotel Rwanda, which mined the same tragedy, Beyond
the Gates shows you the slaughter and the carnage lining the streets.
You hear stories of babies getting beaten to death. There are
close-ups of the surrounding Hutus’ machetes, dripping with fresh
blood. When a group of Tutsis tries to flee from the school grounds,
you know in your gut what’s coming. Despite this graphic depiction,
however, your gut doesn’t become any more involved than that –
Wolsencroft’s development of a few African characters is bare-bones,
and the rest are just…the rest. Like, apparently, the real victims
seemed to most of the world in 1994, the Tutsis here may as well be
faceless while the Hutus are villainous caricatures; add in Darcy’s
blank character, and you’re merely watching the watcher, a stasis no
amount of spilled blood can overwrite.

There are a handful of
affecting moments – such as a father’s plea that the U.N. spare the
Tutsis painful deaths by shooting them all before the soldiers leave
– but they don’t occur until near the film’s end. In fact, the most
poignant part of Beyond the Gates is its closing credits, which flash
photos  of the significant number of cast and crew members who lived
through the genocide and tell how many family members each person
lost. At once, these pictures show what most of the story failed to
tell.

The sadness of a death is also lost
among jokes and bathos in writer-director Steve Stockman’s debut, Two
Weeks. Most all of the humor culled from this failed weepy about the
torturous decline of a mom with ovarian cancer falls into the lazy
it’s-funny-’cause-it’s-true! category. For instance, you know how
when someone dies, everyone brings the bereaved family casseroles?
Well, isn’t that hilarious?  How about comments such as “This is
the best family reunion ever!” No?

Stockman sure thinks so, and swings
awkwardly between the yucks and the melodrama. Sally Field plays
Anita Bergman, the mother in her final days of life; now receiving
home hospice care and getting weaker all the time, her four grown
children come to stay with her until the end. At least three of them
are: While the “Hollywood type” eldest, Keith (Ben Chaplin),
Zen-spouting youngest, Matthew (Glenn Howerton), and by-the-book
goody-goody Emily (Julianne Nicholson) are willing to put their other
lives on hold for as long as necessary, general hotshot Barry (Thomas
Cavanagh) is the “only one with a real job” and therefore rather
unbelievably proclaims himself too busy to hang around. This is
forced conflict No. 1. No. 2 is Matthew’s PYT wife, Katrina (Clea
DuVall), who for no apparent reason is icy and out of favor with her
in-laws (not to mention completely wrong for sweet, laid-back
Matthew). The spouses/children of other siblings show up and
disappear as needed.

Two Weeks – which as you may have
guessed, chronicles 14 days in the Bergman household – is framed by
a video interview that Keith had presumably conducted with his mother
in her better days. She tells stories about the family, none terribly
amusing or touching. In between these snippets, it’s Anita’s
day-to-day life, from her children cleaning up after she vomits
(once, his is set to jaunty music) to friends who come to say
goodbye. Throughout, none of the characters feel real – the roles
top out at  one-notes and fall from there to complete cartoons, such
as the assistant rabbi whose visit consists of yelling greetings to
Anita and saying, “Why, she doesn’t need a prayer, she needs to get
well!” The actors do what they can with the material, and as far as
the recognizable stars, their success is subjective: With Fields, you
probably like her (as she believes) or you don’t (as I believe), and
Cavanaugh, though his sitcom lives haven’t been terribly long, is
perhaps forever pigeonholed (you can put the former Ed in a suit, but
you can’t make him an asshole).

Mercifully, there are a couple of
genuine of sad but not mawkish scenes in Two Weeks, including a scene
in which Keith asks his young daughter what she knows about dying and
another in which Barry, after mom passes, muses to his siblings,
“Normal out, isn’t it?” But then Stockman wipes out any positives
by veering from mournful to slapstick to melodramatic all in the
final shot. From inception to finale, Two Weeks dies a slow death.

copyright 2007 themoviebabe.com