“Bride Wars” Every now and then you want a silly, stupid chick flick. And that’s what this is. Yes, a semester’s worth of women’s studies courses could be devoted to identifying and dissecting all of the horrific stereotypes perpetrated in “Bride Wars,” directed by Gary Winick (“13 Going on 30”). But if you’re an intelligent woman, who can separate fiction from reality, and you have a purpose or goal in life far greater than throwing the ultimate wedding, then you can take “Bride Wars” for what it is — an hour and a half of sometimes amusing, sometimes entertaining situations that revolve around the ugly wedding industry and best friends whose wedding planner’s assistant accidentally books their dream weddings on the same day at the same venue.
Neither wants to have a double wedding — “What am I, a 40-year-old twin?” Kate Hudson’s character quips. So the competition and sabotaging begins. Hudson, as lawyer Liv who always gets her way, and Anne Hathaway, as Emma the pushover schoolteacher, play their parts well enough. But skeletal-looking Kristen Johnston as Emma’s manipulative, self-absorbed co-worker and last-minute maid of honor steals several scenes. Candice Bergen as Marion St. Clair — “Manhattan’s most sought-after wedding planner” — narrates the flick but does her best work when she forsakes narrator duties to appear on-screen in her office. “You have been dead until now,” she pronounces to recently engaged Emma and Liv in the midst of their bridal bliss. Unfortunately, the big day comes, but the big payoff doesn’t.
>> PG for suggestive content, language and some rude behavior. 90 minutes. Two-and-a-half stars out of five.
– Jessica Novak, Examiner Movie Critic
“The Unborn” The Kabbalah. Hot college students. A creepy, abandoned mental institution. Gary Oldman. Jogging. Twins. Nazi scientists. A suicidal mother. A lost blue mitten. What do these things have in common? They’re all pieces in the convoluted mythology of “The Unborn.”
Best as one can tell, writer-director David S. Goyer’s film is a sort of Jewish version of “The Exorcist,” which is a vaguely novel concept. Catholics are usually the ones who have all the fun purging demons. But Goyer, who wrote the “Blade” series and co-wrote “The Dark Knight,” makes things laughably more complicated than they needed to be.
Well, there are some effective scares here, and you’ll laugh at yourself afterward for jumping like a little girl. But other images and pieces of dialogue are just as hilarious — and that probably wasn’t their intention. (Jane Alexander, as a Holocaust survivor with a secret, delivers a line abut Auschwitz that’s particularly off-tone.)
Odette Yustman runs around in tight jeans, tank tops and boy shorts as Casey Beldon, a young woman being haunted by startling dreams, then a weird little neighborhood boy, then hallucinatory images of insects, and finally a full-blown spiritual attack.
Only Oldman, who classes things up in his few scenes as a rabbi, can help her fend off the impending possession. Meagan Good gets a couple of amusing zingers as the obligatory wisecracking best friend.
>> PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and terror, disturbing images and language including some sexual references. 95 minutes. One-and-a-half stars out of four.
– Christy Lemire, AP Movie Critic
“Gran Torino” Using his finger as a gun, Clint Eastwood’s scowling Walt Kowalski aims, fires and recoils, picking off Detroit street thugs one by one. If any other actor, let alone another 78-year-old, did this, we’d laugh at him. But given it’s Eastwood, the iconic face of masculinity, playing a pissed-off Korean War vet in “Gran Torino,” we’re at attention, awaiting what’s next in the serious-minded drama that ingratiates itself through the first half with laughs before building to a sobering conclusion. Never far from a gun or can of Pabst, Kowalski, a recent widower and retired Ford worker, sneers and growls at everyone he comes into contact with, except his VFW buddies who exchange jokes that begin “A Mexican, a Jew and a colored guy walk into a bar …”
He mutters racial slurs from the side of his mouth about his Hmong neighbors, who have taken over the neighborhood. You can see it coming, but that doesn’t ruin the authentic, father-son-like relationship that forms between Kowalski and well-mannered Hmong boy Thao, who, ordered by his mother, has to make amends for trying to steal Kowalski’s 1972 Gran Torino during a would-be gang initiation.
Spunky, but not stupid or scared of the boys in the hood, Sue, Thao’s older sister, puts first-generation Hmong-American life in perspective for Kowalski after he saves her from a nasty encounter on the street.
“The girls go to college, the boys go to jail,” she said.
After reluctantly allowing his neighbors into his life, he still refers to Sue as “dragon lady,” but underneath the slurs is a fondness that won’t allow him to watch gangbangers threaten Sue and Thao’s futures. Eastwood playing Eastwood directed by Eastwood is what you get in this sure-to-be Oscar contender.
>> R for language throughout and some violence. 116 minutes. Three out of five stars.
– Jessica Novak, Examiner Movie Critic
“Revolutionary Road” The blood dripping to the cream carpet isn’t a lot, but it’s enough to take a piece out of you while watching “Revolutionary Road.”
The horrifying yet riveting tragedy reunites Leonard DiCaprio and Kate Winslet for the first time since “Titanic.” As Frank and April Wheeler in this intense character study, the two are suffocating in the suburbs of 1955 Connecticut. They can’t reconcile what they thought they would become and who they have become — April, a housewife with unfulfilled passion, and Frank, a common suit just like his father. April’s dreams of a fresh start in Paris slip through her shaky hands, usually holding a cigarette or two-olive martini, when she becomes pregnant with their third child, and Frank finds another way of feeling more superior than the Joneses that doesn’t involve crossing the Atlantic.
Even for the most morbid realists, “Revolutionary Road” isn’t a feel-good fairy tale. Rather, it’s a visually stunning portrait directed by Sam Mendes (“American Beauty”) of a husband and wife as their festering union implodes. Through vicious remarks and infidelities, we witness April and Frank turning on each other to feel better about themselves while cannibalizing their marriage. If you love watching dramas that metaphorically slit your wrists, here’s your knife.
>> R for strong language and some sexual content/nudity. 119 minutes. Four out of five stars.
– Jessica Novak, Examiner Movie Critic
“Bedtime Stories” Adam Sandler returns to the familiar man-child of yore with this desperate family-friendly comedy about wild nighttime fantasies that magically come true.
Sandler seemed to have moved beyond the goofy persona he forged for himself with movies like “Billy Madison” and “Little Nicky” with surprising vulnerability and nuance in “Punch-Drunk Love” and “Spanglish.” Although “Bedtime Stories” represents a first for Sandler — a comedy that’s appropriate for all ages — it still feels like a giant leap backward.
Forced to look after his young niece (Laura Ann Kesling) and nephew (Jonathan Morgan Heit) for a week while his sister (Courteney Cox) is out of town, Sandler’s hotel handyman Skeeter Bronson finds the only way to connect with the kids, and get them to sleep, is by telling them bedtime stories. Soon, the kids are chiming in with ideas about what the tales should include — gum balls falling from the sky, violent midgets — and in no time, those details start creeping into Skeeter’s life.
It’s a whimsical and not-too-shabby idea, but the result is too often flat, crass and disjointed. British comic Russell Brand gets the few funny lines in the script, but the always-lovely Keri Russell goes to waste in the straight-woman role as Skeeter’s would-be love interest.
>> PG for some mild rude humor and mild language. 95 minutes. One-and-a-half stars out of four.
– Christy Lemire, AP Movie Critic
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
It’s the damnedest thing. You look into the elderly man’s blue eyes behind a pair of old-fashioned spectacles, look at the sweet smile ringed by wrinkles, and you know that’s Brad Pitt under there. But the special effects are so dazzling, and Pitt’s performance is so gracefully convincing, that you can’t help but be repeatedly wowed.
Director David Fincher has always proven himself a virtuoso visual stylist — to the point of seeming like a shameless showoff at times — with films like “Fight Club,” “‘Panic Room” and “Zodiac.” But here, he’s truly outdone himself: He’s made a grand, old-fashioned epic that takes mind-boggling advantage of the most modern movie-making technology.
Fincher’s film, based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story about a man who ages in reverse, is rambling and gorgeous — perhaps a bit overlong and gooey in the midsection — but still, one that leaves you with a lingering wistfulness. Pitt, as the title character, travels the world and lives a life that’s adventurous and full, but he can never truly be with the woman he loves, Daisy (Cate Blanchett), whom he met when she was just a little girl and he was a boy trapped in an old man’s body.
Eric Roth’s script may seem naggingly similar to that of “Forrest Gump” — which he also happened to write — but it seems more concerned with the transformational power of true love than the gimmickry of an unusual existence.
>> PG-13 for brief war violence, sexual content, language and smoking. 167 minutes. Three-and-a-half stars out of four.
– Christy Lemire, AP Movie Critic
