Splice (2010)

R, 1 hr. 40 min.  Directed by: Vincenzo Natali.  Release Date: June 4, 2010.  DVD Release Date: October 5, 2010.

I have to wonder if the “science” we witness here suffered from the Jurassic Park effect:  you know, it’s vaguely based on real science but could never be duplicated in the real world.  In some ways, this makes for good science fiction.  But, barely.  Some of what we witness in the telling of Dren’s (the creature cloned from random bits of DNA) story seems forced, and a bit too pat.  I’m still trying to figure out what bit of DNA cobbled together to form this new matrix might have spawned that prehensile tail with its poisoned spine, but it did make for one heck of a plot device.  Despite my questions, the effects are interesting to look at, although I find that Dren all growed up is more creepy than sexy, despite the posturing.  

I vaguely remember having a discussion about how everything George Clooney stars in becomes a “George Clooney” movie.  I’m beginning to think that Adrian Brody is the other side of that coin.  I’ve seen Brody in one or two movies that were off his normal patterns and realized that somewhere under all that crap is some talent.  But, unfortunately, what we normally get are his “Adrian Brody” movies.  For me, it’s a movie that generally lacks any real style or intelligence, but isn’t offensive.  If it was a color, it would be gray.  Some medium shade of gray that would go with just about every other color.  

There are worse ways to spend your time than with an Adrian Brody movie.  This is especially true if you’re just looking to kill some time, which is what was going on in my head when I popped this into my DVD player.  This wasn’t something I would have gone out of my way to see, even though it is the sort of movie I might find my way to in a theater.

I had trouble placing this movie using my Futurama-inspired ratings system.  When the movie was over, I was mostly satisfied.  But not enough to rave about this (I’m beginning to realize if this review was a color, it might be gray), and I’m thinking of that line from 10 Things I Hate About You, asking whether or not you can just be whelmed.  That’s pretty much how I felt about this.  Whelmed.

100 Classic Movies #10 - From Here to Eternity (1953)

Unrated, 1 hr. 58 min.  Directed By:  Fred Zinnemann.  Release Date:  Aug 5, 1953.  DVD Release Date:  Oct 23, 2001.

Every so often, I stumble across a movie that I fall in to, usually head first.  Invariably, I love these movies completely.  From Here to Eternity was one of those movies.  I hadn’t seen this before, but I certainly knew a thing or two about the movie.  For sure, I knew about the beach make out scene between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr.  Back in October, I wrote about the film urban legend that Frank Sinatra used influence with the Mob in order to get his part in the movie (and the false nature of that urban legend)… so I had a vague understanding of what was going to happen, although a few things caught me by surprise. 

It’s a hard thing to balance multiple love stories, tales of hazing and oppression, a raging psychopath, and a description of the day to day life of a WWII soldier, and re-enact one of the pinnacle moments in American history and make it entertaining, but Zinnemann and his crew did a masterful job.  The cast is, quite simply, pretty amazing, and makes me long for the day (not for the first time) that our movie stars were selected because of their talent as much as for their appearance.  The story was well constructed and I’m sure when this was released in ’53, that there was still a lot of cultural bad feeling.  I’m sure this had the same impact a movie about the lives of people who went to work at the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 would have if it were released today. 

I haven’t said this yet about one of my classics, but I’m considering buying From Here to Eternity and adding it to my collection.  It really is that good.  While I liked the stories that edge us up to the events that took place at Pearl Harbor on that fateful day in December, the movie really peaked my interest after the bombing.  Pearl Harbor represented the death of American innocence and brought about decades of increasingly violent knee jerk reactions to events on the international arena.  I thought the atmosphere of panic and fear was remarkably accurate, just as I found their portrayal of military life, although my stint in the military was in a different service and almost 50 years later, very little changed.  It made this movie an emotional experience and brought back a lot of memories of my own military career, good and bad times both, because there seemed so many comparisons to make.

There is one little tiny thing that threw me, and that’s the lie that Donna Reed told about Pruitt at the end of the movie.  What was up with that?

Quite simply, this was an amazing movie experience, and one I’m ashamed I put off for so long.  If you haven’t seen the movie yet, you owe it to yourself to check it out and see what all the fuss was about.  Even if you don’t like “war” movies, there’s something for everyone to relate to in From Here to Eternity.

Trailer Alert - The Hunger Games (2012)

I forgot to write this up Saturday night when I wrote about One For The Money.  In truth, this was probably the thing I liked best about seeing that movie.  I've seen posters in the theaters for this for a long time.  I have absolutely no idea what the trailer's talking about (I'm afraid I'd never heard of the book until I saw this trailer on Saturday afternoon), but I'm intrigued. 

I've seen similar stuff before.  I've even read a number of books inspired by that old story The Lottery, where people draw lots to determine when they die.  This seems to be more or less a spin from there, although I'm not sure yet why the people who die have to be between the ages of 12 and 18.  Puberty doesn't suck that badly.

Basically, I'm looking forward to this, and I'll be making plans to see it opening night.

100 Classic Movies #9 - Ten Little Indians (1965)

PG, 1 hr. 30 min.  Directed By: George Pollock.  Release Date:  Jun 1, 1965.  DVD Release Date:  Mar 14, 2006.

I wanted to love this movie, because it’s based on one of my favorite books ever.  Generally, I would try to avoid comparisons between a movie and its inspiration film, but, I found myself having the same problem while watching this movie as I did when I watched And Then There Were None, the 1940s version of this very movie.  That problem is, simply, that I find myself vaguely disappointed by the film’s inability to live up to the images that appear in my head while I’m reading Agatha Christie’s masterpiece. 

I did suffer from this problem, but I’m going to try to look at this as an isolated event, even though Christie's theme of elimination and murderous attrition have served as thematic inspiration for countless mystery and horror stories for close to 75 years.  I actually found some of the creative license to be effective in this movie, particularly the transition from Christie’s “Indian Island” to the chateau in the Alps… although the transition did make the murderer’s use of the “Ten Little Indians” nursery rhyme a little less obvious. I even liked the character swaps, because the novel characters like Emily Brent wouldn’t translate well to a theater audience. 

But the “modernization” of the classic mystery tale ran afoul of its own making.  The ridiculously “modern” crafting looks VERY dated the better part of fifty years later.  From my perspective, there’s too much about this movie that looked too much like the Austin Powers movies for me to be totally comfortable with them.  The addition of sex and graphic violence to the remarkably G-rated inspiration story was… understandable, but somehow unpalatable, and again would have created some sense of misunderstanding if I wasn’t familiar enough with the story to quote about half the dialogue.  Which one of the Indians falls to their death in a gondola (is that the right word for those enclosed ski lift things?) or gets stabbed in the basement?  The last one actually reminds me of a solution to the board game Clue.  Haha!  It was Dr. Armstrong in the basement with the knife!  It wasn't really, or was it...?

This was certainly a fun movie, but knowledge of the inspiration novel kept me from enjoying this as much as I would if I’d been completely in the dark.  Damn my habit of actually reading.  If you haven’t read the book, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that this would be a fun way to kill some time.  However, don’t get me wrong, Ten Little Indians is plagued by a ton of terrible acting.  Fabian’s performance may be the earliest example of the problem in modern Hollywood, where actors are picked solely for their looks instead of for their talents.  His death scene is arguably the worst bit of acting I’ve ever had the misfortune to see and I've been to more than my fair share of high school plays.

Elektra Luxx (2011)

R, 1 hr. 38 min.  Directed by: Sebastian Gutierrez.  Release Date: March 11, 2011.  DVD Release Date: June 21, 2011.

I wanted to love Elektra Luxx.  I went in loving the cast.  After about ten minutes, I realized that there was nothing I didn’t love about the eponymous character.  Elektra was confident, tough, more than a little sexy, and possessed of a certain… power over the other characters that I found mightily attractive, even if she did have a moderately checkered past.  But then, I do love a girl that’s just a little bit naughty. 

There are a number of really good performances.  Quite a large number, actually, and a few from sources that I don’t consider to be constant in their abilities on screen, so I was moderately impressed (and more than just once).  I mostly liked the tale that was told, although I think that was more a factor of liking the main character than actually thinking this was a good standalone product. 

But, there were problems.  The movie felt a bit, well, a bit like a Seinfeld episode.  Pointless and not always in a good way (I never liked Seinfeld), filled with people that didn’t really make sense to me.  Not that there weren’t some wonderful moments, such as every minute that had Emmanuel Chriqui in it.  Actually, in the wake of this movie, I suspect I’ll propose should we ever happen to meet.  Not that the performance was great, but they were very, very memorable.  I feel like they brought in some very decent actors (Joseph Gordon Leavitt) for one, and relegated them to relatively bit parts… mostly the Kramer roles, so that I spent most of the film wondering why they were even there.  I also felt like this needed some… whimsy.  This was technically decent, but it needed something (other than nudity and Emmanuel Chriqui in “girl on girl action”) in order to make it entertaining, and that something was absent.

Some of this is probably my fault.  I’m not sure how this appeared on my Netflix queue, and I realized only after I finished the movie that it was a sequel.  I might have been way more clued in if I watched the first in the series. 

I’ll probably end up watching this again after I watch the initial installment of the series.

One For The Money (2012)

PG-13, 1 hr. 46 min.  Directed By:  Julie Anne Robinson.  Written By:  Janet Evanovich.  Release Date:  Jan 27, 2012.

I’ve been reading Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels for the better part of fifteen years now.  Evanovich isn’t exactly what you might call a classy dame.  I read her books not for vivid prose or wonderful stories, but because she makes me laugh out loud.  Literally.  I’m not talking OMFG LOL, I’m talking about laughter that comes until I tear up a bit and sometimes my stomach hurts after reading one of her novels.  I can’t even talk about the drag queen with the uzi chapter of To The Nines it’s that kind of funny.  Just.  Can’t.  Do.  It.  There are some folks who say Evanovich stole her ideas from Sue Grafton’s Alphabet Mystery series, but at the end of the day, Grafton doesn’t make me laugh, and Evanovich never makes me think.  The similarities in their series’ are circumstancial at best.  Evanovich’s characters have proven to be quirky, offensively endearing, and easy to identify with (up to a point).

Until now.  One For Money may have been written by the same woman who writes the novels, but the characters have few, if any, of the traits that keep me buying the pulp fiction this movie was based on.  The funniest parts of the book are in the movie, although some have been edited to avoid public… hysteria and possible censure, but they aren’t as funny.  The sarcastic tone and occasional bits of irony mixed with physical humor of the books did not manage to come to life on celluloid.  My favorite characters in the series, Lula and Grandma Mazur, both make the film, but both are relegated to small parts and neither are representative of the hijinks (and much needed uplift) that the characters have brought to the novel.

In this, there wasn’t a single cast member that I liked.  Katherine Heigl, who I think was cast mostly to bring in that late-teen and early-20s date crowd, fell completely flat as Stephanie Plum, who is equal parts insecurity and bravado.  Heigl made the effort, but couldn’t pull off the goofiness that fans of the Plum novels will be looking for.  Hers wasn’t the only character that felt off to me, and I didn’t go in with really high expectations because, well, at the end of the day, it was an Evanovich work. 

I did think this was a fairly decent adaptation of the book.  With the exception of the scenes that were omitted in order to keep this from an R rating, and the way that the ending was moderately re-written, it was almost exactly how the book goes.  That wasn’t a huge deal for me, but it was different enough that there were several times when I was surprised by something that happened. 

Basically, this wasn’t the worst way to kill two hours.  I probably should have chosen Haywire, instead, when I was sitting in front of the automated ticket boot, or well, probably just about anything else, but it could have been worse.

Seven Pounds (2008)

PG-13, 1 hr. 58 min.  Directed By: Gabriele Muccino.  Release Date:  Dec 19, 2008.  DVD Release Date:  Mar 31, 2009.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been this underwhelmed by Will Smith.  Not all of his performances are entertaining, some just make me think a bit, but they’re generally pretty good, or so I can admit to myself after years of therapy trying to convince myself that the Fresh Prince doesn’t totally suck.  I’m also excepting his two rounds as Jay from the hot mess that was the Men In Black series.  In Seven Pounds, I thought he was believable in a sleepy way.  I even (kind of) understood where he was coming from.  I have an understanding of the sort of guilt that we watch him go through, although I have to wonder at the realism of the complexity of his reaction to that guilt.

In an even more surprising move, I was overwhelmed by Rosario Dawson, who I think probably has the same agent as Ben Kingsley.  You know, the one who consistently puts a talented actor in increasingly crappy roles.  Very rarely do I think Ms. Dawson lands a part that is worth her talents, although I have to wonder if the large number of characters that she plays that possess a certain… devilish sense of humor are anything like her real personality.  Dawson is what makes this movie for me.  There was so much passion and brutal honesty in her part that it kind of made up for those parts of the movie that didn’t quite work for me. 

This is a movie that I like, but I don’t necessarily enjoy it.  It’s a bit like Pursuit of Happyness in that regard:  it has powerful themes and a message that should spark debate, both internal and interpersonal, but it’s not necessarily a movie that I’m going to run out and see again anytime soon.  So, even with my new separation of head and gut reactions, I’m finding this a little hard to put my finger on. 

If you’re looking for something serious… and a bit depressing, with really good performances and a really cool great dane that isn't Scooby Doo, you’re in the right place.  If you’re looking for something a bit lighter and a whole lot less meaningful, you probably need to keep on looking.

Puncture (2011)

R, 1 hr. 39 min.  Directed By:  Adam Kassen, Mark Kassen.  Release Date:  Sep 23, 2011.  DVD Release Date:  Jan 3, 2012.

It’s not often a movie makes me think, and this week, I’ve seen two movies that got the old brainicle churning.  Yesterday, Midnight in Paris had me thinking of my own time in the City of Lights, and today I was thinking about the dangers faced by our health care workers while they’re saving our lives.  If the “facts” provided unsubtly during the course of the movie, there are more than one million needle stick accidents in American hospitals every year.  One million chances for blood borne diseases to spread to people who are, well, fighting the good fight.

I also was forced to wonder how true was the tale wherein a major American health care provider decided in favor of profits over life.  It’s not that I give most companies more credit than that, and I know there are a lot of unfair things going on in American business, but I have a hard time believing that not only were businesses risking human lives, but that American politicians were supporting them.  I certainly have a problem believing that a company hired people to kill a lawyer opposing them, as is suggested in the movie.  If there were truth in that, we’d have a hell of a lot less lawyers.  While the movie claims to be based on a true story, I can’t believe I’d never heard anything about this tale.  It’s too horrible and there should have been too large a media backlash for me to have missed it.

This wasn’t a great movie.  It was a great story, told by a decent cast, but I think it wasn’t something I was really expecting from Chris Evans, who seems to have divided his time fairly equally between teen comedies and action flicks.  It’s also a role that we’ve him do before, the junkie.  This was much better than London, the last movie where we basically watched Evans do coke for ninety minutes,  but only because of the positive message that the movie delivers.  It’s a role that he does fairly well, although I would think that a junkie that far along might not look quite so much like he was spending six hours a day in the gym.  I even liked the movie, but it’s one that I probably won’t recommend to people.  There’s a darkness here that I found unsettling.  It caused some internal discussion, that much is true, and I wish now that I’d had someone to watch this with me when I popped it in to my DVD player, because the conversation afterward would have been very interesting.

This gets an A for that internal debate, but a C for pretty much everything else.  If you’re interested in health care safety, you may want to check this out… or, I guess you might be interested in how business can mess with the quality of life.

Midnight in Paris (2011)

PG-13, 1 hr. 34 min.  Directed By:  Woody Allen.  Release Date:  Jun 10, 2011.  DVD Release Date:  Dec 20, 2011 .

I walked in to Midnight in Paris fully prepared to hate it.  I’ve only seen a few of Allen's movies, but I’ve never really enjoyed any of them with the exception of Scoop, which will probably not be hailed as his finest work.  What I’ve seen of his work rubs me as pretentious and a bit high-reaching for the subject matter.  In my head, Mr. Allen has frequently found himself in the position that George Clooney currently enjoys:  he could drop a polished turd in our laps and we’d love it simply because he made it.  There were added problems for me caused by casting.  I’ve come to hate Owen Wilson.  He has the occasional movie where I’ve enjoyed both the movie and his performance, but, by and large, I find him a bit obnoxious, and 90% of each his characters are identical, even when they shouldn’t be, which suggests he’s not becoming his roles, they’re becoming him.  Going in, it didn’t look good.

So imagine my surprise when, about fifteen minutes in to the movie, I was hooked.  Having spent time in Paris myself, I recognized a good many of the places we watch Wilson and his crew walk around.  Also like Wilson, I realized early on in my own stay that the magic of Paris is not in the present (although there is this… exotic nature of the city itself if you’re American), but in its past.  One of my favorite places in the city is the Pere Lachaise cemetery, in which at least one of the artistic presences we see in the film are interred.  Wandering through those rows of headstones, which bear the names of famous authors, playwrights, painters, and until a few years ago, Jim Morrison, you get a quiet sense for the sheer amount of talent that has flocked to Paris over the years.  The film highlights that, and provides a visual accompaniment to that “if you could have any 5 people over for dinner, living or dead, who would they be?”  In a way, the movie is an attempt to personalize these artistic giants, although much of what we see would be more hearsay and “literary fact” rather than who these people really were.

The supporting cast of characters was outstanding.  Marion Cotillard and Kathy Bates both stood out in that crowd, although I liked every single member of the cast playing one of the “artiste” crowd.  In an unusual occurrence, I hated Rachel McAdams; not her performance, but her character.  It’s one of the first times I’ve seen her play such a ridiculously nasty character since her Regina George performance in Mean Girls, and it’s not a look I like on her.  And, to be honest, I didn’t hate Owen Wilson.  Well, I hated the Owen Wilson parts of his character, but I dug what he did that was more Gil and less Owen.

This really was a movie worth seeing, and I’m glad I chose to bump this way up to the front of my queue, even if I did so only because I thought it was going to be on Netflix’s VERY LONG WAIT list for all eternity.

Insidious (2011)

PG-13, 1 hr. 42 min.  Directed By: James Wan.  Release Date:  Apr 1, 2011.  DVD Release Date:  Jul 12, 2011.

After reading a LOT of reviews of Insidious, from both amateur and professional critics, I decided to give this movie a pass in the theaters.  My general rule of thumb is that if I can’t find an equal number of positive and negative reviews (or something very close to that), that I skip the movie, and maybe check it out on streaming or DVD.  At $8 a pop, I generally figure that I should see movies I have an actual shot at enjoying, and Insidious was getting grapefruits lobbed at it from all corners.

I’m going to say this hesitantly, and with explanation, but I didn’t quite hate this movie.  Let that sink in, and here’s my explanation:  until they go absolutely nuts with that whole love child of Saw and Paranormal Activity (which I learned is exactly what happened here, since the “creative” team behind this came from both of those movies and borrowed heavily from each to create Insidious), I thought this was based on realistic fears, or at least they are scares that I’ve had happen to me before. 

The face in the window.  Admit it, we’ve all been somewhere when it happened to us.  We were moving around through a house and someone scares the absolute hell out of us unintentionally.  When I was a kid, there was a floodlight in my backyard, and I remember the night that I saw someone’s shadow on my bedroom curtains.  Unfortunately, this was during the Richard Ramirez/Nightstalker scare, and I lived in LA, so it was a problem.  I’m not sure who was in my backyard, but I knew then that it wasn’t anyone who was supposed to be there.  I’m also pretty sure now that it wasn’t Richard Ramirez.  Seeing the face in the window here on several occasions was disturbing and netted the desired jump from me.

The alarm and the open door.  If you have an alarm system, it brings you peace of mind… until it goes off for no apparent reason at 3am and you find your garage door ajar.  Then, it freaks you right the @#!* out.  When I was caring for my dad in 2009, those events actually happened to me.  I was asleep, and then the warning drone woke me up a split second before the real siren began to wail.  So, the scene where Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne are sitting in bed talking and their alarm starts going off hit home.  I know that fear.  It was creepy to watch. 

But… here’s the rub.   What we have here is a (slightly) more intelligent remake of Paranormal Activity, which, if I can quote Roger from American Dad, is “not an American movie classic.”  The story lines are nearly identical, the ideas and scares all come from the same basic place.  Both movies even have the same strong point, the rising action.  Both movies have the same weakness, which is hashing out the paranormal to such an extent that I started yawning… or when the “psychic” brought out the gas mask at the séance, laughing and cracking “Dalton, I am your father” jokes.  The writers worked TOO hard to convince us of the paranormal “science” involved in their movie to make it fun.

They had me for all of thirty minutes, and the day after I watched this, I refused to investigate strange sounds coming from my balcony.  My rationale was that I live on the third floor and the only person who might be on my balcony would be Spider-Man.  The reality was I didn’t want to crack the blinds and find someone staring back at me.

On a side note:  Horror’s well, it’s kind of a bitch for me to write about it.  I think I’ve said this before, and I’ve seen other bloggers (especially those who consider themselves “critics” rather than “reviewers”) get too wrapped up in their heads when they watch horror.  Horror is visceral.  We’re supposed to FEEL it, not think away the scare.  Those cheap scares are going to be effective if you take your brain out of the equation.  When I write about a movie like this, I’m totally not looking at the technical aspects of the film, unless they’re so poorly done that it detracts from the scare quality.  If you go in to horror and you’re looking at the minutiae, of course you’re not going to be scared.  Horror’s a big picture event, not something where you can get lost in the trappings.  Expect a bad movie with a few decent scares or pulse-racing events, and you’ll find yourself disappointed less often. 

100 Classic Movies #8 - The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

Unrated, 1 hr. 52 min.  Directed By: John Huston.  Release Date:  May 23, 1950.  DVD Release Date:  Jul 6, 2004.

I’m a relative stranger to noir… and I think this sort of qualifies.  I’m still a bit iffy on the actual definitions, but The Asphalt Jungle seems to cover the same sort of topics that I’ve seen gone through in other films that I’ve been told are noir.  Despite not knowing much about noir, which is a concept I’m beginning to think is a bit like the French concept of “je ne sais pas,” which means an indefinable something, I’m learning that it’s something that I generally like.  Basically, it means that I think people who pay attention to noir know it when they see it and the rest of us just have to follow along and nod, so I'm nodding.

In the case of The Asphalt Jungle, I really dug the whole heist milieu.  I think that the actual heist component of the story was very well written.  It flowed well, and there weren’t any of those moments that I associate with heist movies where things got a bit ridiculous.  The events in this story were outside of my life experience, but I could see them happening to people who lived in that sort of environment.  

What this movie really had going for it, at least from my perspective, was that it reminded me of old Bugs Bunny cartoons.  If one person, even one, had said “you dirty rat,” I would have died a very happy man.  I suspect it was the accent that queued the memory of those Bugs Bunny movies that lampooned famous actors of the 40s and 50s, although for the life of me, I couldn’t place which part of the United States would be home to that accent.  I’m also left wondering if the accent might be an expectation from the audience… the expectation that is what “criminals” would have sounded like.  It was an interesting question, but not one I intend to do any research on, but it tugged at my brain for most of the movie.

If I have a complaint about this movie, it’s a little one.  There were parts of the movie, mostly in the setup sections of the story, that I thought dragged a little bit.  Otherwise I thought this was pretty decent, and worth repeated watching.

Double Feature - Morning Glory (2010) and Letters to Juliet (2010)

PG-13, 1 hr. 42 min.  Directed By:  Roger Michell.  Release Date:  Nov 10, 2010.  DVD Release Date:  Mar 8, 2011.

I don’t remember when, but at some point in the last few years, I sat down and watched Post Grad.  I had some empathy.  I was going through my MBA, faced deplorable job prospects, and was pretty much freaking out.  When I put this on my DVD queue, I had hoped for something similar to happen, because Morning Glory and I had a ton of things in common.  I lost my job, had to move in with my parents, and if Rachel MacAdams had spent three years looking for that new job, had to cannibalize every cent she had in savings, and had to watch her father die slowly over the course of a year, her life might have sucked almost as much as mine did until September 2011.

It should have been no-brainer magic.  I should have racked up TONS of empathy points, and well, there was nothing.  Don’t get me wrong.  I still have all kinds of naughty thoughts about Rachel MacAdams.  I thought she had an energy and an approachability that will take her far in Hollywood.  Like always, I liked her.  Way too much.  It makes me overly forgiving of when she makes crap like this.  

There are other folks in the cast that I thought were great.  Well, there was one such person, and that was Diane Keaton.  She was pretty awesome, and she made me laugh on more than one occasion.  While I’m not up on my Diane Keaton, I realized that this was a run of the mill performance from her.  She’s a bit like pizza:  even when she’s mediocre, she’s still pretty good.  When balanced off a pretty terrible performance from Harrison Ford, she works really well and makes him look a whole lot better.

The story is simple and fairly mindless, and filled with a timeliness that might not withstand the test of time.  In ten years, when the economy doesn’t suck as bad as it does these days, and given the fickle nature of the average American’s attention span, Morning Glory might not quite have the punch it did when it was released in theaters.  This isn’t terrible.  I expected it to be a romantic comedy, because well, it was Rachel MacAdams and I don’t think she’s done something that wasn’t a romantic comedy since Red Eye.  It was like that little thriller broke her somehow. 

PG, 1 hr. 45 min.  Directed By: Gary Winick. Release Date:  May 14, 2010.  DVD Release Date: Sep 14, 2010. 

Somone.  Shoot.  Me.  PLEASE.  As if my mind wasn't already warped because of the time I spent exposed to Morning Glory, I foolishly chose to use this as a follow up.  These movies have way too much in common:  they both star an actress that has some moderate chops who is forever stuck in the same lame part.  They're both about a woman struggling to make it in her professional and personal lives, and both movies certainly did not aim themselves at me.   I had hoped that the presence of Vanessa Redgrave and Gael Garcia Bernal would elevate this from another cheesy rendition of Dear John.

Sadly, I was wrong.  While Ms. Redgrave did act circles around Amanda Seyfried, it wasn't nearly enough to make me not see the ending coming about two miles away.  Seyfried was comely, which seems to be her true sole talent:  I have yet to see her in a movie where I don't find her completely endearing, even when the movie sucks out loud.  Letters to Juliet is yet another in a long line of those movies, and I'm beginning to think that I might as well just give up on Ms. Seyfried.

I know that the modern romance film uses a formula that was set in motion in the 30s by It Happened One Night, which happens to be one of the few romantic movies that I don't like, because the story that unfolds there falls reasonably close to reality.  You can see it happening to someone, even if it never happened to you.  That's kind of important.  I have a hard time believing that this mopey chick just happens to find this letter hidden in a wall, and then happens to be in touch with the people who write those letters and happens, blah blah blah.  There's too much coincidence, and not enough reality linking the events that send Sophie, Claire, and... well, I've already forgotten the guy's name, on this wild goose chase through Italy for a man that Claire had a summer fling with 50 years before.  Then, everything falls into place perfectly, blah blah blah.  There's too much left to chance and there's too much left for the audience to just swallow.

Redgrave was charming, and this was one of her rare roles where I wished she was my grandmother or something.  She was... perfect, but still, this won't go down on the call sheets as her best performance.  The rest of the cast was unoffensive.  If you like your movies dull and a bit witless, and don't want anything like a surprise, this is probably going to be your poison.