Jun 20, 2011
After a year of really bad movies depicting war between terrorists and Americans, finally a Hollywood way to make us jump for joy from our theatre seats! Send in – to the middle east – an unlikely superhero called “Iron Man” played by Robert Downey Jr, a billionaire inventor with a conscience. The story opens with Tony Stark (Downey Jr.) an MIT grad, part Bill Gates part Sumner Redstone, total playboy, kidnapped in Afghanistan by the very terrorists who purchase his Stark weapons. Incapable of being responsible (in other words rich and spoiled) Stark has a cathartic moment that transforms him. This is expected when you’re beaten up, and dragged into a dungeon with a bag over your head at gun point. While held in captivity for enough time to make him think about his factory-made weapons of mass destruction, Tony Stark evolves. Back home his best friend Colonel Rhodes (Terrence Howard) is running the air force, while Stark’s partner, Mr. Stane (Jeff Bridges) is supposedly running the company. Stane’s mission: Make money on arms. But that’s not what Stark wants anymore. And then there’s Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) Stark’s assistant/love interest whose red locks and blue eyes (and tilted camera angle) feel like a generic version of Kirsten Dunst’s Spiderman girlfriend. Nonetheless, the story works. And works really well. Downey Jr. has the energy, charisma and the right dose of wise guy attitude to carry off this character long into the franchise sunset. He’s a super hero with a heart. He’s a super hero who’s middle-aged. He’s a superhero with flaws. And for us Americans sitting in the audience, it’s actually a bit of a dreamy stretch to see a machine like “Iron Man” go in and wipe out the Bin Laden wannabes. This is Super Hero meets Patriotism. And “Iron Man” is George Bush’s answer on how to solve the war on terrorism. Four tiaras
Jun 20, 2011
(rated R, 90 Mins.)
Based on John Bayley’s memoir “Elegy for Iris” about his marriage to novelist, philosopher, playwright and poet Iris Murdoch, the film covers their early years while teaching at Oxford together through her subsequent struggle with Alzheimer’s disease 40 years later. The story inter-cuts young Iris (Kate Winslet) with elder Iris (Judi Dench) and her young husband Bayley (Hugh Bonneville). But it’s older Bayley portrayed by Jim Broadbent, whose passion for bonding with his soulmate yet hating her for slipping away years later, that steals the movie and a recent Golden Globe. While one of the slowest pictures ever viewed, if I’m to see a movie about somebody famous that I don’t know, I want to know why I want to see this movie. This one never seems to answer that question, yet its sweet approach to coming to terms with the aging process is convincing. Like “Beautiful Mind”, brilliance can be tainted by life’s curveball illnesses.
Jun 20, 2011
The nicest thing about this movie, isn’t just its PG rating or a theatre full of families, but its opening credits, which feature the old Disney logo reminiscent of the Sunday nights in the 1960s, when we gathered round the television to watch their movie-of-the-week. And that’s exactly what the newly re-vamped Disney company – determined to bring back old-fashioned quality – has succeeded at doing on the big screen. “Invincible’ about a football player, is from the same producers who brought us “The Rookie” about a baseball player that starred Denis Quaid. This time, it’s Vince Papale (Mark Wahlberg) living in South Philly, 1975, down on his luck, out of a teaching job and suddenly without a wife. So he takes a shot at open calls for the Philadephia Eagles, recently taken over by Coach Dick Vermeil (Greg Kinnear) who takes a lot of slack for his UCLA surfer-dude approach to Football. And so Coach Vermiel sees in Vince an underdog, reflective of himself. What makes this movie mostly magic, is that it’s based on a true story of a local yokel who suddenly found himself a major football star. The story is sappy-sweet and formulaic in its plot, but that is what the audience wants – something predictable and feel-good with a “Rocky” feeling of nothing to lose to everything to win – and it is that. A winner. Three tiaras. .
Jun 20, 2011
(rated PG-13)
George Clooney is a sleazy divorce attorney. Catherine Zeta Jones is a woman who robs alimony from a string of ex husbands. When their worlds collide, so do their values. Or lack of them. Director/brother team Ethan and Joel Coen tackle their first romantic comedy re-teaming with their “O Brother Where Art Thou?” star, Clooney. The chemistry of Clooney and Zeta Jones is a throwback to Hayworth, Clark Gable, Hepburn and Grant, you name it. With Billy Bob Thornton as Zeta-Jones’s next victim and Geoffrey Rush in an amusing stint as a client of Clooney’s. The movie holds its own. Buffoonish style comedy, Zeta-Jones is deadpan in her role, and the Coen brothers good, but not as great as some of their past films.
Jun 20, 2011
Written and directed by Sean Penn, comes the story of Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) a top graduate and athlete of Emory University, who donates his Harvard Law Grad School money to charity and takes for the high road – the wilderness. On the way he meets a cast of characters who help him discover the meaning of life from Vince Vaughn as a farmer, to Catherine Keener as a hippy chick, to Hal Holbrook as an old-timer who just wants to adopt him. Part “Grizzly Man” part “Brokeback Mountain” for the wilderness factors, this story has some dramatic and often over-the-top elements. Take Chris’s intense need to punish his parents (Marcia Gay Harden and William Hurt) who never know if he’s alive or dead, and his anger toward money and the politics of life. Based on the John Krakeur book this is a breathtaking movie to watch, but sadly with a real life ending that never quite adds up. Two and a half tiaras
