With but 2 features to their credit (am I the only one who’s never heard of The Last Romantic or Band of Robbers) the Nee Brothers, Aaron and Adam, convinced four of Hollywood’s biggest names (Bullock, Tatum, Pitt, and Harry Potter) to star in what is best described as Fabio …
George Clooney’s relationship with sci-fi fantasies has been spotty at best. A finely condensed Cliff’s Notes abbreviation: Solaris was Steven Soderbergh’s aesthetically bountiful endeavor to distill Tarkovsky for the masses. Theatre ushers loved the film, as low audience turnout left little to clean up between shows. Gravity was an Awards-season …
Miss Ingratiation, for sure. Sandra Bullock (who produced, too) plays a one-of-the-guys FBI agent who goes undercover as a beauty contestant. The character howls in protest; it's the actress who worms and wheedles. Michael Caine has his moments as the gay Pygmalion who makes her over. So does William Shatner …
Barbet Schroeder, coming off his engagé political thriller Our Lady of the Assassins, reverts to his Hollywood-hack mode, with an updated Loeb-Leopold case about a precocious, Nietzschean, absinthe-sipping high-school misfit who masterminds a "perfect crime" in collaboration with a cocky BMOC. For hack work, however, it is a handsome job, …
Slow start while the well-established is re-established: the cuteness and adorability of Sandra Bullock ("I take my share of risks. I don't always floss. I rip the tags off my pillows"). That done, the incomprehensibility of computers is taken to be a license for any neck-wrenching plot turn or, more …
Same dross, different gender. Danny Ocean’s kid sister Debbie (Sandra Bullock) whiles away a five-year stretch in the pokey by conspiring to knock over the annual Met Gala. Her seven same-sex associates are all assigned one function/trait needed to advance the plot: Rihanna as the spliff-rolling hacker (with the floating …
Same dross, different gender. Danny Ocean’s kid sister Debbie (Sandra Bullock) whiles away a five-year stretch in the pokey by conspiring to knock over the annual Met Gala. Her seven same-sex associates are all assigned one function/trait needed to advance the plot: Rihanna as the spliff-rolling hacker (with the floating …
Same dross, different gender. Danny Ocean’s kid sister Debbie (Sandra Bullock) whiles away a five-year stretch in the pokey by conspiring to knock over the annual Met Gala. Her seven same-sex associates are all assigned one function/trait needed to advance the plot: Rihanna as the spliff-rolling hacker (with the floating …
The film that dares to ask: will you buy Sandra Bullock as a borderline, ball-busting political strategist? To bring down your asking price, the film takes her south of the border, where everything is portrayed as cheaper: the cynicism, the political strategizing, the despair, and even the redemption. At least …
Slogging exposition, pushed along by intermittent pop songs, to establish the Curse of the Owens Women ("on any man who would dare love ..."), its origins in the 17th Century, its perpetuation in the present. Half an hour into the movie, a situation develops, a tedious one, with Sandra Bullock …
Time-tripping thriller wherein a normal, average, earthbound housewife and mother, whose parenting skills seem to consist solely of addressing her two daughters as "Baby," wakes up on alternate days to find that her husband is dead, not yet dead, again dead, not yet dead, and so forth. "Something," she intuits, …
Anne Fletcher’s contemporary romantic comedy has a premise no more ridiculous than something that might once have featured Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray. The editor-in-chief at Ruick & Hunt Publishers, a transplanted Canadian ice queen slash wicked witch of the north, now threatened with deportation for an expired visa, commands …
The overhanging question is whether a two-time Academy Award-winning actress, Hilary Swank, can lighten herself into the thespian weight-class of a Sandra Bullock or a Kate Hudson. The answer seems to be no, not when the director and co-writer, Richard LaGravenese, who directed her also in Freedom Writers, is intent …
Die Hard on wheels, Under Siege on land, Passenger 57 on the ground. It must have been an easy "pitch," belt-high fastball, down the middle of the plate, "hit" written all over it. The twenty-minute prelude is actually pretty gripping. In fact the opening credits sequence alone is gripping: a …
Too speedy. The pace is indeed so insistently frenetic, and the camerawork so agitated, that we cannot begin to appreciate, even if we can begin to comprehend, the moves and countermoves aboard a hijacked Caribbean cruise liner. The lone hijacker, and the last word in disgruntled ex-employees (Willem Dafoe), gives …