Home » Movies

Movies

'JUST WRIGHT'
NICE BUT MORE DRIVEL THAN DRIBBLE
By Sean Chavel

Who out there wants to be Queen Latifah's friend? Queen is so vivacious, and upbeat, with her eyes always popping up like a toaster machine. But Paula Patton is the girl that guys everywhere want to date because she's cotton candy from head to toe. Common, the rapper turned actor, has to choose between the two and gingerly drive his charisma through the film Just Wright in a way that doesn't make himself look like he's trapped in a formula romantic comedy that he's actually in. Common plays Scott McKnight, a fictional NBA star who falls in love fast but whose inconvenient on the court injury threatens both his career and his love life.

There are a fair number of readers out there who don't know these actors. Well, you should know Queen Latifah because she starred in "Chicago" and "Living Out Loud," is chubby but bubbly, and generally has a great zest of life on screen. Patton is a hot, yummy gams sight for sore eyes who just happens to have acting chops as seen in "Precious" and "Idlewild." Common was in "American Gangster" and "Terminator: Salvation" and yet I don't remember seeing him, he also had a one-note hitman role in "Date Night" and now is here, and you know what? He's as fine as brown sugar.

As a chick flick romantic comedy "Just Wright" can be pretty decent, but the basketball stuff is subpar. Latifah is Leslie Wright, a physical therapist who goes from the standard medical building to the deluxe penthouse of Scott McKnight. Patton is, Morgan Alexander, the best friend who is beautiful but shallow like a Kardashian sister. McKnight dates Morgan for all the obvious good public image reasons, but after his injury, she steps out and Leslie Wright steps in. New chemistry is stirring but the movie forgets about half a dozen characters during this unlikely but engaging courtship. In the meantime, McKnight has only a few weeks of rehabilitation before he has to get back for the playoffs. This is a movie to careless to worry about loose ends.

Let me tell you a story. The screening was the same night as Game Four of the Los Angeles Lakers vs. Utah Jazz game, and I wanted to see the Lakers close it out. I attended the screening feeling that it would be at least over by the time the fourth quarter started, as long as I found a TV. The difficulty of bringing in the media and the audience delayed the start of the movie for 25 minutes. With my temper flaring up, I considered walking out at the end so I could catch the end of the game.

Unexpectedly, I cared too much about the people on the screen to miss any moment and I stayed through the end. Yes, a critic by vow of profession is to never step out of the movie screening room. But if the movie had stunk I would have declined reviewing it and would have just caught the game. Except I stayed. I cared about the people on the screen - does that mean I cared more about the actors or the characters they were playing? I am still trying to figure that one out.

The movie is cheerfully acted and competently directed. But while the screenplay has a pro forma film school structure, the dialogue is nevertheless amateurish. Yet the actors go through as much tongue-zinging as possible to make it fresher than what it is. The boys out there in the audience won't like that the movie doesn't teach you nothing about behind the scenes basketball and training that we don't already know. Scott McKnight is supposed to be a league superstar but in reality his moves on the court aren't that good. He would get torched by Kobe Bryant or Chris Paul.

If you are not expecting art and lower your standards than this is nice and easy to watch movie. In a way it is more of a compliment than it sounds in relation to all the mean garbage we've been getting in theaters the last couple of months. Nobody gets hideously hurt, and for the intended criteria the characters try to be kind and not vindictive on purpose. And Common's final apology and plea for forgiveness is one of the best deliveries I've ever seen, he should be teaching babe magnet classes.

Letters to Juliet
By Linda Cook

Somewhere, not so long ago, a documentary was made about the true-life background of this fictional romance.

In 2005, a documentary called "Dear Juliet" made the festival rounds. There's a book about it, too.

What am I talking about? Well, in Verona, Shakespeare's Juliet receives real letters from the lovelorn and those seeking advice. A group of women, acting as "Juliet's secretaries" for the Juliet Club of Verona, write back with advice.

This is real, fascinating and moving.

Now there's a fictional movie, "Letters to Juliet," that is based on this authentic process. The movie is sweet, but it's not nearly as interesting as the real-life letter writers.

Adorable Amanda Seyfried ("Mamma Mia!") stars as Sophie, a fact-checker for The New Yorker magazine. She wants to write an article for the magazine, but her boss (Oliver Platt) is afraid he'll lose her if she does.

Sophie is about to get married to Victor (Gael Garcia Bernal), a restaurateur whose true passion is superb food and wine. When they travel together to Verona, Sophie discovers the Juliet Club, and realizes this would make a great story for the New Yorker.

Sophie joins the women as they write back on behalf of Juliet. She writes to a woman who sent her missive 50 years ago as a 15-year-old girl. At the time, Claire wondered whether she should go back to London or stay in Verona.

After Sophie writes back, the original letter writer, Claire (Vanessa Redgrave) comes to see Sophie in person. Claire is accompanied by her grandson Charlie (Christopher Egan), who discourages Claire from going to find Lorenzo, the love of her life.

But off they go, along with Sophie, to find the Lorenzo that Claire hasn't seen for decades.

You already know how this movie is going to end; you already know the fates of its characters. You also probably know that you're going to see incredible scenes from Verona; gorgeous sites that will make you want to run out and buy a plane ticket, and nice-looking actors turning in worthy performances.

As a romantic comedy, this is an average show. For some, this will prove satisfying.

For others, who want to know more about the Juliet's "secretaries," why not just visit http://www.julietclub.com/en/club.asp and learn a little more about this unconventional "club" that receives letters from all over the world?

"Letters to Juliet" is OK. But the Juliet Club is something to write home about.

P. S. You'll see Redgrave's real-life husband, Franco Nero, here, too.

Carrie and Company Need a Plot - and a Fashion - Makeover
By Michael Phillips

Two years ago, with the world economy about to be credit-default-swapped right in the kisser, the first "Sex and the City" feature made $415 million worldwide. Its pre-sold fan base, already nostalgic for Cosmopolitans, heaved a collective, economically envious sigh: Nice to see you four again. By the way, nice shoes.

Now, Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda are back for "Sex and the City 2" and it's more like: Oh. You four again. It's truly a peculiar picture, though sure to be a success, because writer-director Michael Patrick King knows his audience. For an hour or so, beginning with the "Top Hat"-inspired wedding of Carrie's friends Stanford (Willie Garson) and Anthony (Mario Cantone), it's closer to the original HBO series' comic spirit and blithely raunchy nonchalance.

And a sloggy hour and a half later, you may feel like fomenting a revolution.

To begin with a shallow point …why have these women, photographed drearily and insanely costumed, become full-on drag queens? They're barely human anymore, though in "Sex 2" the Manhattan women are coping with theoretically relatable problems and relationship tangles. In supremely art-directed splendor, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Big (Chris Noth) argue over whether to go out on the town, or eat in, and whether it's bad to have a big flat-screen TV in the bedroom. Samantha (Kim Cattrall, who always was the drag-queeniest of the lot) keeps attracting younger men with extremely firm buttocks.

On the flimsiest of pretexts she, Carrie, Charlotte ( Kristin Davis) and Miranda ( Cynthia Nixon) are junketed to Abu Dhabi. So it's fun, frolic, run-ins with old lovers (John Corbett shows up at a spice market as Carrie's blast from the past) and a teensy-tiny brush with crushing Islamic fundamentalist disdain for everything "Sex and the City" represents as the quintessence of capitalist extremism in quasi-human form.

Many fans of the series will enjoy this wallow, just as they turned out for the first feature, although I wonder if anyone on the planet, including writer-director King, honestly believes "Sex 2" makes the most of its running time. The best episodes of the TV series were marvels of compression; here, for every amusing exchange, we're stuck with two more that run on three times longer than they should. The most dubious sequence has the ladies hitting the stage at an Abu Dhabi nightclub with a rendition of "I Am Woman," featuring cutaway shots to oppressed women of various nationalities joining in. It's a joke, but essentially sincere and you wonder: When Helen Reddy first sang about invincibility and sisterhood and wisdom born of pain, did she have runway divas such as Carrie and Samantha in mind?

If "Sex 2" were a half-hour HBO episode, nobody would be thinking about the implications of anything. At the show's peak the ensemble, especially Parker, could sell any conceit, any hypocrisy, any zinger. King's big-screen expansions of this fantasy universe have their moments, but the padding is outrageous: montages of the gals swanning around in the desert on camels, that sort of thing. In one narrative development Carrie's latest book gets a pan. She is devastated, and it's implied that the (fictional, male) book critic simply wants to keep strong female voices silenced, like the Taliban. Please. I enjoyed these characters more when they were rich, rather than obscenely rich, when their self-involvement and life crises had one foot on planet Earth - and when they weren't all gussied up like Mae West in "Sextette."

'PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME'
A NEVERENDING STORY
By Sean Chavel

Only minutes into Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time passed before I had the desire the play one of the old versions of the video game over sitting through the rest of the movie. Even for blockbuster movie nonsense, this one takes the cake. It tries so hard to be about something historic in the times of 6th century Persia. In the final banal scenes, it turns into a parable of how the United States found no WMD's in Afghanistan. Uh huh.

The film often has an impressive look but it fades from memory like quicksand, possibly because there is nothing meaty in the storytelling for you to chew on. Oh, how the filmmakers try to rope a seemingly complex story out of all this nonsense. Jake Gyllenhaal, sporting a British accent, is the adventurer prince Dastan who is framed by somebody in the palace, by somebody likely also with a British accent.

Gyllenhaal ("Jarhead"), a born American, has been in a lot of terrific movies where he beautifully underplays his characters with a dash of humbleness. Now he is in leather-strapped warrior outfits spouting tough-gruel dialogue like he's Orlando Bloom as Maximus. When he gets lovey-dovey eyes then that's the Gyllenhaal we know, a lover not a fighter. A Town & Country boy, not a Persian Empire warrior. Anyway, it's about time to ask this: Do audiences worldwide accept that British accents pretty much cover any foreign culture from any time in the past? Let's hope not.

The outfits are intended to make Gyllenhaal, and everybody else, look beefy. And so our hero looks muscular, albeit, but not a genuine specimen of ancient times. The movie contains military strategies unbeknownst to history, featuring actors scaling walls in unprecedented and impossible ways. Yet, wink-wink humor aside, the acting is so square and serious, but let's not forget inauthentic. I would have preferred the blockhead acting of Brendan Fraser of "The Mummy" movies, to the it's-so-stupidly-self-aware-it's-priceless kind of acting.

As obligatory for the plot, Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton, "Quantam of Solace") is dragged through the political upheaval, at one point enslaved, but in family movie terms. She has a love and hate relationship with Dastan, but at first it's just hate, and then it's bantering, and then the rest of the formula. Arterton is a confused actress who doesn't have a clue on how to modulate the love-hate formula to endear the audience. Her screen personality is poison.

Ben Kingsley and Alfred Molina, cast for their pedigree, don't add much class either despite their reputations - they parody themselves. What's left is a CGI-heavy action film (even the snakes are CGI), with lots of rapid cutting to no positive effect. The awe is brief, though existent, in the swirling aerial shots that reveal an entire city. But the messy shooting and editing style is rampant, and director Mike Newell ("Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire") has no sense of crowd control.

The worst special effects are the core ones dealing with a magic dagger that turns back the sands of time. These effects are video game similes cranked to a slow-motion effect that only lets the eye wander endlessly upon the lousy CGI. The climactic inferno - who will fall into the abyss? - is at least an imaginative and tactile demonstration of effects except that it is also ridiculously overblown (doesn't it look hot down there, like Fahrenheit 451 kind of hot?). Even for fantasy purposes nothing in "Prince of Persia" is remotely humanly plausible or made to feel "real."

The public statement that Disney made recently reflected that the company will make no more traditional films at all, focusing entirely on animation, franchises and superheroes. With this insultingly bad cast, incoherently scripted and disjointedly directed formula product, Walt Disney spotlights its directive in company soullessness.

back to top