Well, half a movie is better than none at all, right? I hope for Nora Ephron’s sake (and the sake of all those who sat through her latest) that is true, because half a movie is just what we get with her latest candy-coated confectionary, Julie & Julia. On the one hand, half of this bipolar motion picture is a vibrant and joyous movie about love, passion and French cuisine, starring the effervescent über-actress almighty, Meryl Streep, walloping out a pitch perfect portrayal of the ever-fascinating “Lady of the Ladle” Julia Child. On the other hand, Ephron’s typically underwhelming will-o’-wisp filmmaking style lends to the other half of her film being an annoying, and quite cloying, middle management kind of affair, featuring the usually dependable Amy Adams as wouldbe back door cook and average cubicle cutter, turned dogged blogger Julie Powell. It is a tale of two women – one weak, one strong, one a powerhouse, one a sniveling wannabe, one an ingenue, one Meryl “freakin” Streep – and no matter how hard poor Miss Adams, or for that matter, poor schmucky Miss Powell, tries, never these twains shall meet.
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The opening scene in The Bad Lieutenant shows a sizeable water moccasin swimming within the murky water of an abandoned police precinct. The deluge that has consumed a domicile of justice has seemingly washed the safety of New Orleans away due to the effects of hurricane Katrina.
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Elegantly shot and with a luscious, almost dreamy feel – as if we bear silent witness to the inner workings of protagonist Jenny’s sixteen year old fantasy world – director Lone Scherfig’s An Education is a visual wonder to behold at times. The film is draped in period lucidity (set In the post-war, pre-Beatles London suburbs according to the official Sony press release) while also dripping with a fantastical cinematic fluidity – as if we have been dropped into the perfect incarnation of early 1960’s London while also are assuredly watching an imaginary filmic version of that same said early 1960’s London. Scherfig, whose most well known work is the sentimentally acerbic, but not overtly cinematic, Dogme entry, Italian For Beginners from nine years past, creates a mood here with her camera that shows specks of the visual pinings of both Scorsese (when he’s not riddling his whirling dervish camera with blood) and the enigmatic portraitist Wong Kar-wai. In essence, a sumptuous dewey-eyed look at the innocence (or seeming innocence) of long ago days.
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It’s strange to think about it in an era when it’s impossible to escape the ubiquitous “Disney Princess” brand, but the venerable animation studio produced all of three princess-themed films during Walt Disney’s 40-ish year tenure there. Of the nine princesses included in the standard lineup, six are from the last 20 years (that translates to twice as many princesses, in half the time, for those of you keeping score). Why the sudden flood? A lot of it has to do with the studio’s one creative genius passing on and leaving his place open to businessmen. The Little Mermaid was a hit in 1989, so the studio continued to base their films on the same formula: plucky, independent princess; dashing-but-bland hero; goofy comic relief sidekicks; ugly villain; six Broadway-style songs; lots of cleavage.
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It’s Christmas time, and that means the public is 67% more likely to go to a movie if it has a Christmas tree on the poster. Okay, I just made that fact up, but it sounds plausible, right? And I guess the promoters behind Everybody’s Fine thought so, hence the Christmas tree on the poster. So, just in case it really is that important to you to see a Christmas movie, I guess I should warn you that Everybody’s Fine is not, in fact, a Christmas movie. Actually, it’s a loose remake of the 1990 Italian movie of the same title, and just like it, it’s set in the summertime.
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