Movie review: Oscar-nominated short films - Los Angeles Times

The races for the live-action and animated short film Oscar tend to operate blessedly outside the Academy Awards hype machine; assembled here into two separate programs, this year's nominees — a stronger batch than last year's — offer thought-provoking contrasts in storytelling and style.

On the live-action side, many of the entries are marked by worlds in collision. Max Z¿hle's suspenseful drama "Raju," breathlessly filmed in Calcutta, depicts the seesawing emotions and ethical quandaries a German couple go through trying to adopt a 4-year-old orphan boy in a teeming Indian metropolis of overt poverty and hidden agency.

Peter McDonald's "Pentecost," meanwhile, finds buoyant Irish humor in the ways sports and church overlap, when a soccer-obsessed altar boy is given an important role in an upcoming Mass.

Belfast is the setting for Terry George's gently poignant "The Shore," in which an expat Irishman (Ciarán Hinds) returns from America with his grown daughter (Kerry Condon) after 25 years, only to be pushed into resolving things with a forgotten buddy and the fiancee he left behind.

Seaside reconciliation also animates Norwegian Hallvar Witzø's quirky but forced "Tuba Atlantic," about an old coot who lives out his last days machine-gunning seagulls, befriending a church-appointed teenage caretaker and trying to patch things up with his long-lost brother via transoceanic wind horn.

Much more effortlessly amusing is Andrew Bowler's neurotic comedy "Time Freak," in which the possibilities inherent in mastering time travel hilariously bump up against its inventor's crushing addiction to the do-overs daily life presents.

Humor is typically prevalent in the animated features that dominate the multiplex, but in shorts, filmmakers often try for more nuanced emotions. Even Pixar's excellent entry "La Luna," from Enrico Casarosa and inspired by an Italo Calvino story, aims for evocative magical realism over gags in its depiction of the moon-sweeping journey a young boy embarks on for the first time with his father and grandfather.

A child's point of view characterizes Patrick Doyon's "Dimanche/Sunday" as well, wherein a boy's day with his extended family — whose unintelligible chattering is equated with the cawing of birds — encompasses boredom, imagination and the fragility of life.

"The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore" is William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg's movie version of their successful iPad app for kids, whimsically combining visual storytelling flourishes from the silent era (the titular hero resembles Buster Keaton), inventive digital animation and a touching metaphor for the soaring joys of reading.

More offbeat in tone are the entries "A Morning Stroll" and "Wild Life." The former, from director Grant Orchard, is a bracingly loony triptych set in three years (1959, 2009, 2059) and using dimensionally progressive animation each time — from monochromatic line drawing to color-burnished photorealist CGI — to dramatize an encounter between a man on the street and a chicken with a purpose.

The latter is an impressionistic, painterly rendering of an Englishman's migration to the Canadian hinterlands in 1909, which in the hands of Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby proves to be a quietly resonant tale of quixotic, opaque individualism. It also serves as a fitting reminder that the short form allows for a wide variety of artistic temperaments, which this collection of Oscar-nominated films admirably showcases.

calendar@latimes.com

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Review: Skyline -- Don't Bother Looking - Seattle Post Intelligencer

Saturday, November 13, 2010
Last updated 9:34 a.m. PT

At this point we've seen just about every kind of alien invasion movie there could be: giant monster aliens, flying saucers, bright lights, tentacles -- you name it, we've seen it. So for an alien invasion movie to set itself apart from the crowd it had better do something different, otherwise it's just another invasion flick that is as forgettable as the one before it. The makers of Skyline attempted to make a different kind of invasion movie, one that's both epic and low key, with a unique take on the reasons behind the invasion (and the human abductions that follow). At least, on the surface ... but when you sit down to actually consider it, Skyline is just a mash-up of your typical alien invasion movie wrapped into one big cheese-filled morsel.

Eric Balfour and his girlfriend (Scottie Thompson) are in L.A. to visit Donald Faison for his birthday. Faison is a big shot who lives in the penthouse suite of a sky rise condo downtown with his spiteful girlfriend. Early the next morning strange lights shoot down from the sky, taking over the willpower of anyone who looks at them. However, these are no ordinary lights, they're alien lights, and they report back to giant space ships that have surrounded the greater Los Angeles area. Trapped inside Faison's penthouse, the group of "friends" try to survive the alien invasion long enough to figure out what they're going to do and how they're going to escape.

Skyline is essentially a compilation of previous alien invasion films. They must have figured a movie that had a little bit of everything would fool people into believing they were watching something original. From the post-birthday party set-up (Cloverfield), to the look and design of the aliens (a cross between 2005's War of the Worlds and Starship Troopers), to that glowing white/blue light (Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Fourth Kind), to the image of a giant mothership hovering over a metropolitan city (District 9 and Independence Day), Skyline is an end-all be-all string of never-ending invasion clichés from start to finish, and if that's what you're looking for then rejoice! Because that's exactly what you get.

But sitting through aliens invading and destroying cities is tolerable and even fun regardless of whether we've seen it a hundred times or not. What makes Skyline tough to sit through isn't the alien stuff or even the invading stuff, but rather all the people stuff that's suppose to make us care who lives and who dies. The five main characters we're forced to follow aren't likable, they're not relatable, they lack reason and logical thinking. For the life of me I'm not exactly sure what Faison does that makes him so rich, or why he's with his mean-spirited girlfriend. If their personalities don't make them intolerable for you, the string of bad decisions they make certainly will.

As grand a scale as the film appears on the surface (with the giant spaceships and the scenic landscape views of the city), the film is actually quite small, with 95 percent of it set in the confines of the penthouse and surround building, including the roof, the stairwell, the poolside, and the garage. The problem is, as with any film, for the setting to be the same throughout it has to be somewhat interesting, and the apartment in question was not. It was rather boring, actually. Most rooms were so sterile that after awhile I wanted everyone to make a run for it, not so they could escape, but so we could have some different scenery.

Alien invasion movies are a dime a dozen and Skyline manages to take a little bit from each of them (in one form or another), playing out like one long cliché after another. That didn't have to be a bad thing, as many of the alien action sequences were fun and rather entertaining. But the characters were lame and the final act features dialogue that gets extremely cheesy, coming off like some hilarious spoof that was aiming for laughs. Still, if all you care about is seeing giant aliens crushing cars and blowing up helicopters, and you have an hour and a half to kill, you could do worse than Skyline. Of course, you could do a lot better, too.

Grade: C-

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Book review: 'Decision Points' by George W. Bush - Los Angeles Times

Former U.S. President George W. Bush waves while signing copies of his new memoir "Decision Points" at Borders Books on November 9, 2010 in Dallas, Texas. (Tom Pennington / Getty Images / November 9, 2010)

The first great American autobiographies both appeared in the 19th century, were born of conflict and written by public men — "The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass" and "The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant."

Since then, what we might call the publishing-industrial complex has turned the reminiscences of our public men and women into a never-ending stream. As former President George W. Bush — barely two years out of office — points out in the acknowledgement of his memoir, "Decision Points," virtually every member of his extended, very political family has published a bestseller, including his parents' dogs.

Where does Bush's account of his astonishingly eventful eight years rank in such company? Probably far higher than many of his detractors expected. As Bush writes in "Decision Points," he enjoys surprising those who underestimate him. As the title suggests, the former chief executive elected to abandon the usual chronological approach to these volumes (except for a brief, obligatory foray into childhood and school years) in favor of his recollection of his presidency's key choices and the personal decisions that Bush says prepared him to make them.

Foremost among the latter were his conversion to active Christianity, which he attributes to an after-dinner talk that evangelist Billy Graham gave to the extended Bush family at their Maine compound, and to participation in his male friends' Crawford, Texas Bible study group. According to Bush, he continued to read the Bible every morning of his presidency — like his daily run, a comforting habit. Bush credits his religious awakening, along with a growing sense of obligation to his wife and daughters, with his other foundational personal choice: the decision to quit drinking after a night of boorish overindulgence in celebration of his Laura's 40th birthday. It's a change Bush credits with making possible his subsequent public life.

Leaks and an active publicity campaign of television and radio appearances have made many of the substantial points Bush makes rather familiar. Essentially, "Decision Points" confirms many of the better nonfiction accounts of his presidency published while he was in office, particularly Bob Woodward's four volumes and Robert Draper's "Dead Certain." The Bush White House may not have been given to doubts or its chief executive to indecision, but it did have a penchant for ad hoc deliberation, stubborn persistence in the face of failure — as in Iraq up to the surge — excessive personal loyalty and for being "blind-sided" by events beyond the unforeseeable tragedy of 9/11.

Nearly midway through "Decision Points," Bush writes that, "History can debate the decisions I made, the policies I chose, and the tools I left behind. But there can be no debate about one fact: After the nightmare of September 11, America went seven and a half years without another successful terrorist attack on our soil. If I had to summarize my most meaningful accomplishment as president in one sentence, that would be it."

For that reason, Bush is singularly unapologetic and clear about the fact that he personally ordered the torture of key Al Qaeda members, who CIA interrogators were convinced held information of other planned terrorist attacks. (Bush also continues to insist that waterboarding is not torture.) When then-CIA Director George Tenet asked whether he had permission to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, Bush replied, "Damn right." Bush writes that about 100 "terrorists" were placed in the CIA interrogation program and that about a third "were questioned using enhanced interrogation"; three were waterboarded. All, according to Bush, gave up usable intelligence that thwarted other acts of terrorism. Other reports have contradicted that assertion, but Bush is firm on the point.

Similarly, he writes that his stomach still churns over the fact that he and the rest of the country were misled by faulty intelligence concerning Saddam Hussein's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, but that the nation and world still are better off with the Iraqi dictator deposed. His only real regret, in fact, is that he failed to act more rapidly and decisively when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.

Many readers will be surprised by Bush's warm account of his cooperative relationship with the late Sen. Edward Kennedy and his disappointment that they were unable to push through comprehensive immigration reform, which both felt was within a vote or two of their grasp. Given the contentious political use Karl Rove and other Bush aides made of abortion, readers also may be interested in the former president's unfailingly respectful discussion of the abortion-rights advocates with whom he disagrees. (There's also something amusing about Bush's account of urging the late Pope John Paul II not to waver in his pro-life convictions.)

Actually, one of the impressions that arises repeatedly in "Decision Points" is how much civility and bi-partisan cooperation matter to Bush. "The death spiral of decency during my time in office, exacerbated by the advent of 24-hour cable news and hyper-partisan political blogs, was deeply disappointing," he writes.

Looking back on his exit from office, Bush recalls, "I reflected on everything we were facing. Over the past few weeks we had seen the failure of America's two largest mortgage entities, the bankruptcy of a major investment bank, the sale of another, the nationalization of the world's largest insurance company, and now the most drastic intervention in the free market since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. At the same time, Russia had invaded and occupied Georgia, Hurricane Ike had hit Texas, and America was fighting a two-front war in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was one ugly way to end the presidency."

There's a great deal in that statement of what this unexpectedly engrossing memoir suggests is the essential George W. Bush — a disarming candor, for example, combined with almost alarming off-handedness about the implications of what's being said. The man and the president portrayed in these pages is, at the same time, passive and strong; intelligent but not curious; a public person apparently at his best in private; willing to admit shortcomings, but not particularly self-critical; unfailingly civil himself, but happily surrounded by bare-knuckle partisans. There is a kind of pragmatic courage that makes a leader fearless of contradictions. Bush, for his part, seems oblivious to them.

Immediately after the admission that his presidency was coming to an "ugly" end, Bush adds, "I didn't feel sorry for myself. Self-pity is a pathetic quality in a leader…. As well, I was comforted by my conviction that the Good Lord wouldn't give a believer a burden he couldn't handle."

One suspects that Bush hopes to have the way in which he bore his unexpected burdens compared to the service of another wartime president, Lincoln. "Decision Points" records that, during his eight years in the Oval Office, Bush read 14 books on the first Republican commander-in-chief.

Somehow, though, it isn't the Great Emancipator who comes to mind at the end of this memoir, but Shakespeare's Macbeth:

"To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself."

timothy.rutten@latimes.com

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Movie review: 'Morning Glory' - Los Angeles Times

In "Morning Glory," Rachel McAdams gives the kind of performance we go to the movies for. The rest of the film isn't always up to her level, but it does provide genial entertainment until it runs out of steam.

A "Broadcast News"-type saga of life behind the camera on a struggling national morning news show based in Manhattan, "Morning Glory" starts beautifully and, though it doesn't quite go the distance, it certainly has the credentials to do so.

The film's script is by Aline Brosh McKenna, who charted a similar young-woman-on-the-rise trajectory in "The Devil Wears Prada." The director is the under-appreciated Roger Michell, responsible for "Notting Hill," "Venus" and the best of the Jane Austen films, 1995's "Persuasion." And McAdams' costars, Harrison Ford and Diane Keaton, are not in need of further introduction.

Though the film's advertising gives the impression that McAdams is one among equals, the reality is that this is her show. An actress who's brought the great gift of coming completely alive on screen to films like "The Notebook," "Wedding Crashers" and "The Time Traveler's Wife," she's never carried an entire film as completely and as easily as she does here.

McAdams plays Becky Fuller, a young woman of endless and effortless energy, liveliness and passion. Nothing but nothing gets her down for long, and her funny, endearing spirit is a breath of tonic air. While go-getter characters can be an irritant if not handled properly, McAdams has such a great take on Fuller that she is all but irresistible.

Fuller's great passion in life is being a morning news producer, a job that pretty much eats her alive. She is up at 1:30 a.m. to get to the station for "Good Morning, New Jersey," a situation she hopes will lead to her lifelong dream of working for "Today."

Instead of moving up, however, the workaholic Fuller is fired for budgetary reasons, but she then catches the eye of Jerry Barnes (a swell Jeff Goldblum), who runs a network called IBS. He is looking for an executive producer for "Daybreak," a morning show that is so perennially in last place that other networks mock it unmercifully. After telling Barnes that "'Daybreak'" needs what I need, someone to believe in them," she gets the job.

Though we soon see that Fuller is quite good at what she does, "Daybreak," which has had 14 executive producers in 11 years, turns out to be more of a challenge than even she anticipates.

The mainstay of the show is Colleen Peck, expertly played by Keaton. In classic morning show form, she is game for anything (at one point we see her wearing a fat suit and facing a sumo wrestler), but she is tired of being stuck in the cellar, of having to "pull the train up the hill with my teeth." Her advice to her new young boss: "Enjoy the pain, Gidget."

Adding to her problems, Fuller has to replace Peck's male co-host sooner than she anticipates. Then she gets a brainstorm. IBS has a world-class anchor under contract, the winner of 16 Emmys, eight Peabodys and a Pulitzer. That's right, the legendary Mike Pomeroy, a man Fuller reveres, is in the house.

Occasionally mistaken for Dan Rather, the egotistical Pomeroy turns out to be a real piece of work. Yes, he's won a ton of awards, but, as played with fine Mr. Cranky conviction by Ford, he's allowed that to go to his head. Not shy about reminding people that he "pulled Colin Powell from a burning jeep and put a cool washcloth on Mother Teresa's forehead during a cholera epidemic," Pomeroy has real contempt for morning news and is not afraid to show it.

So rather than be part of the team, Pomeroy makes life impossible for everybody, referring to Peck as "Miss Pacoima," rejecting typical morning news assignments and even refusing to say the word "fluffy" on the air.

Naturally, this makes Fuller crazy. And it also hurts a possible romance with Adam Bennett, a hunky newsmagazine producer played by Patrick Wilson (formerly of "Little Children" and now doing the best he can in the male version of the girlfriend role).

This is certainly an excellent setup, and it's aided by how accurate "Morning Glory" feels to the nuts and bolts realities of the a.m. TV world. But having gotten this far, the film proceeds to stumble and lose its way, giving itself up to formulaic plot elements that are not as engaging as the stuff that's come before.

McAdams' performance is worth the price of admission, but a resolution as satisfying as her work is not to be found.

kenneth.turan@latimes.com

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Taylor Swift's new CD: EW review

Featuring rock veterans like Pink Floyd's David Gilmour and glam crew Scissor Sisters, Ferry’s new album also reunites him with Roxy Music members Brian Eno, Phil Manzanera, and Andy Mackay.

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'Saturday Night Live' review: Jane Lynch was a gleefully good host - Entertainment Weekly

Jane Lynch really sold her theme song for Glee during the opening moments of this week’s Saturday Night Live. Wearing a fetching off-the-shoulder jacket and backed by Fred Armisen on guitar, Lynch took the Sue Sylvester-centric lyrics and performed them with disarming energy. That opening performance characterized her work throughout the entire show; even during the weaker sketches, she entered into them with a vitality that never seemed forced.

SNL got its Glee out of the way early on, with a parody of the series that hit most of the right notes, ridiculing the show’s repetitive character tics. (Keenan Thompson as Mercedes, Armisen as Artie, and Andy Samberg as Kurt could have pretty much stepped into a regular episode of Glee.) The sketch had a reckless old Mad magazine-style spirit, and didn’t require the addition of Kristen Wiig’s Gilly to be funny.

The ad for the “Dammit, Your Mom Is On Facebook Filter,” with Lynch as a cornball mom, was cleverly executed, as was the evening’s “Digital Short,” featuring Lynch as Samberg’s too-intimate therapist. While the short’s final shot was a funny surprise, I’d give the edge to “Facebook Filter” for funniness.

Lynch upstaged Wiig on the sheer strength of brassiness during the show’s Password parody, “Secret Word.” Although her character had a different name, Lynch was really doing a terrific variation on Phyllis Diller, one that captured Diller’s raucous 1960s-era self-deprecation.

At the other extreme, Lynch proved a team player willing to step back while Jay Pharoah let loose his Denzel Washington impersonation. It was a dead-on approximation of Washington’s intonation and attitude, weakened a bit by the sloppy writing, which lacked a decisive ending.

Bruno Mars, sporting a powder-blue dinner jacket and a Little Anthony pompadour, sounded terrific belting out “Grenade” and his “Just The Way You Are.”

This SNL was heavy on fake commercials, which also included Lynch doing a game parody of Faith Hill’s NFL theme-singing, and Jason Sudeikis running out the clock with the night’s final-weird-moment, a spoof of Patrick Cox’s “Tax Masters” ads, outfitted with a “half-formed twin brother” on the side of his head.

The week’s weakest spots: “Weekend Update” was a wash, and by now, Kristen Wiig has more interest in Suze Orman than anybody else in America does.

But the bottom line is, Lynch sparked an above-average SNL.

She used the show, and the show used her skills as both a performer and, occasionally, an improviser (adding a sharp reaction or edge to a line in responding to another cast member), to better advantage than could have been expected.

Agree? Disagree?

Follow: @kentucker

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Review: Secretariat 'insistently square' - CNN

Diane Lane plays the film's central character, Penny Chenery, a housewife who wins Secretariat in a coin toss."Secretariat" is a Disney sports drama about the racehorse who won the Triple Crown in 1973When Secretariat is running his races, the movie has a hokey, old-fashioned appealDirector Randall Wallace aims for the Christian demographic that supported "The Blind Side"

(EW.com) -- Moviegoers have grown increasingly intense about avoiding ''spoilers'' (probably because of all the information that spills out of the Internet.)

In that light, "Secretariat," a benignly inspirational Disney sports drama about the legendary racehorse who won the Triple Crown in 1973, offers a fascinating test case for how much spoilers sometimes don't matter.

Going into the movie, we absolutely know that Secretariat, the chestnut Thoroughbred who galloped to triumph through a rare combination of total speed and maximum stamina, will win his three big races (the first time a horse had done so in 25 years.)

Yet there he is, in his famous blue-and-white blinker hood, pounding the track at the Kentucky Derby, starting way in the back (as was his style), then overtaking one horse after another, the camera following right on his hooves.

And damned if, at that moment, we aren't as excited as children, our hearts in our throats as he thunders to victory, almost as if we had no idea what was coming.

When Secretariat is running his races, the movie has a hokey, old-fashioned appeal. It uses a fantastic gospel anthem to stoke our feelings, the Edwin Hawkins Singers' 1969 rendition of ''Oh Happy Day.'' And that song, with its funky-sublime syncopation, its waves of lordly joy, makes us feel that, yes, Secretariat really was a miracle horse, a competitor graced by Someone Up There.

Off the racetrack, however, "Secretariat" is a sketchy and rather innocuously upbeat movie. The director, Randall Wallace ("We Were Soldiers,") often seems to be aiming for the same Christian demographic that helped make a hit out of "The Blind Side."

I personally have no objection to a horse film that views a creature as magnificent as Secretariat with religious awe, but in this case the uplift has a downside. The film is so insistently square it undercuts the very drama it's out to capture.

The central figure, Penny Chenery (Diane Lane), is a housewife who knew nothing about running a horse farm when she took over the management of her ailing father's Meadow Stables in Virginia. Penny wins Secretariat in a coin toss (though the film suggests it's her womanly vantage that leads her to foresee how the horse's bloodlines will give him racing strength.)

It's a pleasure to see her take charge, fighting her way up in a racehorse world thick with the corruptions of men. Lane, wearing Pat Nixon's hair, makes Penny devoutly traditional but never prim; it doesn't scare her that she's in over her head.

She recruits the eccentric trainer Lucien Laurin, played by John Malkovich, and the actor, wearing crazy hats and spouting French whenever he gets angry, makes us feel his horse fervor.

Penny, in her devotion to Secretariat's racing career, tears her family life apart. Yet this central conflict comes to very little. (Dylan Walsh plays her husband with just enough mild testiness to make you wish he'd shown more.)

Penny's obsession remains flawless, noble, benevolent. The only real drama is that (spoiler!) Secretariat occasionally loses. As long as he's winning, though, this pleasantly rote movie will rouse you. B-

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Review: 'Nowhere Boy' travels well - CNN International

Actor Aaron Johnson portrays a young John Lennon in the film "Nowhere Boy.""Nowhere Boy" is a portrait of John Lennon as a teenIn the film, Lennon forms The Quarrymen with Paul McCartneyIt's the directorial debut for photographer and artist Sam Taylor-WoodActor Aaron Johnson captures Lennon's turbulent brilliance

(CNN) -- Released in time for John Lennon's 70th birthday, Sam Taylor-Wood's moving film is a portrait of the rebellious future Beatle on the brink of breaking rock 'n' roll wide open.

In 1956, Lennon is 16, a cheeky, smart-mouthed Scouser (Liverpudlian) who is beginning to run into trouble at school, especially after the death of his beloved Uncle George.

Lennon (played by Aaron Johnson) has grown up in the care of Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas), a prim and proud lower middle-class housewife -- a woman who brushes off any overt displays of emotion with a gentle scold: "Don't be silly," meaning life is too punishing to relax our defenses even for a moment.

That's not Lennon's way.

Coming of age in the austere post-war years, he's hungry for fun -- girls, for instance or riding the roof of a double-decker bus or listening to the American 45s he picks up cheap at the docks. But it's only when he's reunited with his real mum, "the red-haired one," as he refers to her early on, that music becomes his main focus.

Screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh ("Control") puts that reunion in the wake of George's funeral, but in reality she had been a regular visitor at Mimi's house. Played by Anne Marie Duff, Julia is Mimi's polar (or bipolar) opposite: an effusive, flighty good-time girl who showers John with so many kisses her second (or is it her third?) husband has to bite his tongue.

Sensual and uninhibited but borderline manic-depressive, Julia seems ready made for rock 'n' roll. Put a shilling in the jukebox, and she'll dance in front of a roomful of strangers, the kind of display that could only harden Mimi's conviction that she is no fit mother for the wayward boy.

When Lennon shows up with a Screamin' Jay Hawkins record, they listen to it together and Julia's rapt reaction is almost as inspiring as the song itself. Expelled from school for a week, he takes refuge with his mum and she puts a banjo in his hands.

The rest, as John might say, is his story. He forms a skiffle band, The Quarrymen, and soon makes the acquaintance of baby-faced Paul McCartney.

A distinguished photographer and conceptual artist, director Taylor-Woods keeps it simple in her first feature film. And if she occasionally seems stranded by the script's bald determinism (Greenhalgh condenses and distills with too much vigor sometimes), she's equally sensitive to the emotional claim of each sister, as well as to the troubled adolescent who feels himself torn between them.

You might expect Mimi to be the villain in this scheme, but while Paul McCartney has noted that Mimi was less starchy than she seems here, Kristin Scott Thomas delivers another superb, subtle and ultimately deeply sympathetic performance that makes Mimi the movie's unlikely center of gravity.

Johnson -- who made "Kick Ass" after this -- probably wouldn't win a look-alike competition and soft-pedals the hard Scouse accent, but he catches Lennon's turbulent brilliance, his swagger, wit and anger.

The movie reminds us just how much he had to be angry about, and suggests very movingly that before he preached universal peace and love, he had to find it within his own heart.

"Nowhere Boy" may be modest in scale, but Beatles fans will recognize that it's made by one of their own.

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Review: Life as We Know It is Love as We Know It - Seattle Post Intelligencer

Friday, October 8, 2010
Last updated 9:43 a.m. PT

Holly and Eric (Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel) zip a Smart Car from zero to, well zero, in a blind date so terrible you know they're destined to be together -- at least in Life as We Know It. That is, life as we know it in the romantic comedy date-o-sphere and the latest spawn of the genre, the film Life as We Know It.

If the Academy created a category for Best, or Most Frequent, Use of Musical Montages (which of course they should), Life as We Know It would certainly be a contender. It relies on the first of its extended montages to sum up Holly and Eric's post-first-date and pre-parenthood history. Their BFFs Alison and Peter are a model of married bliss, living in a perfect house in a perfect neighborhood with a perfectly adorable baby Sophie (Eric and Holly's goddaughter). Despite Holly insisting that she never wants to set eyes on Eric again after Alison set them up on their disastrous date, all five seem to do everything together. Though it's clear, when Eric pinches Holly's rear during a wedding photo-shoot, or points out the mistletoe when she obviously doesn't want to kiss her Christmas party date, that they hate each other.

Then Alison and Peter die in a car crash, and Holly and Eric learn from their lawyer that they've been chosen in their will to take care of Sophie. "TOGETHER?" is their response since of course they detest each other. The lawyer suggests (which I'm sure is standard legal practice), that they move into Sophie's house (for her sake) until they've decided if they accept the responsibility or prefer other guardian options (like Sophie's oxygen-tank-dependent grandpa). Eric points out the ludicrousness of their friends forgetting to mention they're Sophie's guardians. Yet when movies admit something doesn't make sense, you know the movie makers aren't really sorry and will just do it again.

So the singletons are thrust into a life of poo, vomit and sleepless nights. It's a rather realistic (for a while) portrait of sudden parenthood. Holly's gourmet bakery biz and Eric's sportscast director dreams all take a backseat to Sophie. On top of that, a quirky social worker drops by at all the wrong moments to evaluate whether they're even capable of raising Sophie. But then, they're both beautiful people, Eric especially as their kooky neighbors keep reminding us. (You'd think Heigl would demand the writers flatter her looks instead of spotlighting, as in most of her roles, her character's stick-up-her-skirt personality.) Nevertheless, they're attractive and Heigl and Duhamel's high-strung gal meets carefree playboy chemistry works unexpectedly well. When the life-with-Sophie montage of diaper changes and first steps starts, you suspect everything will work out regardless of whatever bickering ensues, or Holly's crush on her blue-eyed bakery customer Sam (Josh Lucas).

So if you can swallow the following pills of romcom wisdom:
1. Loathing is a mask true love wears, or as Sam puts it after Holly and Eric squawk at each other during a Thanksgiving tiff, "if my wife and I fought like that, we'd still be married."
2. Backwards is the new forwards. First comes baby, then comes man (or woman), then comes love.

Then Life as We Know It is a heartwarming romantic comedy of peppy pop montages that hits all the right notes and will be music to your ears. Or, it may only remind you that romcoms are a lot like Jackass, potentially entertaining, but not an example of something you should try at home, especially in your love life.

Grade: C+

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'Harry Loves Lisa' review: Hamlin and Rinna, deflating those lips, inflating ... - Entertainment Weekly

The new reality show Harry Loves Lisa follows Harry Hamlin and Lisa Rinna as they try to keep their careers from sputtering to a halt. Hey, nothing wrong with that: Who’s not trying to do the same thing these days? It’s just that most of us don’t do it with cameras recording our every dull comment, our every banally expressed desire, most of them issued through silicone-inflated lips. The duo has been flogging Harry Loves Lisa wherever possible, and managed to get some unintended publicity by getting a phone call, live on The Today Show, that their house was being burglarized. The HLL premiere on Wednesday night was a half-hour of hodgepodge, with everything from Rinna addressing her perceived slam of Heidi Montag to Harry Hamlin doing stand-up comedy in order to make himself more marketable. I ask you: Would you hire this guy if you were a TV producer?

That clip doesn’t include the lispy jokes about a gay director Hamlin says he worked with on Equus. After watching that, I lost what sympathy I had for Hamlin’s attempt to get “back in the game” — i.e., another TV job. The one element of the episode that sounded interesting, Hamlin auditioning for the role of an airline pilot and receiving feedback that “I gave a bizarre read and I freaked everybody in the room out” — well, darn, wouldn’t you know it, the cameras weren’t there to record that.

Much of the rest of the time, Rinna is rightfully obsessed with the career damage done by her excessively-enlarged lips, which turned her into a tabloid joke. Since you know that she’s already had reduction surgery, are you going to hang around to watch what looks like, from the coming attractions, weeks of doctor appointments and discussions with her gal-pals as to whether she should get the procedure?

Hamlin and Rinna seems as though they like each other, their two daughters are adorable. Their show fits the TV Land mold, in that it’s not excessively crass. But it’s a bore.

If you watched, will you watch again?

Follow: @kentucker

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Review: A new Bogie box set worth checking out

Image Credit: Everett CollectionWhen Humphrey Bogart was struggling to make his name on Broadway in the 1920’s, scalpel-wielding theater critic Alexander Woollcott sized him up thusly: he “is what is usually and mercifully described as inadequate.” Harsh. Then, in 1930, the young wannabe with the scarred lip, snarling lisp, and looks that might charitably be called “unconventional” finally landed a contract with Fox. The studio cut him loose after two years. Most actors might have thrown in the towel and started selling encyclopedias at that point. But Bogart’s best years were ahead of him.

In 1936, the not-so-young-anymore tough guy caught a break when A-list pal Leslie Howard lobbied to get him a part in Warner Bros.’ The Petrified Forest. The film is hardly a classic. But to quote a film that is – Casablanca — it marked the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Over the next dozen years – from 1936 to 1948 – Bogart made a string of masterpieces at Warner Bros. That gilded period, when Bogie became “Bogie,” the hardboiled hard guy, doomed lover, and Greatest Movie Star of All Time is the subject of the fantastic new box set, Humphrey Bogart: The Essential Collection. Comprised of 24 films on 12 discs loaded with extras (plus a thirteenth with a documentary about the history of the studio), The Essential Collection kicks off with 1936’s The Petrified Forest and hits on indelible masterpieces like 1941’s The Maltese Falcon, 1942’s Casablanca, 1946’s The Big Sleep, up through 1948’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It’s hard to imagine a more impressive run of iconic performances.

If you love movies, then you’ve no doubt seen a lot of these films already. But let’s single out three of the best. The Maltese Falcon, which is also making its Blu-ray debut, may be the best of the bunch. It’s certainly the film that catapulted Bogie to super-stardom. Based on Dashiell Hammett’s noir crime novel, Bogart plays tough-talking private detective Sam Spade — a fedora-wearing gumshoe with a gun at his hip, a Chesterfield dangling from his lip, and a wiseguy crack for every two-bit hood or dangerous dame who crosses his path. With John Huston making his debut behind the camera, it’s also as twisty as a pretzel, with character actor turns from Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook, and the truly wonderful Sidney Greenstreet as “The Fat Man”.

Five years later, Bogie essentially played the same character with a different name, Phillip Marlowe, in 1946’s The Big Sleep. This time the pulp fiction belonged not to Hammett, but Raymond Chandler, and its plot (littered with kinky motives and dead bodies) is so labyrinthine that director Howard Hawks infamously had to call Chandler personally to find out who killed the chauffeur. Chandler, on the other end of the line, had to admit that even he didn’t know and he wrote the thing! It doesn’t matter. It’s a first-rate film loaded with wiseguy patter (“she tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up”) and double-dealing femmes fatale, including real-life love interest Lauren Bacall, who matches Bogie’s Marlowe quip for sassy quip. They were the Brangelina of their day.

While Bogart, in our memories, is often pigeonholed as these smart-talking sleuths or as the suave Rick Blaine from Casablanca, he could also mix it up. Take his turn as down-and-out scoundrel Fred C. Dobbs in John Huston’s 1948 classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (the other film making its Blu-ray debut, and looking better than ever). Broke and forced to beg for spare change south of the border, Bogart hooks up with Tim Holt and Walter Huston (crusty coot and father of director John) to prospect for gold in the mountains where banditos run wild (“Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!”). When the trio strike the motherlode, Bogie’s Dobbs turns into a greedy, paranoid monster. But instead of being broad, Bogart gives a finely calibrated performance as precise as a Swiss watch. It’s arguably his best role, not to mention the last he would give during his miraculous 12-year run at Warners. Humphrey Bogart: The Essential Collection: A

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