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Alyn’s Movie Picks Of The Week

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

Reviewed By Alyn Darnay

The Hilarious Simon Pegg (Shawn of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) is back again, this time in a true “fish out of water story” as bumbling celebrity journalist Sidney Young.

Hired away from his own little British Magazine by Jeff Bridges, head of the leading upscale celebrity rag “Sharps Magazine” in New York City, Sydney tries to maintain his integrity while everyone around him throws theirs out the window. It’s the stuff true comedy is honed from and this is a very funny film.

Watching Sydneys decent into success is a true joy rife with tons of miscommunications, poor taste, boorishness, and lucky accidents. Example: He walks into work the first day wearing a bright red tee shirt reading “Young, Dumb, & Full of Come”, and proceeds to offer a like one to his new boss.

Along for the ride are, or maybe being ridden are, Kirsten Dunst as Sydney’s only friend in the office, Megan Fox as the starlet that’s his love interest, and Gillian Anderson, almost unrecognizable and wonderful as a powerful press agent.

If you want to laugh hard for and hour and half, this is the film for you.

4 Stars

BLINDNESS

Reviewed By Alyn Darnay

 “Blindness” is the latest film from talented director Fernando Meirelles, who gave us the fantastic ‘City of God” back in 2002. Unfortunately this time around he gives us a bleak and brutal portrayal of the collapse of civilization through an epidemic of blindness.

Visually stunning, it takes place in an unnamed metropolitan city and charts the course of the epidemic from its very first patient through a mass quarantine and beyond.

As the quarantine facility fills up, the outside world begins to take less and less care of the inmates until a new society is created inside the facility. A society based upon survival of the fittest where inmates are forced to trade their valuables and then their bodies for food.

Based on a 1995 novel by the Portuguese Nobel Prize winning writer José Saramago, “Blindness” stars Mark Ruffalo as an ophthalmologist stricken early with the disease, Julianne Moore as his wife who joins him in quarantine though she’s actually sighted, and it features Danny Glover and Gael García Bernal among the patients.

 “Blindness” is not an easy film to watch and you should pay heed to its R-rating.

3.5 Stars

Eagle Eye

Reviewed By Alyn Darnay

Eagle Eye is a terrorist thriller revved up and set into non-stop action. It’s the big screen used to it’s state-of-the-art visual potential to lay you back in your seat and take you on a trip through the imaginary landscape of today’s governmental and military plot contortions.

Shia LaBeouf plays Jerry Shaw, a Chicago copy clerk whose life is turned inside out by an anonymous female voice on his cell phone. Joining him on this intricate and confusing quest is single mom Rachel (Michelle Monaghan) and together they manage to become the most wanted fugitives in the country after the voice informs that they’ve been “activated."

Chasing them are two government agents, Billy Bob Thornton playing a by-the-book FBI agent, and Rosario Dawson, beautiful as a hard edged Air Force investigator. Along for the ride in a wonderfully underplayed role is Michael Chiklis ("The Shield") as the straight-laced secretary of defense.

The film is reminiscent of a number of Hitchcock films, most notably “North By Northwest” with it’s wrongfully accused person on the run, and the omnipresent 2001: A Space Odyssey undertone is hard to ignore as well.

Don’t try to make sense of this movie, just go enjoy it, it’s a fun ride all the way through. Eagle Eye is also playing in IMAX, and I highly recommend you spend the extra $2 to see it in this format; it’s well worth money for the experience.

4.5 Stars

Reviewer Alyn Darnay is a multi-award winning Writer/Director and Scriptwriting Guru whose latest book is  “The Script…A Breakthrough Guide To Scriptwriting.” It is available at www.ScriptWritingBook.com