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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

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE

Starring: Simon Pegg, Kirsten Dunst, Jeff Bridges, Gillian Anderson, Danny Huston and Megan Fox with Thandie Newton as herself

Directed By: Robert B. Weide

R for language, some graphic nudity and brief drug material

By John Delia

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People may be the year’s best comedy. Loosely based on the true memoirs of Toby Young, the funny antics are hard to believe could actually happen in real life. The sidesplitting dialogue just keeps coming and coming until the last line is delivered. Simon Pegg’s over the top whit and humorous appearance make him the new Peter Sellers. If you want to laugh out loud, then this film should give you the motivation.
The film follows Sidney Young (Pegg) a failing British celebrity publication owner who has bumbled his way through the royal society. About to lose his publication, he puts his nemesis Clayton Harding (Bridges), managing editor of competitor Sharp magazine on his cover in the nude. Soon after, he gets a call from Harding asking him to come to New York and write for his magazine. Thinking he has now become an insider in the world of entertainment, Young goes all out to impress his new boss. Accidentally he insults Alison Olsen (Dunst), a fellow writer who is working her way to the top, and starts finding it difficult to cope within the office. Young doesn't give up trying, finding creative ways in the face of everyone just to get a story, including top New York publicist Eleanor Johnson (Anderson). When Young falls for Sophie Maes (Fox), one of Johnson’s up and coming young starlets, he gets a rude awakening.
The storyline is snappy and full of very funny remarks that make the film fun to watch. I especially liked Pegg’s expression in the elevator when he hits the boss’s daughter in the back with food he chokes up. Another scene has him facing his worst fears when he finds out he is bedding Bobbie, a tranny. There is lot of sight gags and clever comments all coming at you at a quick pace, so don’t forget to take a breath.
What makes the laughter work so well are the support cast of remarkably funny characters. For example, Miriam Margolyes plays the owner of his rooming house who questions him a lot of weird things going on in his apartment; and there’s a belly-laughing interview with Thandie Newton by Young during a cocktail party.
But the winner here is Simon Pegg. He was great in Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, but here he tops them both and gives his best performance ever.
How to Lose Friends & Alienate People is a perfect date film so choose your best girl or a bunch of friends and start laughing. The film contains graphic nudity and drug use, so be cautious when deciding to bring young children.

FINAL ANALYIS: How to Lose Friends & Alienate People’s the right medicine to kick the blues. (4 of 5 stars)

BLINDNESS

Starring: Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Alice Braga, Don McKellar, Yusuke Iseya, Yoshino Kimura and Gael Garcia Bernal

Directed by: Fernando Meirelles

R for violence including sexual assaults, language and sexuality/nudity

By John Delia

Although at first sight Blindness delivers a plot that has a chance to be engaging, engrossing and empathetic, but the film looses with uneven directing, incredulous scenes and an empty ending that spoils the show. If you are looking for a sci-fi thriller, you won’t find it with Blindness; it’s more like The Fog without the monsters.
A blindness creating virus of some sort (we really don’t ever find out what it is) affects an Asian man (Iseya) who spreads it to his wife (Kimura) and a thief (McKellar), who then spread it to innocent bystanders, and eventually to an eye doctor (Ruffalo) who infects his patients, and so on and so on until most of the city has the affliction. The blinded people are all carted off to a medical detention center for isolation from the rest of the city. While at the heavily guarded facility the inmates are separated into three groups, each with their own leader. When the food starts getting scarce, one of the factions steals the last shipment and holds it for ill gotten gain and perverted acts.
The film is spotted with famous faces like Sandra Oh (Sideways) as the Minister of Health who gets a minute of screen time with a walk down a corridor while telling the men following her the dilemma that has taken hold of the city. Danny Glover plays an old man with a black eye patch who shows up once or twice in the film and has fewer lines than he did in the movie Saw. Maybe they were not working at the time and they just wanted a chance to work under director Meirelle, because anyone could have played their meaningless parts.
The film does have some excellent talent, but in some cases it was wasted. Blindness features the fine actress Alice Braga (I am Legend) playing a frightened woman who wears sunglasses throughout the film even while she is getting raped. Not a great role to put in your resume. And then there is Maury Chaykin (Being Julia) play a ‘real’ blind man accountant caught up in the catastrophe who turns into a sadistic letch? The two are above and beyond that stage in their careers.
On the other hand, there is a saving grace in the film and it comes with the performances of Moore and Ruffalo, a married couple who find each other in a position of protecting themselves from all the evils that are being cast upon them. While Moore does a superb job pretending to be blind so she can look out for her husband, Ruffalo admirably takes on the role of the parasitic husband living off his wife’s ability to keep him fit and out of harms way. The two characters play off each other nicely showing the strength of their love even in the face of a pitiful act of lust.
The film contains violence including sexual assaults, language and sexuality/nudity, and should only be viewed by adults who are not easily sickened by visual adulteration.
FINAL ANALYSIS: Blindness looses sight of a potentially good plot with an unfulfilling ending. (1 of 5 stars)

APPALOOSA

Starring: Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Jeremy Irons and Renee Zellweger

Directed By: Ed Harris

R for some violence and language

By John Delia

Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen are terrific together in Appaloosa, but although the story starts out with a bang, it drags in the middle then fizzles at the end.  If you are a die-hard western film lover and just can’t get enough saloon fights, Indian raids and lawmen watching their jailbirds, then Appaloosa should be a perfect fit for you. 

The film opens with the sheriff of Appaloosa getting gunned down by tough old rancher Randall Bragg (Irons) leaving the small western town without law enforcement. The town has an idea who killed their sheriff, but has no proof.  Notorious lawmen for hire,  HYPERLINK "http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/contributor/1800012404" Virgil Cole (Harris) and Everett Hitch (Mortensen) happen along and fill the vacancy.  Bragg’s men, not knowing there’s a new sheriff in town start shooting up the saloon, so Cole and Hitch bring them down.  Finding out about the incident, Bragg goes to town to settle the score, but Cole gets the drop on him and realizes that a lot of men will die in a street fight.  When one of his men decides to out Bragg as the killer of the sheriff, Cole and Hitch go for the arrest.  But like in most horse operas, things don’t go as planned.

This is Ed Harris’s first attempt as a screenwriter and second at directing.  His directorial debut for the film Pollock, the life of the famous painter, was a huge success landing Marcia Gay Hardin a best supporting Oscar in 2001 and a nomination for Harris for Best Actor.  But with Appaloosa Harris stumbles, much like Kevin Costner did directing Open Range by allowing the film to drag in parts.   With Appaloosa, Harris just can’t seem to end a scene, adding more than the audience needs to grasp what’s going on.  The performance by Zellweger was awful, appearing out of nowhere and stunting the plot with an implausible attempt at sex appeal.

Harris’s uneven storyline filled with more vistas than you want to see, long scenes of him sitting in front of the jail house and a schoolboy attempt at wooing Zellweger’s character gets the film in trouble from which it never seems to recover.  

However the acting on the part of Harris and Mortensen is outstanding.  The two partners in law enforcement fit together very nicely as buddies and killers.  Here is where the film should have been focused.  Maybe if Harris had Michael Bay or Ridley Scott direct his film, I would have enjoyed it more, because they certainly would have cut it and shaped it with a lot of two gun firepower. 

The film does contain some brief violence and use of harsh language, so be forewarned.   

FINAL ANALYSIS: Appaloosa fails with long film shots and a feeble storyline. (2 of 5 stars)