Word: film
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...films with eyes for Oscar, or laden with critics awards the past week, Nine, A Single Man, The Young Victoria, Crazy Heart and The Lovely Bones all did moderate business in a handful of theaters. Fantastic Mr. Fox, the stop-motion animated feature that picked up awards this past week from the New York and L.A. film critics' groups, actually dropped 57% in ticket sales; the power of the press continues to be impotent. The critics' darlings, if they're to gain traction at all, must wait for the free publicity they may receive from next month's Golden Globe...
Interviewing Grant on Wednesday's The Daily Show, Jon Stewart mistakenly called the film What Happened to the Morgans? Stewart might have asked what happened to romantic comedy, once the crown jewel of Hollywood genres. At best, nothing new; at worst, it died of exhaustion. The Morgans' writer-director, Marc Lawrence, has no special gift for character nuance or witty dialogue. To him, rom-com is simply the recycling of a tired fugitive-couple premise from other bad movies (My Blue Heaven, Witless Protection) and the application of the genre's most formulaic shtick-in-trade: forcing an uncomfortable intimacy...
...first night away from New York's 24-hour symphony of noise, Paul awakens to observe that Wyoming is "very quiet. I thought I could actually hear my cells dividing." His role as sinning husband is to confess and win his wife back, but Grant's function in the film is to provide a running commentary on Parker's cartoonishly tense career gal. ("A week ago," he tells his Wyoming hosts, after Meryl proves her mettle with firearms, "she was basically Amish.") Grant can't do much with the rest of the movie's banter, long mothballed in the Museum...
...Leyva's feared chief of hit men, Edgar Valdez, 36, a Texas-born fugitive known as "The Barbie" because of his blond hair. Mexican officials allege that Valdez was behind the videotaped torture and killing of a rival gangster in Acapulco in 2005. Similar to an al-Qaeda propaganda film, the video triggered a wave of copycat movies posted on the Internet, raising the stakes in the Mexican drug war. Such a figure could unleash even more carnage if he were at the top of a cartel. (See how a drug lord placed on the TIME...
...boardroom), the glowering Sir John Conroy (Mark Strong), try to strong-arm Victoria into signing over her power to her mother, just in case King William dies before she turns 18. We want her to be Queen so she can finally say, "Off with his head." Conroy is the film's only outright villain, but he's not really much source of tension: once she's Queen, she's the boss. Nor are Lord M. or Lehzen, even though they try to manipulate the young Queen, because this is primarily a love story. It certainly has sturdy roots: Victoria ruled...