Word: filmed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...means of transportation to Dublin are way more varied and imaginative than the route that the screenwriting team of Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont has Anna take from the dry comfort of Jeremy to the drenched adventure of Declan. You don't have to have seen the 1945 Brit film I Know Where I'm Going!, with Wendy Hiller as the prissy traveler who finds improbable love, to know that Leap Year is a simple ransacking of older, better movie romances. And of bad ones too: the scene in which Anna and Declan, barely on speaking terms, are forced...
...Andy Adorable right in front of her. These afflictions beset the career gals played by Sandra Bullock in The Proposal, Katherine Heigl in The Ugly Truth and Sarah Jessica Parker in Did You Hear About the Morgans?. All were obliged to take a course in sensitivity training, at feature-film length, to nudge them into the arms of, respectively, Ryan Reynolds, Gerard Butler and Hugh Grant - guys whose job was to wait around attractively until the leading lady comes to her senses. In each case, she's uptight because she can't love herself / get out of herself / trust...
...exquisite dorkiness, Nick appears to have no chance of losing his virginity anytime soon, but naturally, sex is all he thinks about. His chances brighten when Jerry, on the lam, takes Nick and his mother with him to a trailer park near Clear Lake called "Restless Axles." (The film was shot in Michigan, not Northern California, which may explain why Arteta uses Claymation and graphics to depict all the road trips; it might have been a penny saver.) There, Nick meets Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday), a luscious teenager who is just as pretentious as Nick and not quite as innocent...
...film seems to think Sheeni's parents should be punished for their religious beliefs, assuming a hypocrisy that is often ascribed to Christians in film but in this case seems absent; the Saunders are mostly just humorless and unfriendly. The anti-adult attitude extends, ultimately, to every grownup in the film. Jean Smart is a good comic actress, but what can you do when you're written as a one-dimensional slattern, held in contempt by your hipster child? Even the best of the grownups, the friendly hippie-dippie neighbor (Fred Willard) is something of a grotesque. This...
...didn't, thankfully, and lived to write A Clockwork Orange, the dystopian novel on which Stanley Kubrick's cult film was based. A year before it hit the book stores, he published Devil of a State, about his time in Brunei. He had begun writing the scathing send-up of British colonial life, which is an equally sarcastic take on local mores and hypocrisy, during the year doctors told him he had left to live - a period in which he wrote torrentially, hoping to leave a financial cushion for his widow-to-be. The glib novel is crazed with misanthropy...