Word: films
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...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...
...retrospect, the issue isn't that Benigni beat out Nick Nolte, Edward Norton, Ian McKellen and Tom Hanks for the award; it's that Jeff Bridges wasn't even nominated. His deft, hilarious, thrillingly perfect performance as Jeffrey Lebowski, a.k.a. the Dude, in the Coen brothers' genius film The Big Lebowski should have been showered with prizes. Instead, the only official honor Bridges got for the 1998 film was a nomination from the Satellite Awards, whatever those...
...What has all this got to do with Crazy Heart, which features Bridges as a washed-up country-and-western singer? A low-budget affair made by Country Music Television, the film might have gone straight to DVD if ICM hadn't gone to bat for a theatrical release on behalf of first-time writer-director Scott Cooper. The agency's persistence is paying off in Oscar buzz for Bridges, who has been nominated four times in his career and has always gone home empty-handed. If the Golden Globe nomination he earned this week is any sign, it seems...
...peering into that face, you'd swear it's Kris Kristofferson) and that he's playing a fictional character. When Bridges sings Bad's wistful, weary songs - written by producer T-Bone Burnett and a group of other musicians, including Ryan Bingham, who has a small part in the film - you feel like this is a guy you might be lucky to find at your local honky-tonk. One of the first lyrics we hear from Bad is "I used to be somebody/ Now I am somebody else." Jeff Bridges has made a lifetime of being somebody else...