Word: sevening
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...twists make it a challenge to describe. (They're saying it could be Smith's first film since the 2001 Ali not to break $100 million domestic.) But both films play to their stars' acting strengths, which means that you will probably laugh along with Yes Man, and in Seven Pounds, if you have a soft spot for noble sacrifice, you will cry. (See TIME's top 10 movies...
...scenarios for Yes Man, the Carrey comedy, and Seven Pounds, the Smith drama, could have emerged from the same screenwriting class. Premise: An ordinary man who's lost his wife has become remote from his family and friends. To resolve his ennui, he determines to become a do-gooder - Carrey's Carl Allen by answering in the affirmative to every vagrant request, Smith's Ben Thomas by choosing seven strangers whose lives he can drastically improve - and in the process he finds a new woman to give him hope or assuage his guilt...
...Everybody in Yes Man, including Carrey in his depressive phase, is pretty darned perky - a mood that applies to no one in Seven Pounds. And whereas Carl is using his personal epiphany to make himself happy, Ben Thomas does good only for others; he's paying it forward, not inward. A child undergoing cancer treatment, a mother whose boyfriend abuses her, a blind pianist (Woody Harrelson), a young woman suffering from congenital heart failure (Rosario Dawson) - each of these, and three others, he showers with rejuvenating gifts. His motive is the movie's secret...
...Directed by Gabriele Muccino and written by Grant Nieporte, Seven Pounds continues a string of movies - The Pursuit of Happyness, I Am Legend, Hancock - in which Smith's characters are isolated and superior, estranged from normal life, ultimately trying to make contact with ordinary folks. It's been ages since the star flashed his charismatic smile for a whole movie. Here he speaks to people with a precise courtesy that seems learned rather than felt. Pain pulses just behind his fretted eyebrows; he carries himself like a hero too gentlemanly to show his grief, too weighed down to hide...
...Opinion polls in France show that slightly more than half the population want shops to have the freedom to open on Sundays. But a powerful range of opponents combined against the idea. Leftist politicians and unions, for example, denounced the plan as introducing a seven-day work week. That, they say, would allow bosses to force workers to work Sundays - despite measures in the original bill that stipulated Sunday hours were both optional, and higher-paid. Conservatives, meantime, brushed off Sarkozy's assurances that the extra day of activity would boost France's economy, and focused on the fact that...