The Ides of March

by Rachael Nisenkier

I walked into The Ides of March terrified I’d be bored by a political thriller lacking heart. Instead, I found myself nearly bowled over by a moral thriller playing with the language and heartbreak of politics.

The movie is essentially a moral tragedy. It tells the tale of idealistic campaign manager Steven (Ryan Gosling), who is working on the presidential campaign for the upstart democrat, Governor Morris (George Clooney).

It’s A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas

Underneath their makeup and awesome hats,
these guys are providing one of the most insightful movies
into our culture all year. No, seriously. 

by Rachael Nisenkier 

As we come upon awards season, we’re starting to see the rollout of prestige films- delicate beasts that tackle serious issues in intriguing ways. We get to see biopics, war dramas, and for some reason a movie from the world’s most famous director about a horse. All signs point to Oscar times ahead at the multiplex.

And then there’s It’s A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas. Which is, honestly, fantastic.

Exclusive: Amy Acker talks Joss Whedon's Top Secret "Much Ado"

photo by Elsa Guillet-Chapuis

by Kelly Bedard

Two days ago my facebook wall started lighting up with friends reporting the latest impossibly exciting story to reach well-rounded geek ears: that TV god/brilliant writer Joss Whedon had used his vacation time post-Avengers to adapt and shoot a new version of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. I immediately dismissed the possibility- clearly someone was playing a trick on me. There's no way one of my favourite cultural icons could have cast a squad of my favourite actors to produce a film version of one of my favourite plays ever written; there was no way it was true. But by the time the story hit EW.com yesterday there was no denying it- this thing was real.

Back in 2010, our fellow My Entertainment World branch, My TV featured an exclusive interview with My TV Award nominee Amy Acker. Now, Whedon's newly minted Beatrice (Much Ado's word savvy leading lady) has graciously agreed to answer a handful of my giddiest questions about the film, the exceptional cast, working with Joss and the super quick and top-secret 12 day shoot that ended on Sunday.

Everybody Cut Footloose!

by Kelly Bedard

The opening scene of the new Footloose is toe-tapping great and followed by the excellent addition of the game-changing car crash that sets the no-dancing law in motion. The last scene is even better- it had me on a glitter high and dancing in my seat. The iconic montage of Willard learning to dance to the tune of "Let's Hear it For the Boy" is expertly copied almost frame-for-frame but given tiny modern tweaks and played with wonderful comic panache by Miles Teller. If they'd screwed up any of those three things (2 iconic, 1 tone-setting), the film would have had failure written all over it. As it is, a 70% mediocre film gets such a big boost from the excellence of that crucial 30%.

Style, Punch and a Whole Lotta Driving

by Kelly Bedard

Ryan Gosling is on top of the world. With no fewer than 3 major major movies currently in theatres and Oscar buzz starting up again, Gosling is named-checked as The Guy right now, the one that all other men are stuck never living up to. But Ryan Gosling is a gangly Ontarian with floppy hair and a goofy smile. Isnt' he? At least that's the kid I grew up loving on Breaker High back when I was the only kid I knew who knew his name. Then he conquered the world, making everyone fall in love with him in the process- and my possessive pride is kicking in.

Playing Moneyball with Pitt, Hill, Hoffman and Pratt

by Kelly Bedard

I knew I would like Moneyball. I was hoping it wouldn't suck but I was fairly certain I'd love it either way.

The following are the reasons:

- My idol of all idols Aaron Sorkin worked on the script, even if it was rewritten for a third time before finally going into long-delayed production, and I've never not loved anything he's ever touched (yes, even Studio 60).

- I like Brad Pitt more than your average Joe, I suppose, and I can even get behind the unconventional casting of Jonah Hill.

- Chris Pratt as an unlikely hero baseball player? Has someone been reading my dream journal?

- I like a good true story. There's just something really great about life and its inherent cinematic quality.

but, most telling of all,

- I just love sports movies. All of them, even the crap ones like The Big Green and The Replacements. I love few things more than the metaphorically rich game of baseball, one of those things is movies about the metaphorically rich game of baseball.

So I was pretty sure they could completely screw up Moneyball and I'd still be all in.
But hey, they didn't screw it up.

Soderbergh's Contagion

by Rachael Nisenkier

I’m not usually a fan of thrillers- I find the sense of anticipation and the constant jolts to my system to be fake, and am rarely all that invested in the characters. Similarly, I’m not usually a fan of movies that throw tons of famous people together and just hope something cool comes out of it. But I am a huge fan of Stephen Soderbergh. Like… HUGE. So when Soderbergh gathered up seemingly every Oscar winning/nominated actor he could find to make a globe-spanning thriller about a killer virus, I swallowed my normal boredom at thrillers (and attempted to quell my hypochondria for a night) to check it out.

The result is a beautiful piece of genre filmmaking, masterfully blending real world anxieties with genre conventions.

The Help: from page to screen

Editor's Note: 
The Help is one of the biggest films of the summer. But the beautiful movie isn't one of those adaptations that lives a separate life from its source material. The movie is directed by the childhood best friend of the author and based on her book inspired by her childhood about a woman who writes a book inspired by her love of the woman who raised her. It's not a movie you can take out of context. Katheryn Stockett took a lot of heat just for writing The Help (a strange notion in context of the heat her character Skeeter and her subjects Minnie and Abilene get for writing the book "The Help" within the book The Help) and to think of Tate Taylor's film as somehow unburdened by that history takes away a lot of what makes The Help special. As such, senior contributing author Rachael Nisenkier (an author for both My Cinema and My Bookshelf) has written her film review as a companion piece to her previously published book review. You'll find both pieces here, published together in our efforts to capture all that The Help is.

One Day in Hollywood

by Kelly Bedard

The film adaptation of the truly wonderful book One Day, predictably, leaves much to be desired. While the presence of the always sensational Patricia Clarkson (perfectly cast in the pivotal role of Dexter’s idealized mother) certainly helped the film along, the incredible miscasting of the story’s leading lady proved devastating to the adaptation.

So much of the complication in Dexter and Emma’s relationship comes from their regional class differences. In casting an American actress (no matter how charming) without perfect accent skills, the filmmakers essentially robbed themselves of that crucial tool. Anne Hathaway could have given the performance of her life (which, for the record, she did not even come close to giving) and no one would have cared because her accent work was just so bad. It was inexcusable (though I will admit that no one pulls off an "awkward girl comes into her own" makeover quite like Hathaway).

A Gleeful, (mildly) Frightful Night

by Rachael Nisenkier

Colin Farrell is trying to sleep with your mom. Go ahead, take a second and digest that. Pretty freaking horrifying, right? And because he’s Colin Farrell, even if your mom is a tough-as-nails Toni Collette, she’s probably going to let him. But just in case that gonorrhea-influenced mess isn’t enough to send you into a stake-whittling rage, get this: Colin Farrell is trying to sleep with your mom, and probably also eat people, because Colin Farrell… is… a… vampire.

From the Desk of A Critical Caster

by Rachael Nisenkier 

Oh hey, new images of Peeta and Gale from the upcoming Hunger Games adaptation. I, personally, love them. I stand by my (cautious) belief that the seemingly look-blind casting approach that led to a naturally blond Katniss, dark haired Peeta, and Viking God-related Gale will lead to a movie cast with actors who actually can behave like their parts.

What do you think? More at Ew.com

Cowboys, Aliens, and other uninteresting things

by Rachael Nisenkier

What if the director of one of the most enjoyable superhero movies of the past ten years (Jon Favreau) and the charismatic star of the well-received James Bond remake (Daniel Craig) teamed up with a rough and tumble Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) to make a movies western that features extraterrestrial life, and whose title is a cute pun (Cowboys and Aliens)?

Goofy I was expecting, maybe a little implausible. Yawn-inducing didn’t really even enter the picture.

Cowboys and Aliens fails at the number one component of the successful summer Blockbuster: entertainment. It’s got kick-ass explosions, suitably bad-ass acting from Craig and Ford, and a pretty cool concept. Yet somehow, despite all of that, the film is as lifeless as the towns left deserted by the alien menace.

"The Change Up": making good off a bad premise

by Rachael Nisenkier

The Change Up is exactly what you see in the commercials. It’s crass to the point of gross, it’s awkward to the point of putting your hands up to cover your eyes, and it’s funny. It also hinges heavily on the charisma and comedic chops of Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds*, which as far as places to hinge go, is not such a bad idea.

The Change Up tells the story of David (Bateman), stand-up lawyer and father who works all the time and neglects to have fun, even to the extent that his wife feels neglected and he’s started to lose touch with his childhood friend, Mitch (Reynolds). Mitch, for his turn, is a perpetual quitter who has skated by in life on a mixture of money from daddy and ridiculously good looks, and who spends most of his life behaving like a fourteen year old who woke up in Ryan Reynolds' body (ooo, someone get me an agent quick, so I can sell that screenplay idea!).

The Art of Nothing At All

The Art of Getting By is a truly terrible film. I had high hopes for what looked like a sweet, earnest and artsy coming-of-age story but what I got instead was a pretentious wannabe indie darling with a lame hipster “New York insider” attitude. The film’s principle themes of art and love as salvation are admirable but their condescending and derivative presentation left me literally yelling at the screen (seriously, I was the only person in the giant theatre, so I took the opportunity to scold the characters and filmmakers- it was wonderfully cathartic, if a little lunatic-seeming).

The story essentially boils down to that of an exceptional boy (played by Freddie Highmore, who apparently has been busy ageing in these last few years while we weren’t watching- whod’a thunk?). Said exceptional boy spends the entirety of the film (and his life preceding it) trying his darndest not to be exceptional. The plot really kicks off when he falls for a girl who is, in every way, unexceptional (Emma Roberts, the powerless victim of a vile role).

The Antidote to Cynicism

My best friend informs me that “Larry Crowne is so stupid!” He’s usually more eloquent than that, just not when he’s wrong. On his international press tour for the film, writer/director/star/most-beloved-man-in-Hollywood Tom Hanks had a single line that he trotted out in some form or another every one of the 4 million or so times he was asked what the film was about: “it’s an antidote to cynicism”. I think it’s that very feature that my “realist” friend so ineloquently can’t get behind. I, on the other hand, am all for it. When Conan O’Brien was leaving The Tonight Show, endlessly bitter and fundamentally heartbroken, his parting words were a plea that his audience not be cynical. “It’s the most useless thing in the world”, he said of the state he had every right to be in. And Conan was, as he often is, very right. For almost everyone I know, 2011 has been an absolute shit (excuse the language, there just is no true synonym). But the people who are making it through the best are the ones with the acute awareness that 2012 is just around the corner and that it, surely, will be better. Larry Crowne is a film about possibility, the counter-argument to the “lost potential”, “missed opportunity”, “you only peak once” narratives that have come to dominate our overly competitive lives.