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.

On The Road w/ Coogan and Brydon

The Trip is an odd film. A lot of people won’t like it, it won’t win many awards and in a million years it wouldn’t make for a passing grade in any university film course. Because nothing happens on The Trip. The characters are largely the same when they return as when they leave, there is no significant rising action, no obvious climax, the characters don’t set out with a tangible goal in the “Dorothy just wants to go home”-sense. But like many things that wouldn’t make for a passing grade in a university film course, The Trip is simply wonderful.

Playing slightly exaggerated versions of their real selves, UK comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon set out on a restaurant tour in Northern England. We begin with Coogan half-heartedly inviting Brydon along when his elusive American girlfriend declines. Brydon asks “why me?” and Coogan plays it cool to a mildly insulting degree, insisting that Brydon is his last resort, thus establishing the complex, petulant and achingly real dynamic that becomes the highlight and purpose of the film.

Captain America, the set up

by Rachael Nisenkier

Watching Captain America feels a whole lot like watching a so-so pilot episode for a TV show you really want to watch. In there are all the elements that you know you’re one day going to love (more on that later), but the actual substance of the episode seems more about putting the pieces in place for the show to come than it is about what’s actually going on.

Anticipating the Avengers

by Rachael Nisenkier

I’m officially nervous.

It was sitting in the back of my brain during the post-credits sequence of Captain America. And as I breathlessly indulged in comic-con coverage on entertainment websites, it just sat back there, percolating, bubbling up into my cerebellum. It brings unbidden images of middling box-office numbers, critical dismissal, and fan eruptions of anger.

I’m nervous because Joss Whedon is directing and writing The Avengers! There, I said it.

I love Joss Whedon in a way most people reserve for people they’ve actually met. I love his easy going nature in interviews, the stories of Shakespeare parties, his feminist rantings. But mostly, I respect the crap out of his work. He’s a great writer and an increasingly impressive director, who has turned in some of the best episodes of television of the past twenty years. He’s played with the form and constantly seems to want to expand what he is capable of. He’s ambitious, innovative and intelligent. He’s also a huge nerd. His run as a writer on the X-Men comics was funny, smart and really true to the characters. His Buffy Season 8 comic managed to really take the form by the hand and lead it into this strange, mystical, uniquely Buffy world. And he imbues even his most mainstream work with his nerdy bonafides. So why does it scare the crap out of me that he’s helming The Avengers?

Friends with Partial Benefits and a Lot of Issues

I was really looking forward to Friends with Benefits. I think Mila Kunis is damn cool and love Justin Timberlake (especially now that he's in an acting phase of his existence instead of a music one); I've long been a fan of Patricia Clarkson (who is quickly become Hollywood's trademark "cool mom"), generally find Jenna Elfman adorable, admire Richard Jenkins and think Woody Harelson is a hoot. Add in small parts for the greatest young actress in Hollywood (Emma Stone), an SNL favourite (Andy Samberg), a lovely familiar face (Masi Oka), a child comedy upstart (Nolan Gould) and my long-lost One Tree Hill crush (Bryan Greenberg), and you've got me in the theatre for opening night.

The result is an enjoyable film, sweet, sort of funny, well-paced. It's also a hypocritical film, a predictable film and one that thinks it's a tad funnier and edgier than it is.

Mila and Justin do their jobs well- I can think of few romantic comedy pairings with their easy charm and superb chemistry. Their relationship develops well and they have some really truthful moments. But that's not enough to make a decent movie into a good movie. The script just isn't good enough.

Crazy, Stupid, Love- 3 movies, 1 title

by Rachael Nisenkier

Crazy, Stupid, Love’s mission statement is spelled out for you in its title. It’s one of those movies that proudly wears its ridiculous heart on its sleeve; its ultimate mission is to make you believe that it’s completely acceptable for a 13 year-old and his father to hijack an 8th grade graduation to make ridiculous declarations of love to the objects of their affection. It wants you to believe that the two adjectives before love in that title are not insults, but the natural order of things when you’re really, truly in love.

The trick of the movie is that it wraps all this romantic-comedy ridiculousness inside two other types of movies.