Film

Tamara Drewe, the latest installment from director Stephen Frears, has both great moments and glaring faults. This is a black comedy adapted from a comic-strip-turned-graphic novel by Posy Simmonds, which itself is based on Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Maddening Crowd. In the countryside of a writer's retreat, the once ugly duckling Tamara Drewe, now a glamorous yet confused journalist with a life-changing nose job returns to sell her house. This Tamara is not to be confused with the B-horror film Tamara or its titular ax-wielding, cheerleader-killing machine, although that might have been the gimmick this flick needed.

Burlesque takes place during present day, which was a shock to me, as the trailer made it seem like it was the roaring '20s. The movie employs a story that's all too familiar – Ali (Christina Aguilera) moves from middle America to Los Angeles in order to make it big and escape the confines of her small town.
While searching for a job as a singer or dancer, she stumbles upon The Burlesque Lounge, where she instantly falls in love with the idea of performing on their stage. Despite being turned down for an on-stage job, she grabs a tray and waitresses her way into a job slinging drinks. Ali lives on Bartender Jack's (Cam Gigandet) couch and through studying the girls' dance moves is able to convince the lounge owner, Tess (Cher), to give her a dancing job.

Oddly, the only movie opening here in Bend last week was The Warrior's Way… and what a disappointment. This wannabe visually-stunning modern martial arts Western stars South Korean actor Dong-gun Jang as Yang, a Samurai warrior assassin who refuses to kill the last child of the enemy clan, adopting the baby instead. He then hides in the untamed West near a traveling circus.

You won't have to work too hard to keep up with Faster, a bullet-headed, throwaway vengeance flick that is stripped-down to the max and beefed up to the hilt from title to characters to plot. It never strives to be more, concentrating on making the most of its wild-ass look and self-imposed restrictions.

Here's the problem with romantic comedies: Most of them are so formulaic that you can anticipate the plot of the entire film before you even step foot inside the theater. To the contrary, the best romances are rarely comedies. Still, every couple of years we're treated to a truly entertaining romance like The Notebook or When Harry Met Sally. Love and Other Drugs is neither of these, but stands above most romantic comedies because of Anne Hathaway's stellar performance.

It seems that several literature-to-film series are coming to an end and, finally, looming questions will be answered. This week both the final Harry Potter (or at least the first half) opened in theaters as well as the more adult The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. Whereas fans of the Harry Potter series have waited patiently through six previous films, followers of the Millenium series were treated to all three Swedish-language films over the course of 2010.

The Next Three days is an exercise in patience and tolerance. This meandering flick tells its story with painfully slow and uneventful scenes. I don't mind a slow-paced movie but it, at the very least, must be engaging. This wannabe-angst-ridden think fest just blows it.
The official synopsis goes like this: John and Lara Brennan (Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks) have a happy little life until she is arrested from out of nowhere and convicted of murder. Three years later, while struggling with work and raising his son alone, John (an ordinary guy/community college teacher) is still trying to establish her innocence. When her final appeal is rejected, Lara becomes suicidal, forcing John to exercise the only supremely logical option he has left: break her out of prison.

Unstoppable is the fifth collaboration of director Tony Scott and actor Denzel Washington and is merely by-the-numbers stuff. That's not to say Unstoppable isn't engaging, because as a suspenseful thriller it works fine, but it plays out as Hollywood mainstream schlock at its most finely tuned.

Morning Glory's Becky Fuller (Rachel McAdams) is relatable, but at the same time her character is flawed. We all know her, or at least we've all met someone exactly like her. She (or he) was the person sitting in the front row in every class. She's enthusiastic about her job and she's incredibly driven. For those of us who studied broadcasting, it goes a little further because we know someone who is a Becky Fuller incarnate – the person who was always the first in the editing room and the last to leave, and when they said they'd someday work for The Today Show, you believed them.

I recently read an article in the New York Daily News, in which Due Date director Todd Phillips divulges that the secret ingredient to making a great comedy is danger, and by danger he means the element of surprise. Anyone who's watched his smash hit The Hangover can agree with that statement, but when it comes to Phillips' most recent film, it would be fair to say he played it safe, rather than dangerous. Sure, cars are flipped and stolen, and the odd-couple duo of Robert Downey, Jr. and Zach Galifianakis face danger in the most physical sense of the word, but the storyline and comedy are anything but dangerous.