Culture

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.