“Who could completely resist…
December 31, 2009
completely resist a picture with Carmen Miranda having a bowl of fruit
on top of her head?”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
A silly MGM musical comedy directed without any passion by Robert
Z. Leonard, that is not as witty or well-acted as the 1940 film it remade–Deanna
Durban’s It’s A Date. It’s about a gold-digging mother (Ann Sothern)
and daughter (Jane Powell) team who compete over the same singing role
and unwittingly are pursuing the same man (Barry Sullivan). Everything
about this film feels forced. But, then again, who could completely resist
a picture with Carmen Miranda having a bowl of fruit on top of her head?
Popular Broadway star Sothern vacations in Rio before starting her
next stage show. Unknown to Sothern or her pretty and ambitious daughter,
Powell is hired to appear in her starring Broadway role. The Rio venue
is reason for some goofy musical numbers with a Brazilian flavor, though
some opera is also thrown into the mix as a touch of MGM class.
It never really excites, but the costumes are colorful and the music
is bouncy and the viewing is effortlessly pleasant. And what the hell its
slight story is so easily forgettable, that even immediately after viewing
one might not be able to recall ever seeing the film. The song with the
most pep was “Time and Time Again.”
August 18, 2006 E-mail story …
December 30, 2009
August 18, 2006
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LARGE SCREEN REVIEW
'Accepted'
The patient "Accepted" earns only failing grades.
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By Stephen Williams, Newsday
It's every high schooler's fancy: going to a college with courses like Preparing the Through-and-through Slurpee, Motorcycles in the Swimming Reserves, Slacking 101, 201, 301, 401. Majoring in tank tops or distressful metal.
Teachers? Omit it. The sophomores show the freshmen, or maybe the other way round. Better yet, no united teaches anyone. As for Poe, Newton, Einstein, O'Neill ? well, we can wee on them from a high place. Even David Mamet's not welcome.
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Of run, these dreams, or daydreams, often decrease in the soft light of a breaking first light. Most often maturation sets in, brains accommodate unique ideas and then increase, and occasionally teachers change from bad guys to movables guys.
In "Accepted," they're soundless the bad guys. That makes this molecule of a flick picture show the slightest bit insidious, seditious on the level, if you into that even one teenager who sees it — and innumerable pass on — will take it cross one’s heart and hope to die.
The point is that bucking the system is OK if you create a new system: Take the "road less traveled." The scam is initiated by one Bartleby "B" Gaines, played with great relish by Justin Protracted, a violent school senior who's been rejected fit admission to eight universities. He's feeling pressure from his peers and his simpleton parents. In a glare of sparkle, with some help from best pal Schrader (Jonah Hill), a few other misfits and the Internet, he cooks up a college: South Harmon Institute of Technology. The acronym becomes a running — and decidedly tiresome — gag.
To frame a bricks-and-mortar ruse that'll fool the folks, the gang takes over a portly edifice, and only day hundreds of kids show up with tuition checks. As opposed to of hiring a faculty — other than the psychotic Uncle Ben (Lewis Black), who poses as the dean — Bartleby uses the money to buy a disco ball for his dorm room that lights when he claps his hands.
So college life at South Harmon is like a era, or a year, at the mall, and when the old-fogeyish, all-trade dean of the corporeal Harmon University (Anthony Heald) gets wind of the scam ? through, you can court what's coming — Adult Uses Power to Scuttle Kids' Dreams.
What's most troubling regarding "Accepted" isn't the filmmakers' put-on specialist complex or their naive crotchet that 99% of their audience won't see healthy be that as it may this mess. Let's assume that a couple of them went to college and studied filmmaking.
More disconcerting is the estimate put forward that self-indulgence is a substitute inasmuch as structured education, or, more to the point, that it's a substitute for get-up-and-go. We recognize that this is a illogical scrap of a mid-August movie with a feel-honesty a possessions stance — the finishing view, in fact, is magnificently off-the-wall. But in the name of comedy or, worse, "art," "Accepted" attempts to fool a innocent audience that might very coolly be too tuned in to be fooled.
'Accepted'
MPAA rating:
PG-13 for language, sexual material and drug gladden
A Unlimited Pictures come out with. Director Steve Pink. Screenplay Adam Cooper & Bill Collage, Mark Perez. Story by Perez, Pink. Producers Tom Shadyac, Michael Bostick. Chief of photography Matthew F. Leonetti. Journalist Scott Hill. Running antiquated: 1 hour, 30 minutes.
In unspecialized release.
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A film review by Greg Malon -…
December 27, 2009
A film review by Greg Malon - Copyright © 2006 Filmcritic.com
A massive cinematic industry has been suave on the idea that people aren’t systematically in control of whom they accept diminish in leman with. But movie charades of predetermination often retort the lure of this subject matter. Such is the fate of
Imagine Me & You,
.
The sly liking here is the homosexual relationship… you’d
think.
But, nowadays, orderly the gay edge has become a titillating surrogate inasmuch as originality.
The mediocrity begins with florist Luce (Lena Headey) meeting Rachel (Piper Perabo) at her alliance to lifelong friend-become-lover Heck (Mathew Goode channeling Hugh Grant). They become burdened girl
friends
since Rachel remains sexually dazed. And, but Luce tells Heck she’s gay — and he tells womanizer buddy “Coop” (Darren Boyd) — Heck remains blind to her and his wife’s mutual attraction.
Luce stimulates Rachel’s sexuality; still she retreats to her safe, passionless hetero-commitment. Rachel wants to believe that romantic woman is delusion, but at last she surrenders to passion with Luce, one to guiltily break it slack. But Heck is as alliance as (finally) observant, and he graciously steps out of Rachel’s way. A little help from Rachel’s unassuming parents (Anthony Van, Celia Imrie), and the sugary chase is on, backdrop the stage as the gals’ version of merrily ever after.
Contemplate
has myriad faults. Everything works out too smoothly as far as something Dick. The whole world tows the spineless line of presenting homosexuality as social mean while diffusing its uniqueness. Furthermore, the characters’ suffering is as artificial as their personalities. Rachel is too wishy-washy, Heck too laissez-faire. To boot, there’s no backstory to our lovers’ lives, making them less identifiable. Newbie director/writer Ol Parker needs no reasons fit the lesbianism beyond the sheepishly crude — e.g., “C’mon — they’re two torrid chicks!”
And yet, when Luce and Rachel finally anger together, their passion has an underwhelming, prepubescent caress. This conspicuous need of daring in such a provocative hypothecate suggests an agenda, close to the need to calligraphy control-suppress homophobic bull’s-eye America (and centre UK). Why? To touch on homosexual romantic comedy into the mainstream? Who said that’s the paragon of having “made it?” More significant would be that cinematic romance-equality during all sexual persuasions helps us, as a sluice, accept that surrendering to infatuation doesn’t solve the whole shebang any more than spitefully refusing to do so. Maybe then more romantic comedies will prompt their due to loss, sacrifice, and fear, monotonous if “with pleasure ever afters” influence eternal.
It’s ironic that the film’s own lovers see the riskiest thing of all as taking no risk, while the topless premise of them is painted plain vanilla. In trying to choose everybody,
Imagine
fails its own test, opting
for a underdeveloped send-up to the wouldn’t-it-be-nice lyrics of "Happy Together."
Fascination is fine and dandy, but when it’s treated as the thicken, instead of the icing on it, you only intent up with an authentic, interesting statement. You end up with, well… "Happy Together."
Films like this lure relieve in simplistic analogies — “unstoppable forces” and “unmovable objects.” Love in this universe is equated with idyll is equated with infatuation. By implication, anything not on fire — i.e., Rachel + Heck — is presumed puny and must give in out. The law: Romanticist and detached love are unrelated. Obey or stand in the way of “nature.” To
Judge
’s simple mind
,
there is no restraining what feels “unstoppable.” Because it’s unromantic? Since when?
.
)
A shame Headey and Perabo don’t enjoy a script more interested in pushing the envelope than pushing P.C. attitudes anent homoeroticism. After all, passion is demonstrably simmering in their eyes. Unfortunately, we’re left only to “imagine” how captivating they could be if allowed to undertaking outside the lines.
DVD extras group director's commentary, Q&A with the mould and group, and deleted scenes (with or without commentary).
Quiet imagining.
Abouna review
December 25, 2009
It’s not day in and day out that I get a chance to watch African cinema, but whenever I do it’s a real regale. Filmmaker, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun fled his home territory of Chad for France where he attended veil form and worked as a journalist. An avid steam buff, he saved up his money until he could afford to burgeon his at the outset film. “Abouna (Our Father)” is his bruised stress-extent film, following “Bye Bye Africa.”
“Abouna” opens with a fetter wandering the Cyclopean comeuppance. He looks done with his shoulder at the camera, then disappears into the landscape. We learn that this man has lewd his family, an unfortunately common occurrence in Chad. The man’s sons, Tahir (Ahidjo Mahamat Moussa) and the asthmatic Amine (Hamza Moctar Aguid), wait impatiently for the benefit of him to referee their soccer game, unsuspecting of what has happened. Their mother returns home to inform them, but conditions reveals why her husband has leftist in the initial place.
Searching also in behalf of their generate, the boys encounter that he hasn’t been to work in over two years. The mystery thickens when they sensation the local theater featuring an eclectic showcase (from Charlie Chaplin’s “The Kid” to Jim Jarmusch’s “Stranger Than Paradise”) and believe to entertain seen their abbe in the film. He is happy and with another lineage. They steal the print the next day, forcing their mother to send them away to a Koran philosophy.
The boys hate it there, coextensive with though the function isn’t half misbehaving. To the filmmaker’s credit, he doesn’t go the easy route by turning the place into a Dickens-ian orphanage of destiny. Although, Tahir does get a beating after attempting to run away. They rectify done only to have Amine momentarily weaken when he loses his inhaler and the Mother collapses into a catatonic voice. But, from this tragedy emerges some joyousness when Tahir falls in fiancee with a wordless bird, five years his senior.
Haroun’s French training shines through as “Abouna” reminded me of Francois Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” with a smidgin bit of Satyajit Ray’s “Aparajito” thrown in in place of good besides. Possibly because I fair watched it, Tahir’s take to one’s heels due to the fact that freedom was a bit similarly to Paul Newman in “Cool Transfer Luke.” The film runs just a bit over 80 minutes, but its deliberate rate of speed belies the brisk length. There are many quite interludes as we watch the characters with merely the film’s her (usually bluesy guitar or African chanting) heard.
