Read Our Minds

Blind Side

I was pleasantly surprised by this movie. It held the interest of 2 people in their mid-40s, a 10-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy, who deemed the movie “something to think about” and “inspirational.”  I’d normally write off a movie like this as Hollywood fluff – but it’s based on the real-life story of NFL rookie, Michael Oher. It’s an amazing account of a young man’s transformation all because of a chance encounter with a big-hearted woman and a family with loving, open arms.

A product of the crime-ridden Memphis projects, “Big Mike,” played by Quinton Aaron, is a gentle giant who bounces from one foster home to another. He has no idea who or where his father is and hasn’t seen his drug-addicted mother for years. Mike winds up at a private school on the other side of the tracks and his new life begins when he crosses paths with the Tuohys.  If it wasn’t for them, Mike would be right back where he started, instead of graduating from the University of Mississippi and playing for the Baltimore Ravens.

Sandra Bullock outdoes herself as real-life Memphis mom, Leigh Anne Tuohy - a woman whose family is turned upside down when she spots a boy with no where to go and not much more than the shirt on his back. The family takes Michael into their hearts and home, where his lives and theirs, are changed forever.

Without giving away the details, Bullock’s portrayal of Leigh Anne Tuohy as a kind-hearted, head-strong woman is spot-on. The children, particularly son S.J., enthusiastically welcome Mike into their home. There are funny moments, sad moments, but mostly inspiring ones. It’s a great choice if you want to get in the true spirit of the holidays.

--Reviewed by Donna Gaidamak

The Big Night (Co-Directed by Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci)

Forget Julie & Julia. The Big Night, released in 1996, is the best food movie ever, and one of the great unsung American movie-making treasures.

Tony Shalhoub (of TV’s Monk) and Stanley Tucci, who also directed, play two Italian immigrant brothers struggling to start a restaurant. Shalhoub, as Primo, is the chef who will not compromise his art. Tucci, as Secondo, is the maitre’d/business mind who is conflicted between supporting his brother’s considerable culinary skills or changing the restaurant’s menu to meet the vanilla tastes of the American public.

While food is the physical (guttural?) focal point of this story, the emotionally fulcrum is the love and frustration of family as Tucci explores ways to keep the business from going into foreclosure. Pascal, in a brilliant performance by Ian Holm, runs the competing successful restaurant down the road. Pascal offers to have Louis Prima’s band eat at Primo and Secondo’s restaurant in an attempt to create buzz in the neighborhood about Primo’s cooking. Seeing this as their last chance, the brothers plan a big feast and invite a wild cast of characters, including The West Wing’s Allison Janney as Primo’s love interest, and Minnie Driver as Tucci’s girlfriend. What unfolds is not what was planned, and reveals how strong familial ties can be even in the worst of times.

Spoil (your appetite) alert: As course after course is presented to the visitors during The Big Night, you will notice your appetite growing tremendously, especially when the Timpano is served. I guarantee that by the time you finish watching this movie, you will be very hungry. So watch it early and then go out to a fine Italian restaurant like Vittorio De Roma in Palatine, Ill. The specials – especially the Prosciutto in melon with melted asiago cheese – are fantastic! 

--Reviewed by Tim Boivin

Away We Go is a trip worth taking

Away We Go, the movie directed by Sam Mendes and starring John Kracinski of The Office, is a great little movie. In the movie, Kracinski and Maya Rudolph play an unmarried couple who travel from Colorado to Arizona to Madison, WI, to Montreal, and eventually to Florida -- all in an effort to learn what "home" means to them.  This is an understated movie with few belly laughs, but enjoyable all the same. Allison Janney (formerly of West Wing) is a hoot as Rudolph's uninhibited ex-boss living in Phoenix with a family that has pretty much tuned her out.  Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a spaced out mother professor flower child living in Madison, WI, with her slacker husband, both of whom share their interesting ideas on child-raising. Funniest scenes are the mother who pushes her young son to tell Kracinski and Rudoph what he knows about a baby (not what you may think, and who hasn't had a pushy parent shove their baby Einstein in your face?); Jim Gaffigan, as Janney's husband, going on a rant about how every living being in the desert is going to die from a lack of water, and he then proceeds to prioritize the decline of each species; and Kracinski taking the flower couple's kid on an unauthorized stroller ride around their living room.  This movie didn't get a lot of buzz, probably because it was more of a thinking picture than an in-your-face comedy.   But it is well worth the 95 minutes and DVD rental.

Directed by Sam Mendes

Reviewed by Tim Boivin

The Informant a good, but not great, movie

Over the weekend I had a chance to catch the matinee showing of The Informant, Steven Soderbergh's film about a food company employee (Matt Damon) who begins feeding information to an FBI agent (Scott Bakula) about illegal activities at his company, but turns out to not quite be Karen Silkwood.

First of all, let me say it's my last matinee. As I looked around at the rest of the people heading in, I imagined them all going to dinner at 4:30 to catch the AARP specials. I'm not quite ready to be associated with that just yet.

As for the movie itself, it was entertaining, and had some good moments. Still, nothing that made it worth paying full price for in a theater. You could easily watch this movie again and again on cable or dish and not lose a thing.

It definitely carried Soderbergh's personal stamp. The titles to transition between time and place and color saturation had a feel to them like the movie was made in the late '60s, even though it is new this year and is set in the early '90s. The soundtrack was excellent, written by Marvin Hamlisch but with a jazzier, more stylized feel than some of his other work. It definitely works here.

As for Damon's performance, he does a good job of playing a man who believes himself to be a good guy, yet is deluding himself as well. From what we can see, he's a guy who sees his company doing something illegal and feels it's important to do the right thing. We are brought along with it, sympathizing with his worries, and feeling bad for him as the company tries to weasel out of the trouble it gets into. It's all very Hollywood formula about a whistle-blower. But then his personal story begins to unravel, and we find that what we were led to believe about him isn't quite the truth.

Sorry to be so vague, but to say more would ruin some of the twists the plot takes. Suffice it to say it doesn't end the way you think it will.

Kudos to Soderbergh for incorporating not one but two Smothers Brothers in separate roles. That is part of the fun with this movie -- seeing who all is in it. It's not quite as good as the "Ocean's" franchise, but it has its moments.

-- Reviewed by Ken Krause

Inglourious Basterds

When you’ve made Pulp Fiction, everything else is inevitably going to be compared to that movie making triumph.   It must be a curse and a blessing to Quentin Tarantino.  In this case, it’s a blessing for him because a lot of us are going to plop down the cash just to see his latest work, Inglourious Basterds.   

 

Yes, there are similarities between Basterds and the 1967 classic Dirty Dozen, and Quentin is both celebrating and mocking that genre of Nazi killin’ movies.  There are two parallel plots that meet at the end and that was well sequenced and fun to follow, and the character development was also very well done.  I can tell Quentin really wants his characters to come to life.  The film also develops tension and suspense nicely. 

 

There is some gruesome violence that was a little hard on the eyes, and it didn’t seem as funny to me as the violence in Pulp.  Maybe Pulp was all about awkward life and death moments, which made them funnier.  And the violence in Kill Bill was heavily stylized in an over the top homage to martial arts classic gore, and I get that. But I was unconvinced of the effect Quentin was trying to achieve with violence this time around.  For that reason, I’d knock Basterds down a peg.  The editor also could have lopped off ten minutes. 

 

It wasn’t a completely satisfying film, but it was fairly fun.  Quentin did a good job of walking the line between the predictable plot elements we want to enjoy in this genre, while adding a lot of unexpected twists that kept it entertaining.  I'll give it 3 ¾  stars.

Reviewed by Lawren Markle  Tech Image

Watching my pennies with a $3.99 movie download

It’s never a good sign when you sit down and can’t remember the movie you watched five hours earlier.Oh yeah, my iPod says I viewed Confessions of a Shopaholic. The chick flick starts out with a flashback of the main character, Rebecca Bloomwood, played by Isla Fisher, must buy sensible shoes per her mother while her school girl friends are buying trendy foot wear. Not something I understand.  As a kid I don’t think I took off my canvas sneakers until I was ordered to buy a new pair without holes. Anyway, as a 25 year old adult she chooses to take a fork in the road to high fashion, which of course leads to a massive debt to deal with. Credit card debt of $16,000 is simply impossible for me to understand.

So she quickly moves on to a higher paying job. What economy is she living in? The government claims 2.6 million jobs were lost in 2008. According to the US Department of Labor, In July 2009, the number of unemployed persons was 14.5 million. Her new boss hires her for no apparent reason, except maybe to mentor and fall in love with her. I’m thinking there isn’t much money to be had in what I’d call an intern position.

Ok Isla Fisher is as cute in this as she was in Wedding Crashers. There are some funny lines and scenes like when she pays off the debt collector with $9,000 in hand-delivered pennies.

This was one way to kill an hour and 45 minutes. But I am thinking it may be time to move beyond romantic comedies to something that I can actually recall before the day ends.

Ken, I should have taken your suggestions. Next time! Anyone else have some good ideas for my tiny iPod screen?

-- Reviewed by Tracy Shryer

You Can Never Have Too Much Butter – A Review of Julie & Julia

If you’re a fan of cooking shows (think Top Chef, 30-minute meals with Rachael Ray, Good Eats – you get the idea), you’ll like this movie. Or if you’re stuck in a rut with your job or life, this movie just might inspire you to make a change. Or at least think about it. The basic premise of this movie is two women looking for a purpose.

Julia, who adores her global-trekking husband, is more than a bit restless. After exclaiming that she needs something to dooo, Julia pushes her way into a prestigious French cooking school and takes eight years to write a tome on mastering the art of French cooking. Meryl Streep is marvelous as usual.

Julie, feeling marginalized by her friends, doesn’t see an alternative to her menial job, so she starts a project: to sauté, steam and fricassee her way through Julia Child’s voluminous cookbook, one recipe at a time. Struggling to stay on task, Julie cooks and blogs her way through all 752 pages and finds her calling (Watch it yourself to learn how it ends.)

The movie goes back and forth between their lives, but it’s very easy to follow. One of the things I really liked about this film is that it really happened. With her husband posted in France, Julia Child found her passion in food and turned it into a wonderful career.

Julie Powell really did blog about her project http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/ and you can also see what she’s up to now at http://juliepowell.blogspot.com/

Final thoughts: Go see it if you want to laugh or be inspired. Just don’t go when you’re hungry!

--Reviewed by Donna Gaidamak

iPod touch: Frustration = Four Stars

 Have a couple of hours every other week lately being stuck by needles? Instead of complaining about it I went out and bought an iPod touch. I figure I could easily download music, audio books and movies to get me through a couple of hours of chemo. So the plan was to review the 2008 movie “The Women”. Great actresses … Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Candace Bergen, Cloris Leachman, Bette Midler. And a pretty good second string … Debra Messing, Debi Mazar, Carrie Fisher. Unfortunately the movie missed the mark. It was messy. A few good lines but too much like Sex and the City for forty-somethings.  

More important, is the iPod touch. I was so excited to have this toy. Unfortunately, the iTunes store application is a bear. First I downloaded the same audio file multiple times. Thank goodness iTunees saw the mess I put myself in and allowed me to return the two extra editions of “Twilight”. Upon direction, I had an easier time downloading “The Women” to my computer. But to get it onto the iPod took forever to figure out. The app is not intuitive, particularly for someone with other things on her mind. The rental movies are hidden behind a series of screens, and all things considered, remembering the order to actually get the movie to the iPod seemed ridiculously complex. I did finally manage it.

Hopefully it will be easier next week. Any ideas on what movie I should download?

-- Reviewed by Tracy Shryer

The Uninvited

One of the best ways for me to unwind from a hectic week or a busy weekend is by renting a movie. Even though I love horror films, I was skeptical on renting the new flick, “The Uninvited.” In my mind, everything since “Sixth Sense” has, for the most part, ranked as average in my book. Nothing seems to create that much suspense or horror, and you can predict every evil lying around the next corner.

To my pleasant surprise, “The Uninvited” wasn’t bad at all. And it kept me awake the entire 87 minutes, which is a difficult task for any director.

Without diving into a spoiler alert, “The Uninvited” was based around a teen who is going through emotional problems after her mother dies in a house fire. After she is released from psychiatric care, her father brings her back home where her and her sister quickly believe their dad’s new girlfriend (and their ex-nanny) killed their mom in a purposely ignited house fire. And now the duo believes she has also murdered a friend and is now after them.

Of course there is a lot more detail than what I just told, but there is never a true glimpse of the twist the movie takes in the final minutes. Much like the “Sixth Sense,” you never see it coming.

If you’re looking for a decent horror movie this weekend, I would recommend checking out “The Uninvited.”

--Reviewed by Christine Rojewski

Dillinger -- Villain to Vanilla in Public Enemies

Because of Johnny Depp, Public Enemies received a lot of pre-release buzz, but it seems like a movie without a center. So many stories were going on with so many characters that after a while I started checking out the cool colors on the walls of my local cineplex due to a lack of interest. That kind of wandering story. Even Johnny Depp couldn't save this dog. A very vanilla movie, very forgettable. Look for it on TNT within six months.

--Reviewed by Tim Boivin