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GTBP CONNECT
Sunday, July 11, 2010 at 3:56PM Adrien Brody has had two movies in theaters in the last month: Splice and Predators give the actor his highest profile releases in some time, and he has a third film lined up for September. Trouble is...it's only on DVD.
Saturday, June 5, 2010 at 7:14PM More Bruce Willis movies with gunplay are on the way. Exasperated that he seems to be taking any offer at this point, most of which are regurgitated action flicks, I implored Bruce Willis this week to "put down the gun." Not yet, I guess.
Friday, March 19, 2010 at 7:20PM | Repo Men
Starring Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, and Liev Schreiber  |
At some point in the future, our organs will be replaced by synthetics. They'll work better, last
longer, be a snap to replace with upgrades, and they'll even come complete with payment plans, to the tune of a steep 20%
interest rate.
Those are the conditions in Repo Men, based on the sci-fi novel The Repossession Mambo, and because these
artificial organs - called Forgs in this world - carry such a big sticker price, they have to be valuable to the company
that produces them. And that company will go to great lengths to get them back.
If you're three months overdue on payments for you new liver, kidneys, hearts, eyes, lungs, whatever, The Union will send
out "highly trained specialists" to reclaim those spare parts. It's bloody, unseemly work and requires a certain kind of
individual. Two such individuals are Remy (Jude Law) and Jake (Forest Whitaker). Remy tells us they met in the fourth
grade - Jake's third try at the fourth grade - and have been inseparable ever since.
They fought in the war, and after it was over, Remy notes that the fighting didn't stop; they just changed the venue. So
now, Remy and Jake find organ recipients who have missed payments, tase them, cut them open, take the organs, and leave. A
man with a prized liver tries to bargain with Remy, offering him cash on the barrel head. "Not my department," deadpans the
repo man.
Remy has no choice but to change his tune when a malfunctioning defibrillator used on the job leaves his own ticker in need
of immediate replacement. Yep, the repo man has to keep up with his payments or The Union will take the heart back. And
Remy knows exactly how that would play out.
Monday, March 15, 2010 at 9:26AM | Our Family Wedding
Starring Forest Whitaker, Carlos Mencia, and America Ferrera  |
Every so often in a bad movie, there’s one good scene just dying to get out. Clearly, it’s the aberration, because there’s
nothing else to recommend the film, but for a fleeting moment, everything just goes right.
Our Family
Wedding can claim such a scene, the evidence of that old adage about a stopped clock
being right twice a day. Movies about weddings - especially romantic comedies about weddings - are ordinarily hard to
stomach, and this one is no different: The closer the couple gets to the altar, the more out-of-control their
circumstances become.
In this case, it’s an interracial wedding comedy with America Ferrera (Ugly Betty) and Lance Gross (House of Payne) caught in the eye of the storm. Their fathers (Carlos
Mencia and Forest Whitaker, respectively) try to one-up each other every
step of the way and disaster usually follows.
However, for about 90 seconds, Our Family Wedding is tolerable. As the seating chart for the big day is being put
together, Whitaker pictures in his mind where his ex-wife might sit (in the path of an oncoming bus), while Mencia tries
to figure out the right table for his hardcore gangster cousin, fresh out of the joint. No, it’s not the breakfast montage
from Citizen Kane, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the rest of what surrounds it.
The real disappointment isn’t that Our Family Wedding is mostly unfunny, mostly unoriginal, and mostly unappealing,
it’s that the film never tries to go beneath the surface that stands out as its biggest offense. The comedy is most racial
in nature, gently prodding the black and Hispanic communities about this or that. While there’s certainly no
responsibility on the filmmakers to present something more incisive, what good does it do anyone to keep dusting off
outdated stereotypes for the purposes of cheap, infrequent laughs? And couple that with the restrictive formula of a
wedding comedy and this film starts circling the drain in a hurry.
Sunday, March 14, 2010 at 6:33PM We were just discussing how bad the fortunes have been at Universal in our weekend box office recap. Green Zone was a swing and a miss for the studio, and the last time a movie from da U made over $200 million in the US was, ironically, the last Matt Damon-Paul Greengrass film, The Bourne Ultimatum. That was almost three years ago.
