Sunday 14 December 2008
Movie Review: Volcano: Fire on the Mountain (1997)
A fledgling California ski resort is built on a long-dormant volcano that has not seen an eruption in 200 years, but things are about to change.
As made-for-TV movies go, this one ticks-off all the boxes. Not a single character has more than one dimension. Check. The only geologist in the United States to forecast the eruption is the former boyfriend of the local mountain ranger. Check. The local mayor does not want to cause panic during tourist season and has never seen Jaws. Check. The heartless local entrepreneur is desperate to sign a business deal with a rich investor to develop the resort into something beyond a couple of shacks. Check. The local sheriff's wife is pregnant and about to give birth amidst the chaos. Check. The re-united lovers will cheat death a half-dozen times, including having to walk across a thin log with a raging lava inferno below them. Check. And a local boy will become a man by committing a heroic deed. Check.
The acting is reassuringly wooden, the script (five different story-writers or teleplay authors are listed, which is five too many) appears oblivious to the amount of dripping cheese around the edges, and the directing by Graeme Campbell is devoid of any flair or creativity.
Dan Cortese is the geologist who overnight becomes an expert mountaineer, and Cynthia Gibb is his former and once-again girlfriend mountain ranger. Together they spend a good chunk of the movie trudging through the wilderness, exchanging glib one-liners as they somehow avoid incineration or even dehydration while all the snow around them melts instantaneously as the volcano erupts.
This TV movie passes the time as it touches all the routine bases, but it's not necessarily time well spent.
Sunday 7 December 2008
Movie Review: Guns Of The Magnificent Seven (1969)
The second sequel to 1960's The Magnificent Seven re-treads the by now tired story of seven loner mercenaries with special skills, in this case assembling to help Mexican rebels free their captured leader from a well-defended evil-army fort.
All the characters wander in from other, better movies where they were played by other, better actors. The leader of the seven is still Chris Adams, portrayed here by George Kennedy. He is supported by six mercenaries who bring their luggage along, including physical and mental frailties. The one-handed quick-draw with a racist attitude of course clashes with the black strong-man in the group. The old guy who is good with a knife wants to put the violent life behind him and focus on his family, while the fading gun-fighter suffers from a persistent cough. They are brought to life by the likes of James Whitmore, Joe Don Baker, Reni Santoni, and Michael Ansara, sturdy actors all, but a significant downgrade in star power.
The good Mexican villagers believe in their revolutionary cause, the ugly Mexicans drink a lot and pretend they are rebels, and the bad Mexicans run the army and torture the good villagers.
The film builds up to the final assault on the army fort, which is a reasonable climax but hampered by startling inconsistencies (we just found all this dynamite!). Overly dramatic death scenes fail to inspire any emotion as the seven gradually dwindle to a number much less than seven.
At least the well-worn music survives from the original, and is one of the better reasons to endure this sequel. Directed by Paul Wenkos from a colour-by-numbers Herman Hoffman script, Guns of the Magnificent Seven mildly entertains but never ventures into challenging territory.
Labels:
George Kennedy,
James Whitmore
Thursday 4 December 2008
Movie Review: Prom Wars (2008)
Back in the early 1980's, a sub-genre of the teenage movie featured nerds and jocks one-upping each other for 90 minutes before the nerds inevitably triumphed and proved that smarts defeat brawn. This built-in bias is understandable since real-life nerds are much more likely than real-life jocks to become movie producers, directors and script-writers.
Revenge of the Nerds (1984) and a host of sequels and imitators kept easily amused teens entertained and personified the era.
Someone forgot to tell the makers of the Canadian production Prom Wars that this is 2008. Even the movie's tag-line "Love is a Battlefield", is stuck in decades past.
Screenwriter Myles Hainsworth and Director Phil Price dust-off the concept of nerds facing off against jocks (mixed-up with preppies, in this case) from the nearby school, this time set against the framework of a half-baked competition to win the right to take the girls from yet another nearby school to the prom.
A cast of relatively unknown young actors, lead by Ricky (Raviv) Ullman and Alia Shawkat, work hard to re-create ancient stereotypes and a positive impression that would hopefully lead to much better roles, to no avail.
The usual assortment of characters is here: the really rich and snobby kid; the cool nerd; the girl-obsessed nerds; the pretty but snooty girl; and the less pretty but smarter girl; the strict headmistress; and the requisite black character.
There is also a lame and unconvincing romance rattling around somewhere among all the heavily recycled ideas.
If Prom Wars had been made twenty years ago, it would have been stale. In 2008, it positively reeks.
Labels:
Alia Shawkat
Wednesday 3 December 2008
Movie Review: Get Smart (2008)
It's always quite painful when a movie is desperately trying to be funny, and yet nothing is working. There were maybe two moments in Get Smart that were funny enough to crack a small smile. The rest of the movie is just sad, because watching blatant failure unfold over a long 110 minutes just hurts.
It actually does not matter what the plot is, but here goes, for the record. Intelligence analyst Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell), working for the super-secret agency Control, is pressed into action as a field agent and is teamed up with super Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) to thwart the latest dastardly plot by the evil KAOS. If this sounds extremely tired, that's because it is, and unless you bring something new to the table, why exactly is everyone bothering?
So what goes wrong here? Let's start with a script by Tom Astle and Matt Ember that has almost no comedic wit, cleverness or sharpness. Maxwell Smart is somehow both inept and brilliant. Agent 99 is supposed to be the best field agent but yet needs to be saved by the inexperienced Smart more than once. The romance that supposedly develops between Smart and Agent 99 is contrived enough to cause inadvertent puking. And let's add one of the worst collection of bad guys ever assembled: each one has been swiped from another movie. In fact, Get Smart shamelessly rips off an entire parachute scene from James Bond's Moonraker movie. Finally, the movie falls into the infantile trap of believing that Big Scenes with Lots of Action will cover for the complete lack of interesting characters or any semblance of believable plot developments.
Carell seems to realize the script is nowhere near good enough for him to play Smart straight and come across as funny, and he is right. There is nothing that any of the cast members can do to rescue this dog, and Hathaway in particular will hopefully have learned to steer away from such stinky material next time she is sent a role for the "sexy super secret agent with a troubled past who falls in love with the bumbling nerd in a laugh-out-loud comedy".
Old famous faces like Alan Arkin, James Caan, Terence Stamp, and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson (ok, some not so old nor famous) are rattling around in the background of this movie, and hopefully they enjoyed their pay cheques because they will not enjoy having this title on their resume.
Director Peter Segal demonstrates no deft touches, and just hustles the action along as the movie lurches from one set piece to another, stitched together with awkward tin-eared dialogue. He may as well have phoned in his instructions.
Get Smart is a movie that makes you appreciate other movies, you know the ones, where the action scenes are actually exciting and the comedy scenes are actually funny.
All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.
Sunday 23 November 2008
Movie Review: Recount (2008)
Can the world's leading superpower be unhinged by a Presidential election that is too close to call?
The United States had to face this scenario in the 2000 election, when the decision between Republican candidate George W. Bush and Democratic Vice President Al Gore came down to literally a handful of votes in Florida.
Recount, an HBO production, re-examines the events that transpired, starting on election night with Gore first conceding and then dramatically un-conceding the election as the vote counting in Florida tightens to a statistical dead heat. The film then follows the two campaigns as they mobilize for a bare-knuckled, old-fashioned political fight involving public opinion, the press, overwhelmed local county officials, the Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris (Laura Dern), the Florida Supreme Court and finally the Supreme Court of the United States.
Bush and Gore are peripheral characters in the movie, mostly appearing as voices over the phone. The story is mainly told from the perspective of Ron Klain (Kevin Spacey), the lawyer who ends up leading the Gore team through the legal battles, and former United States Secretary of State James Baker (Tom Wilkinson), who leads the Republican team. Klain and Baker match wits and strategize against each other throughout the 5 weeks of controversy, and only meet at the end of the movie in a symbolic airport encounter.
The film tilts slightly and apologetically in favour of the Democratic party. The Gore team is portrayed as the more sympathetic scrambly bunch, out-gunned and fighting uphill against a slicker, better organized and better financed Republican team fighting on home turf. Florida's Governor is Jeb Bush, the candidate's brother, and Secretary Harris was the Florida campaign co-chair for the Republicans.
The film does an excellent job of recreating the period of uncertainty that prevailed, and of providing an insider's view of the controlled chaos behind the scenes as two massive campaigns maneuver through uncharted waters to try and claim the ultimate political prize. Given that the outcome is well known, director Jay Roach, and the cast of actors, working from a script by Danny Strong, are able to brilliantly inject emotion and drama as the sequence of events unfold, with each new surprise forcing a re-evaluation of strategy.
There are two notables sub-themes that the movie crystallizes: the first is the portrayal of Katherine Harris as an administrator thrust into a history-defining leadership role that is far beyond her capabilities by events that are far out of her control. The second is the examination of an electoral system that is designed to deal well with large numbers where small errors are irrelevant and tolerable. What happens when such a system is forced to deal with very small numbers where every vote becomes important? In both these sub-themes there are good lessons and topics of discussion about leadership and system design that add significant long-term value to the film.
While Recount for the most part recreates real events and portrays real characters, an understandable amount of artistic licence is also exercised. This really only matters to the few individuals who passionately care about extreme accuracy. For the rest of us, the film is a tight and controlled look into one of the most dramatic political events in the history of the United States.
All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.
All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.
Labels:
Kevin Spacey,
Laura Dern,
Tom Wilkinson
Saturday 22 November 2008
Movie Review: Swing Vote (2008)
Interesting premise. Horrible execution.
Sometimes, Hollywood just seems to forget what the word "subtle" means, or how powerful it can be to deliver a message with cleverness and gentle prodding. Instead, the brash "in your face" delivery method is unleashed to carpet bomb any trace of soul that tries to poke itself out of the ground.
Swing Vote, directed by Joshua Michael Stern and written by Stern and Jason Richman, has Kevin Costner as the blue collar uneducated beer-loving single dad who is the beneficiary of a computer malfunction and gets to cast his vote again in the US Presidential election. And on his vote rides the outcome of the entire tight election between the Republican incumbent (Kelsey Grammer) and the Democratic challenger (Dennis Hopper). Interesting premise, and a clever idea that could have delivered compelling drama, comedy, or both. But in the hands of Stern and Richman, the film is a pure colour-by-crayons disaster that seems to run backwards into every imaginable cul-de-sac.
The international press descends onto Costner's tiny town and creates a media circus that the film overcooks to a charred crisp. Then both the Republicans and the Democrats wade into the mess in an attempt to win his vote, and proceed to immediately chuck overboard all that they stand for in response to every off-handed remark made by Costner's clueless character. So for example, overnight, the Republicans become pro-environment, the Democrats become pro-life, with the two candidates bowing to every whim of their driven campaign managers.
In the middle of the farce is Costner's idealistic, precocious daughter (Madeline Carroll, the only watchable thing in the movie), who despite having two substance-abusing losers as parents is somehow growing up to be the smartest kid in all of New Mexico. And let's not forget to throw in the ambitious local female TV reporter who wants this story to be her stepping stone to national prominence, and her boss the local station executive who works hard to define the word stereotype.
The film must win recognition for strictly limiting every character to one dimension; not avoiding any cliches; and not delivering a single intelligent, memorable or reflective moment.
And if the first 110 minutes were not bad enough, the film out-does itself in the last 10 minutes. All of sudden, Costner gets a brain, and starts to care; a character who could not stop thinking about beer suddenly contrives to deliver a painful monologue about the importance of being a good citizen, working hard, contributing to society, and voting. The two candidates just as suddenly seem to find a conscience, although even this transformation is hopelessly flubbed in the case of the Democrat, who needs a full-face whacking from his wife to rediscover his values (did we mention the lack of subtlety?).
Swing Vote is witless, boring and simply awful, for its entire overblown length.
All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.
Thursday 2 October 2008
Film Review: Bluff (2007)
Bluff is an engaging piece of film-making from Quebec. In the tradition of weaving several unrelated stories around one inanimate object (famous examples being 1965's The Yellow Rolls Royce and 1998's The Red Violin), Bluff presents an apartment unit that is slated for destruction. At the final walkthrough before the bulldozers move in, the demolition foreman makes a startling discovery inside the apartment, the exact nature of which remains a secret until the film's final few scenes. The foreman is soon joined by the doomed apartment's superintendent, who calls the police to investigate the discovery, and as they wait for the authorities to arrive, we are taken back in time to see the stories of five sets of tenants who previously occupied the apartment.
A young man preparing for a job interview; an infertile couple seeking the help of a friend to get pregnant; an old man who was briefly a boxer and wants to re-live his glory by trading punches with his daughter's latest boyfriend; a couple who are about to celebrate a birthday just as soon they sell a set of horrid paintings to a mysterious buyer; and an aging thief who is staging a final heist in the hopes of enhancing his legacy. The stories are presented through inter-mingled scenes, and while the stories start innocently enough, they all start to head towards a threat of violence or unexpected misfortune, while always maintaining a low-key streak of humour. Meanwhile, back in the present, the construction foreman and the apartment superintendent are also discovering that all is not what it seems.
An ensemble cast of actors does a terrific job of bringing all the characters to life, which is no small achievement given that each actor is effectively creating one sixth of a movie. Co-directors Simon-Olivier Fecteau and Marc-Andre Lavoie manage to quickly introduce us to the unique dynamics of each story, and effectively weave the various threads into compelling vignettes that may or may not be heading to a variety of unwelcome endings.
With a suitably nifty soundtrack, Bluff is proof that a small, low-budget film can provide clever and thoughtful entertainment through tight storytelling, deft acting and efficient directing.
Labels:
Bluff,
Canada,
Film Review,
Marc-AndreLavoie,
Movie Review,
Quebec,
Simon-Olivier Fecteau
Film Review: Notre Univers Impitoyable (2008)
Two lawyers on the fast-track to success at a private law-firm, Margot and Victor, work as a team and are also a loving couple. When a senior partner drops dead and creates an opening for a new senior position, only one out of Margot and Victor will get the promotion, and the other will have to settle for a supporting role.
Notre Univers Impitoyable (meekly titled What If? in English) cleverly explores both possible scenarios: Margot as the new senior partner, breaking down gender barriers and becoming the new glamour star of the firm, while Victor labours in her shadow. Or Victor as the hard-driving new senior partner, with Margot relegated to serving coffee and caring for the children.
The film consists of inter-cut scenes that alternate between the two possible realities. There are parallels and contrasts between the two, and director Lea Fazer has fun with the interplay. She effectively and seamlessly introduces the switches between the two stories by embedding "what if" questions into the script, as cues for the role reversal scenes that follow. In both story lines, the couple's relationship is rocked by infidelity, feelings of neglect, family versus career conflicts, and questions about true values. A strong common theme emerges between the two stories, addressing the impact on a relationship that is thrown out of a comfortable balance.
Alice Taglioni as Margot and Jocelyn Quivrin as Victor (a real-life couple) are both excellent. They have an obvious chemistry together, and they establish a high degree of empathy for their characters in both story lines. Taglioni and Quivrin effortlessly pull-off three roles, depending on the scene: equals, superiors and subordinates. The film is enriched with many well-rounded supporting characters: Thierry Lhermitte as one of the principles of the firm, who makes the decision about who gets the promotion and then manipulates the consequences to his advantage; Pascale Arbillot as Margot's recently-dumped sister; Scali Delpeyrat as another lawyer at the firm; and Julie Ferrier as the law firm's resident paralegal / mistress.
The film is brisk, helped along by a catchy music score and clever but not pretentious camerawork. An entertaining, thoughtful and well-executed film.
Monday 1 September 2008
Movie Review: First Blood (1982)
There was a time when action movies could deliver entertainment without resorting to a cartoonish computer-generated special-effects laden climax every 10 minutes. First Blood is a reminder that an action movie can be remarkably low key in its setting and character development, and yet deliver a strong punch when based on a message inspired by real events and memorable personalities.
Sylvester Stallone, when he was famous but not yet a joke, is John Rambo, a Vietnam war veteran back in the US who is devastated to find out at the beginning of the film that the sole other combat survivor from his Special Forces unit has succumbed to cancer.
In a representation of the poor welcome home afforded to most Vietnam vets, Rambo is treated badly by the Sheriff (Brian Dennehy, who puts in an excellent but slightly exaggerated performance) and police force of a small local northwest town. The maltreatment triggers the soldier to revert back to war mode in the surrounding hills and forests (the movie is filmed in and around the town of Hope, British Columbia), and soon the war expands to include the clueless local contingent of the National Guard, who are as over-matched as the police, and Rambo gradually draws the conflict back to a final showdown within the town.
Richard Crenna arrives as Rambo's field commander and mentor, and as the police and National Guard are scurrying around pretending to know something about warfare in the forest, Crenna delivers the classic line to Dennehy: "I don't think you understand. I didn't come to rescue Rambo from you. I came here to rescue you from him."
First Blood is part of Hollywood's thoughtful post-Vietnam war examination of the conflict, an era that resulted in large scale epics like Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979), as well as smaller scale films like Coming Home (1978) and Platoon (1986).
Stallone would subsequently achieve stratospheric commercial success with Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), which while undeniably entertaining, unfortunately sacrificed nuance in favour of a jingoism.
In First Blood, Rambo is a hero who feels pain both emotional and physical, bleeds, has to tend to his wounds, tries to stop the conflict before it escalates, and spares the life of most of his enemies. Directed by Ted Kotcheff and running an efficient 96 minutes, First Blood delivers its message with uncommon integrity.
All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.
Labels:
Brian Dennehy,
Richard Crenna,
Sylvester Stallone
Movie Review: Gunfight At The OK Corral (1957)
Gunfight At The OK Corral is based on true events and real characters, but of course the Hollywood treatment is lathered on in great quantities to create fiction and fact at least in equal doses. In reality the actual Gunfight took a matter of seconds. In the movie, it is a solid 10 minute battle, but with unquestionable entertainment value.
Directed by John Sturges, this is a classic western where good and evil are clearly defined but with intriguing shades of moral ambiguity. These mostly revolve around Doc Holliday, by far the most interesting of the main characters and made more so by Douglas' shifty performance. Holliday is a man one step ahead of death, and it's coming at him both from the disease eating away at him, and from the next gunslinger to challenge him. In the meantime he focuses on gambling, drinking, womanizing and finding the thin path that will keep him alive one more day.
In contrast Lancaster's Wyatt Earp is for the most part the prototypical and somewhat boring lawman with a strong moral compass who believes in the righteousness of his actions, and is presented in the film as representative of the type of leader who transitioned the West from rampant lawlessness to a more civilized era.
That Earp forges some sort of friendship with Holliday morally weakens the lawman but strengthens his firepower. And when the bullets start flying in the excellent but historically inaccurate final showdown, firepower is definitely the way to go.
To the film's credit, Earp also has to make a decision to transform the dispute with the cattle rustlers into a personal family feud rather than follow due legal process. In reality, after the OK Corral showdown, Earp became an uncontrollable law unto himself, and embarked on an almost mythical quest to clean up the West without concerning himself too much with the nuances of the law, events that are more fully explored in Tombstone (1993).
Sturges does a fine job steering the film to its climax, introducing a rich tapestry of characters, events, and locations. At just over two hours in length, the story is provided relaxed room to breathe and develop, accompanied by Dimitri Tiomkin's evocative soundtrack.
Labels:
Burt Lancaster,
Kirk Douglas
Saturday 9 August 2008
Film Review: Rock Star (2001)
In 1991, Rob Halford, the lead singer for leading British heavy metal group Judas Priest, left the band. He was eventually replaced by an unknown named Tim "Ripper" Owens, who was the lead singer for a Priest "tribute" band called British Steel. One of the nicknames of Judas Priest was "Metal Gods", after their song on the album British Steel.
The movie Rock Star is loosely based on these events. During the making of the movie there was a fallout between the film's producers and Judas Priest that prevented the movie from being explicitly linked with the band, so Rock Star claims to be a work of fiction, but the parallels with real life remain clear. The movie's working title was "Metal God". The British heavy metal band in the movie is Steel Dragon, and their lead singer quits the band. Mark Wahlberg plays Chris Cole, the unknown Pittsburgh-based lead singer of a tribute band, who is plucked from obscurity to become the new lead singer of Steel Dragon, the most famous heavy metal band in the world. However, the movie is set in the 1980's, at the peak of heavy metal's popularity, and about a decade prior to the story that inspired it.
There are few good serious movies set against a heavy metal backdrop. This Is Spinal Tap (1984) is a terrific movie, but it unfortunately established an expectation that heavy metal can only be treated as a joke, and not a subject for a serious narrative. Rock Star is therefore a welcome achievement. It provides a terrific peek into the world of heavy metal super stardom, set against an interesting story made more fascinating by its connections to reality. The true top-of-the-music-heap sex, drugs and rock'n'roll life that is vividly described in books like Slash (2008) comes to life on the screen, and Wahlberg does a terrific job as the wide-eyed neophyte who is dropped into a world that he always dreamed of, but that is wilder than he could ever have imagined.
In supporting roles, the film has real-life heavy metal musicians like guitarist Zakk Wylde, drummer Jason Bonham, and members of Slaughter and Dokken adding a layer of authenticity to the proceedings. Jennifer Aniston is Wahlberg's grounded manager / girlfriend, and her performance lifts her character out of the routine and into a full member of the plot.
Director Stephen Herek keeps the story moving briskly, and does an excellent job of conveying the electricity of massive live heavy metal concerts, the sweatiness of smaller performances in less glamorous surroundings, and the excessive lifestyle that accompanies the biggest music bands in the world.
The movie features a few original songs, but mostly the soundtrack is composed of top heavy metal tunes from the 1980's that almost serve as narration, providing commentary on the unfolding story.
Rock Star ends with a wistful echo of the rapid downfall of stadium heavy metal and the emergence of grunge that occurred between 1989 and 1991. This adds a fine denouement to an enjoyable movie forged in metal.
Labels:
Jennifer Aniston,
Mark Wahlberg
Sunday 3 August 2008
Film Review: Wall.E (2008)
The latest film from the minds at Pixar aims at some big, broad, messages, suitably amplified to penetrate young minds and the minds of their possibly denser parents: Don't Trash the Planet! Take Care of Nature and Nature Will Take Care of You! Avoid Junk Food! Teamwork Rocks! Love Conquers All!. It's all very topical, and the audience takes these messages in, nods knowingly, and fails to make the connection that they arrived at the Cineplex in a needlessly oversized SUV, are junking the floor with sticky pop and fake-butter smudged popcorn, while drinking water out of plastic bottles. We cheer the film's message; but we don't necessarily really get it.
The genius of the movie is in its delivery. The story is told with almost no dialogue, and using the latest in computer animation technology. Wall.E is a small trash compacting unit left behind on Earth to clean up the mess after all the humans took refuge on space ships because the planet was overtaken by garbage. The clean-up was supposed to take 5 years; instead, 700 years have passed. The humans have adapted to life on robot-controlled spaceships by taking obesity to new levels. They can't walk anymore, and are transported everywhere on cool looking motorized chairs. They communicate through virtual reality screens, and have their every food and drink need delivered instantaneously by endlessly scurrying robots. In short, "comfortably numb" has finally been defined for the human race.
Back on Earth, Wall.E is one of the last remaining robots getting on with the job, and he's developed some very human, almost nauseatingly cute emotions and intelligence, not to mention a friendship with a fellow-surviving cockroach (they will, apparently, survive anything). Onto Earth descends Eve, a shiny new and powerful robot programmed to look for signs of growing life (but apparently not cockroaches). Wall.E is smitten. Eve finds a growing plant. The humans can come home. But there are evil-doers trying to foil the happy ending, and Wall.E and Eve have to team-up with some rogue robots to save the day.
The ending of this film is telegraphed about half-way through, and except for the very young, the audience has to grin and watch the very expected events unfold for the last 45 minutes. It is not too tedious, but it gets close.
There is no doubting the artistry and talent behind this film, and Pixar deliver another extremely high quality product. But a bit less messaging, and a bit more originality in avoiding the obvious, would have been appreciated.
Sunday 6 July 2008
Film Review: Sex and the City (2008)
It's four years later. Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) has settled into a relationship with Big (Chris Noth), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) has settled into life in Brooklyn, Charlotte (Kristin Davis) has settled into the role of wife and mother, and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) has settled in LA, managing the career of her long-term lover.
None of this settling is without troubles brewing beneath the surface, as Carrie is longing for the re-assurance of marriage, Miranda has little time for wifely duties, Charlotte is about to receive a surprise and Samantha is gradually getting resentful that her life is not revolving around her.
And so we are off on a two-hour adventure with the ladies who forever transformed television, as they tackle life's latest challenges, this time on the big screen, dressed from head to toe in the latest designer clothes and accessories, visiting the trendiest restaurants, and in Samantha's case, seemingly spending every other day jetting from LA to New York and back.
There are no disappointments here for fans of the series. There is fashion, fashion, and more fashion, everything from out-there everyday outfits to wedding dresses (an excuse is found for a wedding dress photo-shoot), to haute couture (an excuse is found to attend a fashion show) to the latest designer shoes (an excuse is found for a pair of shoes to play a role in the storyline) to the latest designer handbags (yes, another role in the script is found for a handbag). Not an opportunity is missed to show a designer label, and no less is expected.
There are many gab-sessions over many meals and (mostly) many drinks. The full supporting cast from the series is back, and there is the welcome addition of Jennifer Hudson (of Dreamgirls and American Idol fame) as Carrie's new assistant.
What about the Sex, and the City? Plenty of both. Sex is near the core of the issues that Miranda and Samantha have to deal with, and as an added bonus, Samantha finds herself living next to a hunk who is always either (a) naked; (b) getting naked; or (c) naked and having wild passionate sex, with at least one partner. It's mostly (c), actually. As for the City, although the plot finds an excuse for a quick interlude at a five-star Mexico resort, and there are several scenes at Samantha's dreamy LA beach house, New York remains very much the fifth member of the group. Key locations that play a part in the film include the public library, the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park, many restaurants, a luxurious penthouse apartment, and even City Hall.
The friendships, the fights, the misunderstandings, the make-up sessions, and the comedy are all here, appropriately proportioned to the big-screen experience, and as usual with Love being the emotion at the core of everything. Searching for it, finding it, being afraid to lose it, and trusting in it. It's also a nice touch for one of the other central themes of the movie to be the age of the central characters, now in their 40's, and a bridge is built to the next generation in their 20-somethings through Hudson's character.
It is rare for a TV series to translate so well to the big screen, but Sex and the City succeeds without the slightest stumble. It is highly recommended, of course for all women, and for all men who want to try and understand them.
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