A few days ago I reviewed a couple of movies I had seen over the All Saints weekend, and now I'd like to review the ones I enjoyed most.
Knocked Up
directed by Judd Apatow
starring Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl
Having enjoyed Apatow's last movie, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, I was happy to give him repeat business when I heard about this movie, particularly considering that most of the cast and crew of Virgin remained intact with some delightful new additions.
Knocked Up doesn't benefit from quite an original a premise as Virgin, but Apatow's true gift is in the execution. The story is about an upwardly mobile employee of E! named Alison Scott (Heigl) who, upon being promoted from a behind-the-camera job to full-time E! reporter goes out to celebrate one night, where she meets Ben Stone (Rogen) a part-time web-page designer, most-of-the-time bum and stoner living illegally in the States (he's Canadian). Several drinks later, the pair end up in bed, and thanks to some rather comical miscommunication, without any contraception. The morning after, a now sober Alison discovers that she can't stand Ben. Eight weeks later, however, when Alison starts getting morning sickness, and learns, after several dozen home pregnancy tests, that she is, in fact, pregnant, she gives Ben a call.
The movie is essentially Ben's and Alison's seven month journey on the way to parenthood. They don't spend all of it together, and this makes for some wonderful interplay with Alison's elder sister Debbie (Leslie Mann, Apatow's wife) and her husband Pete (Paul Rudd, also from Virgin), who, in contrast to the struggling new couple, have been married for ten years now. The contrast between the longtime couple and the new one is played out very nicely.
The movie is chock-full of belly laughs, which is pretty much to be expected, but what makes this outing really special, like Virgin, is that it has heart, on top of the biting wit of its script. I don't mean the treacly, virtually condescending "heart" of Adam Sandler movies, I mean real and honest-to-God heart courtesy of some truly wonderful chemistry between Heigl's Alison and Rogen's Ben and some genuinely touching acting even when they aren't onscreen together.
There's a lot of authenticity to the movie as well, with just about every character dropping F-bombs in a somewhat appropriate context (though I could have done with fewer of them) and Apatow going as far as to sneak in footage of an actual mother's vagina giving birth to stand in for Alison's moment of truth. It was a bit extreme, and in fact the knowledge that such footage would be used caused the original choice for Alison, Anne Hathaway, to drop out of the role, but having seen such a phenomenon up close and personally (sorry Theia), I can tell you it works for anyone who's ever had kids.
Knocked Up is a great movie, and although there have been some snide suggestions that its success was more the product of shock value than anything else I say nay. This is a movie that completely succeeds on its own merits.
For anyone who's into belly laughs, relationships, pregnancy, childbirth, raunchy sex humor, the DVD running time of celebrity sex scenes, or repeated references to Spider-Man 3, this movie is for you. As long as you're over 18, of course...
Stardust
directed by Matthew Vaughn
starring Claire Danes, Charlie Cox, Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert DeNiro
I never saw The Princess Bride in its entirety, so I cannot say for certain, but part of me strongly believes that Stardust is, in spirit, its sequel, or at least is meant to be.
Stardust is the story Tristan Thorne (Cox), a country boy from the village of Wall who sets out on a journey to recover a falling star for the lovely Victoria (Sienna Miller) in exchange for her hand in marriage. This would be rather simple, except that the falling star is, in fact, a human being played by Claire Danes, and has landed in a magical realm known as Stormhold which lies just beyond the fringes of Wall, where she catches quite a bit of attention from three witches and the princes of Stormhold, whose father (Peter O' Toole) threw the Stormhold birthstone at the star that caused it to fall in the first place..
Pfeiffer camps it up as the lead witch, who sets out to find the star and cut out her heart (which is supposed to make her and her sisters young again, at least for the next hundred years) and is a delight to watch, as are the murderous princely siblings who have set out on their quest to recover the stone, for any of them to recover in order to claim the throne of Stormhold.
Although Tristan gets to her first, courtesy of a magic candle, the hard part is getting her back to Wall. And the fun/mayhem ensues, with transformations, swordfights, a transvestite pirate (DeNiro in a deliciously different turn) and generous helpings of magic both of the eldritch kind and the very human kind.
The movie is, all things considered a romance, so although Tristan starts the movie enamored with the self-absorbed Victoria, it doesn't take a rocket scientist who he'll fall for before the movie's running time is through, even without having read the book. The movie doesn't pretend to hold any real surprises, though, and this is actually part of its charm.
Though I bought, read and enjoyed the Neil Gaiman/Charles Vess illustrated fantasy novel from which this film was adapted (and yes, it is more like a novel than a comic book, so in this case the term graphic novel is much more apt than it usually is), I can't say I was particularly looking forward to this film, primarily because of my (silent) objections to the casting of Claire Danes as Yvaine, the lead female.
It turns out my apprehensions were, for the most part, unfounded. The movie is quite enjoyable, and even though quite a few liberties were taken with the original work, in many cases they are rather welcome changes and made for a more satisfying viewing experience than a straight adaptation would have been. I particularly liked the camping up of Victoria into a spoiled, self-absorbed brat rather than the annoyingly distant character she was in the graphic novel; it made for more engaging, if not slightly more caricatured storytelling. Although the addition of some swashbuckling elements seemed a little forced at times, I daresay I truly enjoyed the expansion of DeNiro's character Captain Shakespeare, who wasn't nearly as enjoyable in the book. I was also glad that some of the more adult aspects of the book were toned down, because really, this is a story a younger audience should be allowed to enjoy.
It's really quite a shame Stardust was one of this year's box-office disappointments. While not one of my all-time favorite movies, it was certainly a better movie than a whole lot of the other fare this year that have been killing at the tills; it certainly was a lot better than the trashy Transformers which was released by the same studio, and deserved a lot more than the feeble marketing push it got from Paramount, which treated it like gum on its shoe, all things considered.
Well, I take solace in knowing that its thematic predecessor, The Princess Bride, also did poorly during its box-office run, only to become a cult favorite on cable and home video. I hope this movie is able to flourish similarly.
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