It's not a stretch to say that I am not a member of Aquamarine's target demographic. It's a good bet that about 90% of the film's viewers will be girls between the ages of 8 and 14. I'm sure the movie works better for them than it did for me. Still, all things considered, I have to admit that sittin...
While watching Liar Liar, it occurred to me that the chief problem with this film is that it has a script. If Jim Carrey had been unleashed without such silly, incidental constraints as plot and dialogue, who knows where things might have gone? As it is, however, Carrey is forced to confine his antics to the needs of L...
"Pretty Woman" is a working girl indeed, not just some underemployed wretch in a typing pool, but an honest-to-God streetwalking Cinderella who finds her corporate Prince Charming, a Wall Street tycoon lost along Hollywood's Boulevard of Stars. A tale of two hustlers, this romp reminds us, as if we could ...
"Meet Bill." Or better yet, don't. An attempt at a comedy in the flat, buried-jokes mode of Alexander Payne ("About Schmidt," "Election"), "Meet Bill" finds Snickers-addicted Bill (Aaron Eckhart) in crisis mode. He hates his job, he hates his boss (who is also his father-in-...
15-year old Mia Thermopolis (Anne Hathaway, TV's "Get Real") is 'invisible.' Her hair is a frizzy nightmare, she's lousy at sports, public speaking makes her physically ill and her own Vice Principal (Sandra Oh, "Last Night") greats her as 'Lilly's friend.' When the mothe...
Jim Carrey proved he could play it straight (well, at least a portion of the time) as a family man in Liar Liar, his 1997 comedy blockbuster. With The Truman Show, the elastic-faced, loose-limbed dynamo shows he can also be as serious as needed, in the title role of this imaginative tale of an electronic-age guinea pig...
Romantic comedies sell fantasy. Ultimately, that's their reason for being - to make even the most cynical heart crave true love. Some romantic comedies, this one included, fail because of an inability to convince the audience that the protagonists deserve to live happily ever after. There's a simple romantic co...
NICOLE KIDMAN and Jude Law are walking, talking cadavers in love in "Cold Mountain." They shuffle through this handsome adaptation of Charles Frazier's celebrated novel like romantic living dead in period costume. You wonder if this is an epic romance or a ghost story. It's unfortunate, because just ...
In "Pieces of April," the directorial debut of the gifted novelist and screenwriter Peter Hedges, a young woman who has never quite fit in with her family -- she's the April of the title, played by Katie Holmes -- coaxes them out of their comfy suburban environs to have Thanksgiving dinner at her small, c...
Meet Joe Black has the dubious distinction of being the longest film to date of 1998. It is also one of the most tedious and bombastic. At a hair under three hours, it's shorter than James Cameron's Titanic, yet, when it comes to pace, Joe Black is glacial. Director Martin Brest, who helmed the enjoyable-but-al...