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Web Exclusive…
Film Reviews
By Bill Newcott
Bill Newcott, entertainment editor for AARP The Magazine, host of the
Movies for Grownups® weekly radio program, and a former New York and
Los Angeles film critic, presents his film reviews
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Despite Hollywood's infatuation with youth, half of movie tickets are bought by people over 30. "Youth-oriented movies
make or break themselves on their opening weekends," says Movies for Grownups® host Bill Newcott. "But three of the
highest-grossing movies of all time—the grownup-oriented My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Dances with
Wolves, and A Beautiful Mind—never reached number one at the box office. How did they manage
that success? It was thanks to mature audiences, who kept those movies in the theaters for months."
February 2010
 Photo by Scott Garfield,
Courtesy of Sony Pictures
Dear John (PG-13)
If you could gather all the tears shed in darkened theaters over
movies inspired by Nicholas Sparks's romance novels, you could
water a thousand rose gardens exploding with fragrant blossoms and
bristling with long, sharp thorns that I could use to gouge out my
eyes so I would never have to endure another Nicholas Sparks movie.
Stilted, manipulative, and phony as a wooden nickel, Dear John
doesn't so much tell a story as ooze it. We meet a darling young
couple named John and Savannah (Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried,
straight out of a Lands' End catalog) at their first encounter
on a North Carolina beach, and watch as their love blooms
oh…so…slowly. After two weeks (it seems like two
decades) they must head their separate ways: she to college, he to his
overseas posting as a Green Beret. They're apart for a year, but
they write every day—long, boring letters that they insist on
reading in endless voiceovers as their eyes hungrily scan each
carefully folded, meticulously handwritten page.
Well, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, and after that I'd be giving
away the end (which, you might as well know, is different from the
conclusion of the book).
As was the case in the most successful Sparks film adaptation, The
Notebook—which featured extraordinary performances by James
Garner and Gena Rowlands—the very best thing about Dear John is
the presence of a grownup. Richard Jenkins, one of Hollywood's
great character actors (he was nominated for an Oscar for The Visitor
last year) gives a sensitive, thoughtful performance as John's
father, a man who has suffered his entire life with undiagnosed
Asperger's syndrome, yet who has heroically managed to raise a son
all by himself. Every ounce of the man's character development
arises from Jenkins's own considerable resources; the script
doesn't even bother to give him a first name. It's as if
he's in a whole other movie, and by the time the final credits
roll, we wish he had been.
January 2010
 Photo by Macall Polay,
Courtesy of Warner Bros.
Edge of Darkness (R)
He knows it and we know it: We want to see Mel Gibson pushed to the
edge of insanity, to the very precipice of unbearable human endurance,
that tipping point where he's either going to collapse into a heap
of unredeemable despair or, more likely, explode in a righteous rage
that ends with him going totally bat guano crazy all over the
evildoers who have driven him to the point of no return. We've
watched rapt as Gibson has walked that line as a psycho cop in the
Lethal Weapon films, as an oppressed Colonial in The
Patriot, as an anguished dad in Ransom.
Yep, Mel Gibson knows just what we want, and he doles out great
heaping ladles of it in Edge of Darkness, a nice return to
form from a star whose personal dramas have eclipsed his acting career
for nearly a decade.
Gibson plays Thomas Craven, a Boston Police detective whose beloved
daughter, Emma, is shot to death at his front door. At first, everyone
assumes Craven was the gunman's actual target, but of course the
plot thickens like a good bean soup, and soon the distraught dad is
hot on the heels of the bad guys who slaughtered his child. A fine
supporting cast of mostly little-known actors keeps the story moving
along, allowing Gibson to slouch from scene to scene, all but
disappearing into his Columbo-esque raincoat, his face etched in a
grief that soon gives way to grim rage. The action in Edge of
Darkness comes in great sudden gushes of violence—an
unexpected gunshot, an out-of-nowhere car collision. Enough characters
come and go (feet first, usually) to keep us wondering who'll take
the next bullet, and director Martin Campbell—who directed the
1980s British TV series on which the movie is based—sees to it
that the twists come at the most unlikely moments.
And always the focus is on Gibson, who brings to Craven a pain he
cannot express over a loss he cannot comprehend. For those of us who
have been hoping the big lug would get past his private dramas and
deliver some big-screen ones, Edge of Darkness is a pretty
perfect welcome back.
 Photo courtesy of
CBS Films, Inc.
Extraordinary Measures (PG)
Harrison Ford stars as Harrison Ford playing an eccentric research
scientist in this big-screen version of the sort of made-for-TV movie
that used to be called "disease-of-the-week." Indeed, all
that separates Extraordinary Measures from video weepies like The
Boy in the Plastic Bubble or The Ann Jillian Story is
its star wattage: Ford, Brendan Fraser, and Keri Russell toil
admirably to lift the film to a level it probably doesn't deserve.
Fraser is the central character, a dad who has two children dying of a
rare genetic condition called Pompe disease. His role is based on a
real guy, John Crowley, a pharmaceutical executive who moved heaven
and earth to facilitate the development of a drug to save his kids. In
real life, Crowley enlisted the help of several scientists, but for
simplicity's sake his film incarnation turns only to Dr. Robert
Stonehill (Ford), a quirky university researcher who's got a
theory about Pompe that's so crazy it just might work.
A lot of the movie is procedural: The pair secure funding for their
research, and things go so well they get bought out by a big Pharma
company that pays each of them millions of dollars. But it's not
the money these two want. They live for a cure. In fact, Ford's
feisty doc thumbtacks his multi-million-dollar check to a wall, vowing
to cash it only when his work is done. Just the sort of righteous
thing Indiana Jones would do. Or Jack Ryan. And when Ford angrily
orders nosy visitors out of his research lab, Ford fans will have a
hard time resisting the temptation to growl back his line from Air
Force One: "Get off my plane!"
Is it ruining things to tell you there's a happy ending? Naw, the
TV ads show it. And really, all the ins and outs of the financing and
the research are kind of confusing and not very interesting. The fun
of Extraordinary Measures comes from enjoying the stars, two
of the cinema's most appealing leading men. Shambling, grumpy, and
transparently virtuous, Ford's Stonehill is the best drinking
buddy you could hope for. As for Fraser, he's aging very nicely
out of his chiseled George of the Jungle/The Mummy/Encino Man
look. As Crowley he's pleasingly doughy, his sad eyes haunted by
the sight of his steadily deteriorating children. When he smiles in
their direction, his equal shares of happiness and heartbreak add an
emotional power that keeps Extraordinary Measures, which
ought to be running on fumes, surprisingly powerful.
 Photo courtesy of
DreamWorks Studios
The Lovely Bones (PG-13)
Director Peter Jackson of The Lord of the Rings fame takes on a
tremendous challenge in adapting The Lovely Bones—Alice
Sebold's lyrical examination of life and death, good and
evil—for the screen. In the end, it's a challenge he cannot
meet.
A 14-year-old girl is raped and murdered, then watches from heaven as
her family reels from the loss and searches desperately for answers,
including the identity of her killer. It's the stuff of horror and
mystery, yet Sebold's 2002 bestseller was so much more, a timeless
evocation of the enduring power of family, of love, and of hope.
Jackson made a good start with his cast: Saoirse Ronan's haunting
eyes alone qualify her to play the deceased Susie Salmon. And Stanley
Tucci is riveting (and unrecognizable) as the diabolical killer,
George Harvey. (On the other hand, Susan Sarandon badly overplays
Susie's over-the-top Grandma Lynn). But in attempting to emulate
the book's ingenious combination of genres, Jackson tries to pull
off a crime/drama/fantasy/horror/thriller film. Unfortunately, in
attempting to be all those things, The Lovely Bones ends up being none
of them.
The film, perhaps mercifully, never fully recreates the crime itself.
Maybe Jackson should have shown equal discretion in his depiction of
Susie's afterlife; his cartoon-like effects and rainbow colors
seem heavy-handed and clunky. We never really experience the agony
felt by Susie's mom and dad (Rachel Weisz and Mark Wahlberg), nor
that of her sister (Rose McIver), whose obsession to root out the
killer nearly lands her at his mercy. This failure to emotionally
develop the key characters—something Sebold did
masterfully—is a big reason why the film quickly fades for the
viewer.
It is the family's grief, and their coming to terms with loss,
that could have given Jackson's film great power. The Stone Boy
(1984) and Moonlight Mile (2002—coincidentally costarring
Sarandon) are two examples of cinematographic works that look
unflinchingly at the death of a child. Unlike The Lovely Bones, they
are movies you won't forget.
—Meg Grant AARP The Magazine, Entertainment Editor at Large
 Photo by Stephan Rabold,
Courtesy
of Sony
Pictures Classics
The Last Station (R)
Driven by Helen Mirren's ferocious performance as a woman who will not be scorned, The Last Station improbably entices us to invest almost two hours of our lives in the story of Leo Tolstoy's last days. When you consider that most modern readers have little use for the 19th-century Russian novelist under any circumstances, that's quite a feat.
Christopher Plummer (whose long-ago turn as Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music haunted most of our household TVs this past holiday season) plays Tolstoy, frail and troubled, coming to terms with fame and fortune while trying to adhere to his philosophy of rejecting materialism on every level. As he wanders the grounds of his estate and recalls his good-old-bad-boy days with a young admirer (boyish James McAvoy), one senses Tolstoy would like to chuck this austere lifestyle and wallow in the fruits of his literary life. But he's held in check by the adoration of his admirers, most prominently Vladimir Chertkov, played with ingratiating vanity by Paul Giamatti—forever toying with his well-oiled mustache and spitting incredulity when Tolstoy, who preaches the sanctity of all animal life, kills a mosquito.
"He's a much better Tolstoyian than I am," Tolstoy explains to a friend.
And then there's Mirren as Tolstoy's wife Sofya—strong-willed, mercurial, and devoted to her husband despite his renunciation of all physical affection. His vow of celibacy she deals with straightforwardly—in a scene of steam-inducing seduction, Sofya turns up the heat so intensely that the helpless and utterly seduced old man not only leaps into bed with her, she gets him to do it while crowing like a rooster. Sofya is somewhat less successful in swaying her husband from essentially writing her out of his will, leaving the proceeds from his world-famous novels not to her and their children but to the people of Russia. This becomes the movie's true battleground, with Mirren on one side screaming, pleading, and even firing off a pistol—and Giamatti on the other, using exquisitely chosen words to gain influence over Tolstoy's decision.
Perhaps realizing that at its heart The Last Station is little more than the chronicle of a domestic disagreement over publishing rights, writer/director Michael Hoffman basically winds up Mirren and then lets her go. As high-strung Sofya, a woman who transcribed War and Peace in longhand, she is alternately pitiful and terrifying, an already loosely moored soul aghast at the notion of being completely cast adrift. Even those who line up on her side—in the film and in the audience—have to confess that her outrageous outbursts frequently push Sofya pretty high up there on the crazy meter.
Still, in Mirren's hands Sofya remains irresistible, with an unpredictable energy that is tantalizingly sensual. If the movie's Tolstoy had persisted in resisting her entreaties to hop into bed crowing "cock-a-doodle-do," well, there were any number of red-blooded males in the audience who would have been more than happy to oblige.
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