Heigl crimes One for the Money

I hate Katherine Heigl a lot less than most critics do. In fact, I don’t really hate her at all. I kind of like her. I liked her stupid baby movie, Life as We Know It, just a little bit, and I loved her in Knocked Up

Granted, all her other starring vehicles blow ass, but she’s routinely better than her material. Such is the case with her latest bottom-feeder, One for the Money guy who consumes much chocolate between takes. I can’t make any other suggestions about what chemicals might contribute to his uppity film persona because that would be crossing some lines, but you know what I’m thinking. Chocolate is just a gateway drug, man.

2Albert Nobbs

Glenn Close gives it her all as the title character, a woman dressed as a man in 19th century Ireland, working as a waiter and saving money to buy a tobacco shop. Having spent much time as a man, Albert sees trying to take a wife as the next logical step, and tries courting a fellow hotel employee played by Mia Wasikowska. Little does Albert know that the prospective wife is a user, simply trying to score bounty for her and her boyfriend (Aaron Johnson). Janet McTeer plays another woman masquerading as a man in order to get work. The whole scenario seems unlikely. Close and McTeer are rather unconvincing as men, and the story fails to be compelling. Still, Close does provide some genuinely moving moments, even if she does look like an odd combo of Conan O’Brien and Gabriel Byrne in this film.

4The Artist

1

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

The latest 9/11 movie is the worst one yet, focusing on an obnoxious kid (Thomas Horn) on a quest to find the lock for a key his father (Tom Hanks) left behind after dying on 9/11. Horn is just impossible to watch, and the plotting is deplorable. Yes, the kid is making his acting debut here, and it’s a demanding role. I’m sorry—he just drove me crazy. Max von Sydow shows up in a silent role and has some fun with it. That’s about the most positive thing I can say about this trash. It wastes decent performances from Hanks and Sandra Bullock.

5The Grey

by Bob Grimm bgrimm@ newsreview.com

Heigl is only slightly bad, and still somewhat charming, as Stephanie Plum, a former Macy’s employee who goes into the bail-bond business. Her first gig is to go after a cop in trouble, Joe Morelli (Jason O’Mara), a guy she lost her virginity to and tried to run over with a car.

See, that’s just stupid as all hell right there, and Heigl didn’t have a hand in the writing of this crap. It’s based on the first of a popular string of novels by Janet Evanovich, and my guess is that director Julie Anne Robinson missed something in the translation from book to film. The movie is a dull dud.

They get Debbie Reynolds out of mothballs to play the crazy grandma who shoots turkeys at the kitchen table. I guess Betty White wasn’t available, or perhaps she thought the script was a piece of shit. Fisher Stevens shows up late in the film as a sweaty bounty hunter. If that isn’t a harbinger of bad film, what is?

The movie is populated with your standard bounty hunter movie clichés. (We’ll exclude The Empire Strikes Back from the category of “standard bounty hunter movie.” Boba Fett rules!) There’s the hooker with a heart of gold (Sherrie Shepherd) who Stephanie gets all of her information from in exchange for hoagies. There’s the doting, paranoid mama (Debra Monk) who worries when her daughter is five minutes late for dinner. There’s the appliance store guy (Adam Paul) who her mama is trying to fix her up with even though he’s a total dick. OK, most of those roles don’t show up in your average bounty hunter movie. I guess One for the Money just has a way of making everything feel tired and clichéd. The hooker with a heart of gold who eats hoagies is in just about every romantic comedy with guns ever made, though. I won’t back off that argument.

An homage to silent films that’s actually a silent film, this is a funny, touching and innovative piece of work with a fun performance from Jean Dujardin. He plays a silent movie star at the dawning of the sound age, much like Charlie Chaplin, who either must make the leap to sound or slip away. Berenice Bejo plays Peppy Miller, a star on the rise. After sharing a scene in a film, their two careers go in separate directions. They’re wonderfully expressive performers, which suits Michel Hazanavicius’s film perfectly. One of last year’s biggest surprises, and they’ll be watching this one a hundred years from now.

1Contraband

Mark Wahlberg can be cool in a movie. In fact, he’s cool in most of his movies, and the right director can make the man look like a pro. But, oh boy, when Mark Wahlberg stinks, he stinks real bad. Like, The Happening bad. Wahlberg looks clueless and tired in this movie, and who can blame him? Director Baltasar Kormakur packs this silly actioner full of so many garbage subplots and locales that most actors would probably grow weary. Chris Farraday (Wahlberg) has gone legit after a career as a smuggler. Life is good due to beautiful wife Kate (Kate Beckinsale) and his alarm system business. But when his brother-in-law gets into trouble, Chris goes back into the criminal world, which inexplicably involves long boat trips and gunfights with Panamanians while his wife is terrorized back home by a drug dealer (Giovanni Ribisi). This is an overstuffed mess.

4A Dangerous Method

Keira Knightley is just brilliant as a temporarily insane woman who has an affair with her psychiatrist, and that psychiatrist just happens to be Carl Jung (masterfully played by Michael Fassbender). Viggo Mortensen does an impressive turn as Sigmund Freud in this spellbinder from director David Cronenberg. Knightley delivers one of those high-wire performances that go right to the edge of physical and emotional cohesion at all times. When her character is more “ill” in the film’s early stages, her tics and fits are so real, I was actually concerned for her. Watching Fassbender’s Jung and Mortensen’s Freud having intellectual battles over sex and the psyche is one of last year’s great acting feats. This is without a doubt the best thing Knightley has ever done.

4The Descendants

Much of the blame can go to Robinson, who directs with all the finesse of a drunken three-legged polar bear on ice skates suffering from a gaping neck wound. Nothing in this film works, and I mean nothing. All attempts at humor fall flat, with Heigl and O’Mara generating zero screen chemistry.

O’Mara is an actor who has a talent for making every line irritating. He’s just so intense. This is a guy who visits the catering table for coffee a lot during the shoot. This is a

As Ranger, the stud who shows Stephanie the ropes and saves her ass multiple times, Daniel Sunjata is the film’s one true bright spot. He’s funny, he has actual rapport with Heigl, and he needed more screen time. The film goes dark whenever he leaves the screen, and he should’ve been cast as the lead over O’Mara.

The whole thing is set in Jersey, although much of it was shot in Pittsburgh, which means one thing: Bad Jersey accents. Everybody’s got one, most of them sound bad, and Jersey should be pissed.

Heigl’s string of bad luck continues, and it’s no surprise she recently said she’d like to do a return guest spot on Grey’s Anatomy

The big screen hasn’t been kind to her in recent years.

George Clooney delivers another great performance as Matt King, a rich land tycoon living a modest life in Hawaii, trying to get along with his two daughters while his wife is in a coma. Matt finds out some stuff about the wife, and his life takes some interesting turns. Shailene Woodley is excellent here as Matt’s older daughter, as is Amara Miller as the younger one. Robert Forster is both funny and sad as Matt’s bitter father-in-law, while Matthew Lillard gets a good role as a real estate agent with a secret. Written and directed by Alexander Payne (About Schmidt, Election, Sideways), it’s characteristic of his films. There are lots of good laughs to go with the heavy stuff.

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Liam Neeson battles nature and puts up a good fight in director Joe Carnahan’s totally absorbing and devastating survival pic. The Grey tells the scary and surprisingly emotional tale of some Alaskan oil drillers who find themselves stranded in the middle of frozen tundra after their plane crashes. There’s scant chance of survival due to lack of food, lack of shelter and lack of time before temperatures drop and people freeze. There’s also the little matter of nasty, evil wolves trying to dismember them as they fight to stay warm and find food. The animals in The Grey have very little in common with White Fang. Actually, they make the werewolf from An American Werewolf in London look like an elderly pug. Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney and Joe Anderson all shine in supporting roles, but this is Neeson’s movie, containing some of his best work.

3Haywire

While Gina Carano might not be the best with line deliveries, she kicks some major ass as Mallory, a gun for hire who finds herself getting double-crossed by the boss (Ewan McGregor). When Carano is handling a dramatic scene, the film falls flat, but she and director Steven Soderbergh do some pretty amazing stuff when Mallory flies into physical action. She does all of her own stuff, and she’s a sleek badass when it comes to throwing down. Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas and a healthy Michael Douglas show up in supporting roles, each of them doing a great job. The plot itself is interesting enough, with enough twists and turns to keep you involved. And, yes, this is the umpteenth movie in a year to co-star Michael Fassbender. Does that man ever rest?

4

The Iron Lady

Meryl Streep is my pick for 2011’s Best Actress for her incredible, uncanny work as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in director Phyllida Lloyd’s engaging biopic. Streep disappears into her role. Yes, it’s in partly due to excellent makeup work, but it’s mostly due to Streep’s beautifully nuanced performance. She plays Thatcher at many ages, including her recent declining years, and she’s spot on. Her accent is natural, her physicality is perfection. Yes, the film glosses over a lot of the political aspects that made Thatcher controversial. It focuses mainly on Thatcher’s relationship with her husband (played in later years by Jim Broadbent), and her psychological and emotional difficulties in her elder years. This is all about Streep and seeing an actress showing the world how this sort of thing is done right.

3 Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

The famous detective franchise fronted by director Guy Ritchie and Robert Downey Jr. keeps things entertaining but loses a little steam. Sherlock Holmes (Downey Jr.) faces off against the evil Professor James Moriarty, who looks to drag the entire world into war and profit by it. Of course, Watson (Jude Law) is sleuthing right alongside Holmes, and the two actors still have fun screen chemistry. Noomi Rapace, the original Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, is a nice addition, and Rachel McAdams makes a brief appearance. This sequel has a tinge of “been there, done that” and doesn’t really distinguish itself from the original. Still, Downey Jr. is good for a bunch of laughs, and Ritchie does manage some exciting fight scenes.

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