Trust the Man: A relationships movie with Duchovny, Julianne Moore, SJ fave Maggie Gyllenhall and Billy Crudup, among others. I stopped taking it serious three minutes into the movie when married Duchovny and Moore go to marriage counseling and the counselor is ... GARRY SHANDLING. There was one funny sound effect when Duchovny, being the Mr. Mom, is looking at the Internets porn. It's a so-so wannabe set-in-New-York Woody Allen intelligent flick. 2 stars out of 5.
A Good Year: Russell Crowe gets to play in a love story. Ahhhhhh! How cute. Now, this is the silver screen version of Boots' A Romp in the Hay. Follow me. Crowe plays a shrewd London alpha stockbroker who calls his lackies "lab rats" and in his biggest coup to date pulls off a financial Boots on the stockbrokers in the next building over, to the tune of $77 million. At the same time he gets a letter from the man (Albert Finney) who, for the most part, raised him (his parents died young) on a massive French vineyard. Finney is dead and he leaves his vineyard to Crowe.
Long story relatively short, Crowe flits to France to tend to the sale of the vineyard. Some comedy ensues, which was strange to see because two days earlier I watched Romper Stomper and that's the Russell Crowe burned into my mind; not an alpha stockbroker standing on a decrepit diving board overlooking an empty swimming pool, which proceeds to snap, sending Crowe face-first into horse manuer covering the bottom of the pool. Lo and behold, a cutie pie American girl (Kerri Russell lookalike, I think) shows up claiming to be Finney's illegitimate daughter. Crowe was believed to be the closest thing to a blood relative to Finney, but now the daughter has the first real claim on the vineyard. Yadda yadda, Crowe finds himself enamored with an uber-sexy French chick (she's really hot), who was riding her bike along a country road but was run off it when Crowe, driving a rental car that makes a LeCar look like a Cadillac, was trying to retrieve his cell phone, which he dropped while talking to his Indian (possibly lesiban) secretary. He never saw the girl on the bike. Through happenstance, the French chick spots the car at the vineyard estate, finds Crowe struggling to get out of the pool through comedic effort, failing time and again, and cunningly gets him out.
Yadda yadda, and this is sort of the Bootsian transformation, Crowe starts to soften up. He's still shrewd and plans to sell the vineyard before the illegitimate daughter can claim it, but he also starts falling for this French chick, the hottest by far woman in this town, who's a waitress and vows never to fall in love again after getting burned by the stud soccer play from Leon. That's why Boots story was good, because it transformed from neighborly butt sex (the ultimate alpha show of power) to feelings of caring and trips to Nassau; though I say he took her to see the Islanders, but that's a whole other argument.
Yadda yadda, Crowe realizes that maybe the cutthroat business world from whence he came has blinded him to the smaller, more important things in life. It's kind of cute the way he courts the uber-hot French chick, who keeps him at an arm's distance till she starts to see his devotion to her. They finally go on a date, and fork. No way to tell if there was a Bootsing in there.
Lo and behold, Crowe and the uber-hottie actually have a history from when they were 10 or 11 on Finney's vineyard. Finney, an Englishman who retreated out of society and moved to this vineyard, loved to have sex with lots of women. One day he sexes the French girl's mom, so the French girl and Crowe as a boy are hanging by the swimming pool. She takes off her shirt, dives into the pool in her panties and swims across, gets out and whispers something to Crowe, who was more interested in getting through the last chapter of this book. Not till the end of the movie does he recall what she had whispered to him all those years earlier.
Yadda yadda, Crowe performs a good deed by movie's end, and the love story ends the way most love stories do. I wish A Romp in the Hay could've continued because I wanted to see Boots' transformation to the other side ... without human resources getting involved and a settlement being reached in 30 minutes
3 stars out of 5.
But wait! There's more, which boosts the movie to a 4-star production.
Did any of you know Russell Crowe is a singer? OK, here goes "a boy seeing Christmas lights for the first time." On the bonus features of the DVD are 3 music videos by Russell Crowe and The Ordinary Fear of God (TOFOG). The first song and video is somewhere between Coldplay and Creed, or maybe even a combo of them. The second video, Crowe dons bullfighter's garb in a bullfighting stadium, and again, it's a so-so song. But the third song, Testify, became one of my favorite songs. Has a Brian Setzer vibe to it. The guy has some chops. Blew me away.
This is a clip from the AFI Awards even though the performance on the DVD was from The House of Blues.
Freedom Writers: Good good movie. Great to see a story about my hometown. One of my better JV soccer games was at Wilson, which we won. Anyway, I thought this was going to be Stand or Deliver redux, and in a way it was. But totally different, and it tugs the right strings when it needs to. Toward the end there's a meeting with school board member Karin Polacheck. I grew up with her kids, so that was funny. 5 stars out of 5.
