feel the least bit recognizable: Hollywood movie producers. I can almost hear the pitch meeting: There’s this married couple with a baby, see? And then the couple dies in a tragic car accident, leaving their orphaned, 1-year-old daughter in the care of her hot, single godparents. The beauty part? They hate each other’s guts! Conveniently enough, there are no blood relatives who can take in the kid. That leaves Holly Berenson (Katherine Heigl) and Eric Messer (Josh Duhamel)—or “Mess,” as he is aptly known—to move in together and try to make the best of a stupid situation. (PG-13, 115 minutes) Contains obscenity, drug use, sensuality and poop humor. At University Mall Theatres.
—M.O. r½LOVE&OTHER DRUGS
Give Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway this much: They have the best eyes in the business. That’s the most cheering takeaway from “Love & Other Drugs,” a jagged little pill of a movie from Edward Zwick. Here, Zwick turns his attention to millennials riding the financial bubble at the turn of the 21st century. The film plays like a grotesque group portrait of pigs at the trough. And none of those pigs is feeding more blithely than Jamie Randall (Gyllenhaal), a charming rake and underachiever who becomes a pharmaceutical salesman for Pfizer; during his rounds he meets Maggie (Hathaway), a spiky bohemian whose elbows-out demeanor belies a meltingly soft center inside. As a couple with deep commitment issues, Gyllenhaal and Hathaway generate a simmering erotic heat, and when the story takes a serious turn, she especially keeps things tartly crisp and safely out of “Love Story” melodrama. (R, 113 minutes) Contains strong sexual content, nudity, pervasive profanity and drug material. Area theaters.
—A.H.
rrrMAO’S LAST DANCER About 30 minutes into this film, an older teacher, suspected of anti-Communist sympathies, slips his student a wooden box and instructs him to conceal it. It’s a videocassette, and once the contraband film plays, the students are awed by a black- and-white clip of Mikhail Baryshnikov. An unusual hybrid, the film is part ballerina chick-flick and part post-Communist drama. It’s also a true story. In the early 1980s, a landmark cultural exchange allowed Chinese dancer Li Cunxin to spend a year at the Houston Ballet. He fell in love with an 18- year-old student and secretly married her two nights before his scheduled departure. Many films have portrayed the rigors of ballet training, but none will make viewers wince quite like “Mao’s Last Dancer” as they witness Li’s history as flashbacks. (PG, 117 minutes) Contains nothing objectionable. AtAMCLoews Shirlington. —Rebecca J. Ritzel
rrr½MEGAMIND
In the eternal struggle between the forces of good and evil, good almost always triumphs —at least in Hollywood. In “Megamind,” an animated fable about a similar clash of moral titans, funny reigns victorious. At the center of this utterly delightful film is its eponymous hero—er, villain—a blue- skinned alien who was sent to Earth as a baby when his home planet exploded. Unlike his superhero nemesis, Metro Man (voice of Brad Pitt), another refugee from a dying world, Megamind (Will Ferrell) did not grow up with “the power of flight, invulnerability and great hair,” as he so bitterly puts it. Instead, Megamind has had to learn to get by on the powers that reside within his giant, bald cranium. That, and showmanship. Unfortunately, Megamind is less evil genius than evil underachiever. He’s not bad so much as bad-ish. Like other men of steel, Metro Man is a muscle-bound bore. Megamind, on the other hand, is brought to life with every ounce of Ferrell’s comic might in this sharply satiric, deftly written twist on the superhero trope. (PG, 90 minutes) Contains action sequences and mildly crude language. Area theaters. —M.O.
rrMORNING GLORY
Rachel McAdams labors mightily to be adorable in this fitfully funny romantic comedy set in the weary, bleary vineyards of morning TV. McAdams plays Becky Fuller, a hardworking producer at an obscure New Jersey show who’s unexpectedly canned as the film opens. Down but not out, Becky lands a gig executive-producing a bottom- rated network morning news show. Becky’s chief foil in “Morning Glory” is the curmudgeonly news veteran Michael Pomeroy (Harrison Ford), whom she dragoons into co-hosting the “Daybreak” program alongside aging diva Colleen Peck (Diane Keaton). Pomeroy has won countless
on a scholarly study of an unnamed Hardy novel. Beyond that, very little is said about Hardy ever again. “Tamara Drewe” reserves the bulk of its barbs for contemporary literary pretension while saving a few skewers for today’s hookup-happy sexual mores. Most of them are aimed at the heart of the titular heroine. (R, 111 minutes) Contains violence, drug use, sex, partial nudity, underage smoking and some of the most creative and prolific obscenity you’ve ever heard. AtAMCLoews Shirlington and Landmark Bethesda Row.
—M.O. rrrTANGLED STEPHEN VAUGHAN
Christina Aguilera plays a small-town girl who wants to make it big as a dancer in “Burlesque.”
awards and despises all the info-tainment that Becky’s generation represents. He barks and swats, hoping to scare the newbie away. But Becky keeps popping back with an encouraging word and ready smile. Despite an appealing premise and terrific stars, this film veers so wildly in tone that it never settles into a story worth believing. (PG-13, 102 minutes) Contains sexual content including dialogue, profanity and brief drug references. Area theaters.
—A.H. rrTHE NEXT THREE DAYS
Russell Crowe delivers a glum, recessive performance as a community college professor lured into a life on the lam in this film. It plods along dutifully, with the occasional zigzag into contrivance, tidy coincidence and outright preposterousness. When the film opens, Pittsburgh literature teacher John Brennan (Crowe) is meeting his wife, Lara (Elizabeth Banks), for dinner with John’s brother and his bombshell wife. Almost immediately, Lara and her sister-in- law begin arguing, the fight getting more heated; later, in the car, John and Lara enjoy an illicit moment of post-catfight sex. The scenes are clearly meant to bring Lara’s impulses and passions to the forefront of filmgoers’ minds when, the next day, she’s charged with having murdered a co-worker just moments before arriving at the restaurant. John goes to every legal length to prove his wife’s innocence, but when he exhausts those avenues and Lara is facing a lengthy prison term, he takes matters into his own hands. (PG-13, 122 minutes) Contains violence, drug material, profanity, sexuality and thematic elements. Area theaters.
—A.H. rr½RED
“Red” joins a long line of recent movies whose upper-middle-aged stars play AARP members who refuse to go gently into genteel cinematic dotage. But this adaptation of a graphic novel series gets into a cool, sophisticated swing. The one- liners zing right along with the bullets in a playful pas de deux of mayhem. BruceWillis plays Frank, a former black ops agent now living in quiet desperation in Cleveland and enjoying a long-distance phone flirtation with Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), the woman who mails his retirement check.When Frank is unexpectedly visited by a lethal “wet team,” he realizes his life is in danger, and he seeks to reassemble his old cohort of covert assassins: Joe (Morgan Freeman), whom Frank busts out of a nursing home in New Orleans; Marvin (John Malkovich), who’s living in flashback-induced paranoia somewhere in the Gulf Coast swamplands; and Victoria (Helen Mirren), who arranges roses and bakes tea cakes but longs to get back into the life of ordnance and kill shots. (PG-13, 111 minutes) Contains intense sequences of action violence and brief strong profanity. Area theaters.
—A.H.
rrrSECRETARIAT With this stirring movie, director Randall Wallace has achieved the next to impossible, injecting genuine suspense into a narrative we all know the ending to. Wallace’s secret is that he makes “Secretariat” about characters, not races, and he has found irresistible protagonists in both his equine and human subjects. Coming from behind with a heart as big as a house is Secretariat, known to his owners and intimates as Big Red, who at first is so slow “he couldn’t beat a fat man encased in cement being dragged backwards by a freight train,” according to his trainer
(played with quirky, crusty gusto by John Malkovich). But his owner believes in him: Penny Chenery Tweedy, a Denver homemaker who inherits her father’s Virginia horse farm and battles the sexist forces of her own family and the horse racing establishment to champion Big Red and change the face of the sport. (PG, 116 minutes) Contains brief mild profanity. Area theaters.
—A.H. NR SKYLINE
This latest venture from “The Brothers Strause” is a special effects experiment in search of a movie. A bunch of attractive 20- somethings party all night and wake up to an unearthly light. Vaporish fireballs fall all over Los Angeles, then people are sucked skyward into beast-ships where we can assume they’re the main course. The wrinkle here is, you look into the light, you’re drawn to it. Eric Balfour is Jared, prepared to stick-like-glue to his newly pregnant girlfriend, Elaine (Scottie Thompson), who joined him to visit Terry (Donald Faison). The survivors of those first abductions bicker or whether to hunker down or make a break for it. Time passes through time-lapse photography as they hide out. They watch a lot of what transpires through a spotting scope through the windows of Terry’s penthouse. That’s indicative of why “Skyline” is an epic fail of a monster movie. There’s no urgency, no close-contact immediacy to it. The group starts as a sextet, shrinks to a quartet, adds a couple of people, loses a couple more. And we don’t care about any of them. (PG-13, 94 minutes) Contains sequences of intense sci-fi action and violence, some language, and brief sexual content. Area theaters. —Orlando Sentinel
rrrrTHE SOCIAL NETWORK When a talky movie’s talk has been written by Aaron Sorkin (“TheWestWing”), and those words have been animated by the visual brio of director David Fincher, what looks on paper like a static series of dead- end conversations comes to life as a vital, engaging, even urgent parable for our age. As the dramatized story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who invented the site in 2003 as a Harvard sophomore, the film can’t be taken as the literal record of events—which involved Zuckerberg being sued by his partners and competitors. Clearly Sorkin and Fincher had higher aspirations for their film.With surgical precision, exhilarating insight and storytelling flair, Sorkin and Fincher bring viewers along on an infectiously giddy journey of discovery and invention, and also manage to infuse Zuckerberg’s story with meaning beyond his own achievements, struggles and flaws. (PG-13, 122 minutes) Contains sexual content, drug and alcohol use and profanity. Area theaters.
—A.H. rrrTAMARA DREWE
“Tamara Drewe” is one in a million. Try to think of a movie to compare it to, and you’ll probably come up blank. And that’s including any of the various filmed versions of Thomas Hardy’s “Far From the Madding Crowd,” the 1874 novel that served as the loose inspiration for the 2007 graphic novel by Posy Simmonds on which “Tamara Drewe” is based. The only connection between Hardy and this naughty—and very, very funny—confection from director Stephen Frears is the central plot dynamic of a flirtatious young woman and the three men she drives crazy. That, and the fact that “Tamara Drewe” is also set in the bucolic English countryside, in this case at a writer’s retreat where one of the residents is working
rrTODAY’S SPECIAL
There’s nothing terribly special about this heartwarming if slight foodie comedy set
“Tangled,” Disney’s animated holiday offering, provides further evidence that, with live-action movies increasingly opting for naturalistic grit, animation may be the last refuge for sheer, unapologetic beauty. “Tangled” is a princess story, in this case that of Rapunzel (voiced by Mandy Moore), who as an infant is abducted from her parents’ castle by the vindictive Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy) and raised in a tower, her hair all the time growing, growing, growing. Her super-long (and amazingly well- conditioned) tresses have magical powers that make them light up and turn back the clock for whomever they touch—namely, the youth-obsessed Gothel. Rapunzel’s home life may be a study in passive- aggressive dysfunction, but for the most part “Tangled” is zippy and engaging, especially when the wide-eyed heroine joins forces with a cocky bandit named Flynn (Zachary Levi)—and a scene-stealing palace horse named Maximus. (PG, 100 minutes) Contains brief mild violence. Area theaters.
—A.H.
mainly in the kitchen of a struggling Indian restaurant in Queens. Starring “The Daily Show” correspondent Aasif Mandvi (who wrote the film with Jonathan Bines, inspired by Mandvi’s Obie-winning 1998 one-man play, “Sakina’s Restaurant”), the film tells the story of a young, thoroughly assimilated Indian American named Samir, who quits his job as sous chef in a fancy French Manhattan restaurant, takes over the family’s dumpy Tandoori Palace on behalf of his old-fashioned, ailing father (Harish Patel), and in short order has whipped the place into such great culinary shape that the New York Times picks it as the city’s best Indian restaurant. In the process, the chronically lovelorn Samir not only finds a cute blond girlfriend (JessWeixler), but also his inner mojo, reconnecting to his culture thanks to the wise and almost magically gifted chef/cabbie Samir hires to run the Tandoori Palace’s kitchen (Bollywood legend Naseeruddin Shah). (NR, 99 minutes) Contains crude language. At Landmark Bethesda Row.
—M.O.
rrrTHE TOWN A big, ambitious action crime thriller directed by Ben Affleck, this film is a smart, bold genre exercise that’s enormous fun to watch, harking back to gritty urban thrillers of the 1970s with an assured sense of tone and style. Affleck has cast himself in “The Town’s” lead role of Doug MacRay, a native of Boston’s tough Irish Charlestown neighborhood, which as an opening title card informs us, has produced more bank and armored car robberies than any place in the United States. Doug and his best friend, Jem (Jeremy Renner), are lifelong members of one of Charlestown’s most notorious and successful crews.When the guys rob a bank
movies continued on 48
45 EZ
STRONG BLOODY VIOLENCE STARTS TODAY AT THEATRES EVERYWHERE
CHECK DIRECTORIES FOR SHOWTIMES NO PASSES ACCEPTED
the washington post friday, december 3, 2010 l
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