Just Go With It: the best (and only) way to enjoy Adam Sandler's latest flick

By Claire Ward - Friday, February 11, 2011 at 4:38 PM - 5 Comments

Shot and edited by Tom Henheffer
Produced by Claire Ward

Go to Brian’s blog: Brian D. Johnson Unscreened

Opening Weekend: Bardem, Bieber, Sandler and Channing

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, February 11, 2011 at 10:37 AM - 2 Comments

Javier Bardem in 'Biutiful'

Boys will be boys. And what a crazy bunch are on offer this weekend. Adam Sandler, Hollywood’s perennial middle-aged child, takes his singular mix of narcissism and self-loathing to new heights in Just Go With It, a formula romcom composed of funny gags, toxic stereotypes and an unearned romance, with Sandler cast as a skirt-chasing plastic surgeon who persuades his assistant (Jennifer Aniston) and her two kids to masquerade as his fake family. Justin Bieber: Never Say Never documents the amazing phenomenon of Canadian teen heartthrob Justin Bieber, a savvy innocent who—at 16—seems positively mature in matters of the heart compared to Sandler. And a gormless Tatum Channing stars as a Roman soldier in The Eagle, a richly crafted Roman epic with a dumb-ass script that glorifies Rome’s imperialists as the good guys and portrays the aboriginal Britons as dirty savages.

But if you live in Toronto or Ottawa, the hot ticket is Biutiful, which begins its Canadian roll-out in those two cities this weekend. If you’re looking for subtlety, you won’t find it the films of Mexican filmmaker director Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams, Babel). And his latest is no exception. But you won’t find a more powerful performance by an actor this year than the one given by Javier Bardem, who won Best Actor in Cannes and an Oscar nomination for his bravura turn in Biutiful. On the page, the narrative might seem over-ripe, but the cinematography, editing and acting are so breathtaking, this visceral melodrama comes across as pure verité. Bardem stars as a former drug dealer in Barcelona who brokers black-market jobs for illegal Asian immigrants while struggling to contain his bi-polar prostitute girlfriend and come to terms with his own terminal illness. He’s also a clairvoyant who talks to dead people. As usual, Iñárritu overloads the plot and the pathos, which may aggravate the sensibilities of more refined cinephiles, but Bardem’s emotional depth and the raw frisson of the filmmaking make Biutiful a must-see. And for Quebec’s Denis Villeneuve, director of the Oscar-nominated Incendies, this heavyweight contender is the one to beat in the Best Foreign Language Film category. For a more detailed look at Javier Bardem, go to my recent piece in the magazine: The Incredible Hunk.  Now for the wide-release fare . . .

Just go With It

Ever since Judd Apatow cast Adam Sandler as a selfish, mean-spirited comedy star in Funny People—a nervy performance that came across as a devastating self-portrait—it seems there’s no going back. (Like seeing Jerry Lewis more-or-less playing himself in The King of Comedy.) I now find it impossible to buy Sandler as a lovable jerk. In Just Go With It, he’s just a jerk.

Sandler stars as Danny, an obscenely successful plastic surgeon who is single, but discovers that wearing a wedding ring helps him bed young women for meaningless flings. When Danny actually falls for one of his conquests, a 23-year-old babe named Palmer—played by Sports Illustrated swimsuit-issue cover girl Brooklyn Decker—he has to spin an elaborate web of lies about the fake wife he’s on the verge of divorcing. Danny then persuades his long-suffering assistant, Katherine (Jennifer Aniston) to pretend to be his wife. Pretty soon Danny is cutting pricey deals with Katherine’s two kids to pretend to be his children, and the whole gang ends up taking a vacation in Hawaii with his fake ex-wife’s fake new boyfriend (Nicholas Swardson). There, Katherine meets up with her high school nemesis, played by a slumming Nicole Kidman, which requires yet another charade. And what is Nicole Kidman doing in an Adam Sandler movie? We’re just getting over seeing Natalie Portman play Ashton Kutcher’s playmate in No Strings Attached (another romcom with a cliché for title).

Directed by Sandler’s longtime cohort, Dennis Dugan, Just Go With It is actually a loose remake/desecration of Cactus Flower, which won an Oscar for Goldie Hawn. The shenanigans produce a few laughs. But this cynical farce is a rummage sale of gross stereotypes, from gay sailors to a negligent Hispanic nanny. It’s also a transparent vanity project for Aniston, who struts her gym-toned bod in a bikini competition with this SI Swimsuit model who’s half her age. The whole post-Brad campaign to prove Aniston’s hotness is getting very tired.

As for the story, it holds no surprises. It doesn’t deviate from the inevitable outcome that Danny will eventually dump the pretty young thing for the MILF helpmate sitting under his nose. And as Sandler’s soul undergoes the requisite cosmetic redemption—transforming him from heartless cad to devoted suitor and loving stepdad—we don’t buy it for a second.

Adam Sandler should just give up making romantic comedies, even though they make scads of money. He should start making an honest living—playing villains in Bond movies. He could stroke a white Persian cat, do squeaky voices and give full reign to his evil inner child. Continue…

Opening Weekend: ‘The Switch,’ and ‘Lebanon’

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, August 20, 2010 at 3:03 PM - 0 Comments

Jason Bateman and Jennifer Aniston in 'The Switch'

Re-entry! After weeks of gazing at the cinemascope expanse of a empty lake, my endless summer is over. Now it’s back to the crowded screen and the biz of forming opinions. The juggernaut of the 35th annual Toronto International Film Festival (Sept 9-19) looms, with advance screenings already in gear and the newspapers going ape with banner front page headlines announcing visiting celebs (“Clint takes aim at TIFF!” – Toronto Star). Meanwhile the last of the summer movies stagger into the multiplex. This weekend offers one of the best movies of the year, Lebanon, and one of the most dismal, The Switch—representing that classic divide between cutting-edge world cinema and bland Hollywood formula. Both films induced a kind of claustrophobia in me, for different reasons. Lebanon, which won the top award at last year’s Venice festival (the Golden Lion), a harrowing drama about a four-man Israeli tank crew trapped behind the lines of the 1982 war in Lebanon. It’s like Das Boot, but we’re stuck in a tank instead of submarine. Almost the entire movie is shot from the POV of the tank’s interior, and through the roving cinematic eye of its periscope. The Switch is packaged as a romantic comedy, but it’s neither romantic nor comic. It’s one of those movies that’s trying to be cheerful but is secretly dour and misanthropic. It’s like being stuck on a bad date with Jennifer Aniston, who looks like she’d rather be somewhere else.

But I was distracted, because I wanted to be somewhere else. Allow me to digress. People often ask me how, as a critic, I watch movies in advance. I explain that I see some at private press screenings, some on DVD (usually just small indie films and docs)—and I tend to see Hollywood movies at invitational promo screenings staged by studios, which want us to see comedies and action movies with a mass of civilians in the hope that their manic enthusiasm will rub off.  But promo audiences are often even more ill-mannered than the regular multiplex crowd. Perhaps because the tickets are  free. I arrived almost an hour early for The Switch to get a good aisle seat, went out for a snack, and came back to find a family picnicking next to me: an obese woman with a bouncy daughter who looked to be about five years old, and a baby. A baby! Now, The Switch is a movie about a single woman (Aniston) who lines up a sperm donor and has a baby, but I don’t think it was designed for a baby. As it turned out, the baby behaved fairly well, and wailed just a couple of times during the movie. But the little girl was bored, confused and restless. And as phrases like “killer sperm” and “cervical mucus” spilled from the over-amped dialogue, I couldn’t help wondering what she thought. So essentially, part of me was watching the film from the POV of a five-year-old girl. Great. Continue…

Enough with the Friends nostalgia

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, May 14, 2010 at 5:24 PM - 7 Comments

I don’t have a lot to say about most of the pickups (Chuck gets another season to infuriate ‘shippers and action fans alike; better news is Human Target, already a better show, getting a second season), but like Sean O’Neal I do notice one pattern here: a lot of the shows being picked up by the networks appear to be rooted in Friends nostalgia. All the comedies are about good-looking young people hanging out and talking about their relationships, and the ones that aren’t have Matthew Perry or Courteney Cox in them.

I guess you could argue that some of it has to do with imitating How I Met Your Mother. And in fact, HIMYM is having a huge amount of stylistic influence (probably not all to the good), with many shows trying to copy its time jumps and its blend of single and multi-camera techniques. But How I Met Your Mother isn’t the most popular comedy on TV by a long shot. The most popular comedy on TV is about two cynical, broken men in their 40s, and nobody wants to imitate that except the guy who created it. What How I Met Your Mother is is the closest thing TV has these days to Friends, and everybody wants to imitate it because everybody wants to make Friends again.

You can also see this on the NBC Thursday night comedies, which are deeply — maybe even absurdly — obsessed with the memory of Friends. Leslie Knope on Parks & Recreation is a big fan. Abed on Community made a whole speech implying that the ideal thing would be for their show to be as beloved as Friends and complaining that the two leads are “no Ross and Rachel.” 30 Rock has too many to count, but at least it has the excuse that it’s set at NBC and therefore refers to every show NBC ever made. Throw in Michael Scott’s occasional Friends references, like the time he got it confused with Seinfeld, and NBC’s Thursday night lineup is entirely composed of shows that won’t stop talking about NBC’s much bigger Thursday night hits of the past.

It’s disturbing that there is so much Friends-mania, still, because Friends clones nearly destroyed the entire sitcom genre in the late ’90s, with endless terrible shows about young, pretty, not-particularly-funny people sitting on a couch and whining about their stupid problems. You would have thought the networks might have learned how very, very hard it is to do this kind of show. It’s hard because young and beautiful people aren’t usually funny, and because the problems they have are not usually interesting. (Worse, the problems they have on these shows tend to be incredibly trivial, small-stakes problems. I’ve said before that one reason Two and a Half Men manages to beat the competition is that its characters have such screwed-up lives that everything they do winds up being tied to some real, high-stakes issue that they prefer to avoid dealing with. Not to mention Everybody Loves Raymond, where every trivial problem turned out to be about some genuinely important, deeper problem that the audience could care about.) Even Seinfeld is easier to repeat — Curb Your Enthusiasm did it, after all — because it calls for a cast of experienced comedians and farcical, surreal plots.

I think network executives have become obsessed with Friends for a number of interlocking reasons. It (along with Raymond) was one of the last representatives of the mass-audience comedy, and the executives feel that if they can do something like that again, the mass audience will return. Execs genuinely prefer casting young and pretty people. A new generation of execs has come along and this new generation actually watched NBC Thursday nights in the ’90s. Trying to re-create Friends is their version of Ben Silverman trying to bring back his ’80s youth.

This is not a dis to Friends, by the way. It was a fine show. But Friends was practically a one-off, managing to sign up people who were pretty and funny and making genuinely funny scenes out of genuinely trivial — but relatable — things. Everyone since then has tried to do a scene like this, and everyone has failed.

Entertainment Edition:

By Philippe Gohier - Thursday, April 1, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

WINNERS

Batman
Batman and Superman recently went toe to toe and settled the age-old debate over superhero supremacy. The battle, though, was recorded only in the chequebooks of wealthy collectors. Late last month, a copy of Action Comics No. 1, the first to feature Superman, was sold for a record US$1 million in a private sale in New York City. Three days later, the first comic featuring Batman hit the auction block in Dallas, and sold for US$1,075,500.

Jennifer Aniston
Lawmakers agree Aniston played a major role in getting California’s new paparazzi law approved. The law calls for fines of up to US$50,000 against media outlets that buy and publish “unlawfully obtained” photos. Aniston told legislators she’d had as many as 30 photographers charge her on the sidewalk and been followed through L.A. streets at night in SUVs. Politicians agreed: there’s something truly deranged about having that much of an interest in Jennifer Aniston.

Christopher Plummer
After 55 years in show business, Canadian actor Christopher Plummer finally had a reason to show up at the Oscars this year when he was nominated for his role in The Last Station. Plummer didn’t win—the award went to Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds—but one suspects he won’t mind having to find something else to do next Oscar night if he’s not nominated again. “It’s a flesh-peddling business,” he said, prior to the show. “And I don’t always like the feeling on the red carpet.”

Continue…

A real underdog Baseball story, Elizabeth May searches for a riding, and Brad Pitt: joint artist

By Lianne George - Friday, August 21, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 1 Comment

League of their own
The Hastings All-Stars swept five games and outscored their opponents 82-15 to win the Canadian Little League Championships in Val-d’Or, Que., on Saturday. The score, however, belies the backstory of this gritty team from blue-collar East Vancouver. The 11 boys and a girl (Katie Reyes, who homered in the final game) share one overbooked ball diamond with 22 teams. Money is so tight, some players’ fees were covered by KidSport, which helps low-income athletes. Now they’re off to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa. Their first game will be broadcast on ESPN on Aug. 22.

Elizabeth May-be
Green party Leader Elizabeth May is testing the waters, and patience, of party members as she searches the country for a winnable riding. She previously ran unsuccessfully in 2006 in the London North Centre by-election. Then, it was a suicide mission against Tory Peter MacKay in Central Nova. And now, determined to get into the Commons, she has chosen the riding of Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound. At least that’s what she implied last week, when she told local media it was “definitely tempting” to run there. The more likely spot is the left-coast riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands. Local media report she is house hunting in Sidney, B.C. “My heart is here,” she said of the seaside community, “but I just want to make sure.” Continue…

Newsmakers: Breakups

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Jennifer Anniston & John Mayer
Exactly what caused the sporadic soulmates’ final fade from tabloid covers was the subject of much frenzied speculation. Was it her wanting a baby? His womanizing ways? Her eternal pining for Brad Pitt? The final consensus: the former Friends star became fed up with the schmaltzy singer’s compulsive Twittering.

Prince Harry & Chelsy Davy
Commoners learned of the breakup of the blond Zimbabwe-born law student and the ginger-haired British royal stud after five years of yacht-frolicking via that great equalizer, Facebook: Davy changed her relationship status to “not in one”—accompanied by a symbol of a broken red heart. Continue…

These fiscally prudent celebs are killing us!

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, April 23, 2009 at 9:40 AM - 4 Comments

We knew this recession thing was bad, but we didn’t know how bad until news came in from the forests of Bavaria that Nicolas Cage had been forced for financial reasons to sell his 28-room German castle, Neidstein. Et tu, economy?

While it’s true that Cage still owns several other homes and could, in a pinch, build a spacious bungalow from remaindered DVDs of Bangkok Dangerous, the fact remains that this big-time celebrity is now in possession of only one (1) ornate castle—Midford, an 18th-century fortress in England.

This is tragic news and I’m sure you’re tempted to feel sorry for Cage. We all know what it feels like to be down to our last castle.

Continue…

Newsmakers: The White Album

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 9:10 AM - 0 Comments

The blizzard began with Michelle Obama’s creamy Jason Wu confection that completed a top-of-the-wedding-cake tableau with the tuxedoed new President, and continued, days later, with Anne Hathaway’s Grecian glam at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. At Washington balls and on Hollywood red carpets, white is hotter than red, fresher than black. And for good reason: the luxuriously impractical hue assures the showstopping entrance enjoyed by brides on their big day. Plus, no shade better shows off every hour logged with the trainer—especially when it’s shiny as the beheaded Valentino that Jennifer Aniston wore to the Oscars, which, at five kilos, itself provided a workout. White demands and rewards impeccable craftmanship, as illustrated by Marisa Tomei’s amazing homage to New York’s Chrystler Building, and it’s the brand new antidote to doom and gloom. Like Penélope Cruz brandishing her Oscar, it shouts: “This is my big day”—even when everyone else is wearing it.

Click here for the gallery of dresses.

Newsmakers: The White Album gallery

By macleans.ca - Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

Maclean’s Interview: Russell Peters

By Kenneth Whyte - Monday, March 2, 2009 at 9:30 PM - 0 Comments

Q: We’re going to talk about Oscar and the movies, so let’s start with Slumdog Millionaire. Did you see it? Did you like it?

A: I sure did. All of the above. I liked the fact that that movie could have been set anywhere and still been a fantastic film.

Q: Do you think the movie will do anything for perceptions of the subcontinent and for Indian people?

A: I mean, after such a huge sweep like that I think it will only give it some good attention that we’ve been lacking for many, many years. So I think it’s a good thing. It’s probably a double-edged sword, though. Now every product that comes out with any kind of Indian twang to it will always be compared to that.

Continue…

Poor needy pathetic desperate Jen

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, November 20, 2008 at 7:59 AM - 75 Comments

Vogue editor Anna Wintour knows how to sell magazines, which explains the “What Angelina Did Was Very Uncool” line on the cover of the December issue next to Jennifer Aniston’s face. The quote was lifted from an interview in which the former Friends star was asked about Angelina Jolie’s gushing to the magazine in 2007 about falling in love with Brad Pitt while he was still hitched to her. Playing Aniston’s first public comment about Jolie so boldly was a master stroke destined to generate epic buzz.

For Aniston, though, the incident ushered in yet another of the “Poor Jen! Duped again!” moments that have dogged her since her 2005 divorce from Pitt. Not only did Vogue exploit Aniston’s tepid smackdown, making her appear obsessed with the siren who stole her husband, it squared the two women off against one another more subtly. Astute fashionistas were quick to note that the cover image of Aniston posed on a beach in a cleavage-displaying, off-the-shoulder, red Narciso Rodriguez gown echoed the cover shot of Jolie in January 2007 in which she rocked a cleavage-displaying, off-the-shoulder, red Bill Blass against a sandy backdrop. Jolie’s cover line, however, was a more triumphant “Why Her Real Life is More Romantic Than Any Movie.” The disparity continued inside: in 2007, Jolie was shown with Pitt and their numerous children; in the current issue, Aniston is pictured with her dog Norman.

Aniston’s Vogue appearance is part of a publicity blitz for her two new movies, Marley & Me, which opens on Dec. 25, and He’s Just Not That Into You, which arrives in February. Neither role, it’s safe to say, will eclipse the one she currently plays in the cultural imagination—that of the archetypal Wronged Wife subject to an endless loop of “Jen Is Devastated!” “Jen Is Furious!” “Jen Gets Revenge!” bogus theorizing. Since her divorce, America’s Sweetheart has morphed into America’s Spinster. The unmarried, childless Aniston has become the tabloids’ Miss Havisham, portrayed as lonely, needy and locked in the past. The website Dlisted.com recently advertised a US$19.95 “Boyfriend Arm Pillow” thus: “Now, every time the Jennifer Aniston in your life calls you, wanting to whine for hours about how they are so f–king lonely and their cats are even giving them the side-eye, you can simply say, ‘Aniston in my life, go canoodle with the Boyfriend Arm Pillow I got you for Christmas.’ ” Celebrity gossip site PerezHilton.com refers to her cruelly as “Maniston.”

Her alleged tribulations sell big time. “We can’t get enough of her,” says Dina Sansing, entertainment director at US Weekly, where every issue features at least one Aniston photo or story. She’s No. 2 on the “Most Valuable Celebrity Faces” of 2008 list in terms of newsstand sales, according to Forbes. (In a rare case of tabloids imitating life, “Poor Jen!” was knocked off her No. 1 perch this year by Jolie.) Women relate to her, says Sansing, a bond that dates back to 1994 when Aniston entered homes as flaky, likeable Rachel Green. Female fans flocked to copy Aniston’s haircut, known as “The Rachel.” And now they rally to share her pain—as well as a schadenfreude thrill.

Aniston’s position atop the tabloid pantheon was cemented with her union with Pitt, whom she met Hollywood cute in 1998 through their mutual agent. The merger of America’s Sweetheart and the World’s Sexiest Man in 2000 was a lavish event that featured a 40-person gospel choir and fireworks over the Pacific. They were the king and queen of the Hollywood prom, with matching tans and blond streaks. When they split Aniston was poised for post-Friends career breakout; initially she was the one blamed for being unwilling to “have Brad’s babies,” to employ tabloid lexicon. When Jolie’s involvement became known, Aniston became the object of sympathy, and pity. After all, what chance did the Girl Next Door have against the Girl From the Next Galaxy? The New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane summed up perception of Jolie’s snaring of Pitt: “She took one look at the world’s most widely desired man and scooped him up with no more ado than a Parisian grande dame tucking a chihuahua into her clutch bag.”

The scandal was likened to Eddie Fisher leaving Debbie Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor in the ’60s. But back then there wasn’t a celebrity media complex ready to pounce on Reynolds’ every humiliation, real or imagined. For the wounded Aniston, the salt poured down, beginning with an arty 60-page photo spread in the June 2005 W titled “Domestic Bliss,” in which Pitt and Jolie presided over a band of little blond Brads.

Aniston shot back with a tearful Vanity Fair interview in which she admitted to being hurt and lonely and denied rumours that she didn’t want children: “That really pissed me off. I’ve never in my life said I didn’t want to have children. I did and I do and I will!”