It’s difficult to create an effective, respectful, and entertaining treatment of the cancer topic. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in one of his best roles ever, plays Adam, a 27-year-old clean-living Public Radio producer who, as the movie opens, is living with a beautiful and narcissistic, crummy artist played perfectly by Bryce Dallas Howard (daughter of Ron Howard). Adam’s best friend is Kyle, casted very appropriately with Seth Rogen. I say appropriately because 50/50 is inspired by the true story of Will Reiser, who worked with Rogen on Da Ali G Show and got his cancer diagnosis at age 27. Seth’s character is loosely based on his role as Will’s best friend in real life.

Anjelica Huston is Diane, Adam’s mother, and it is truly a joy to watch her. I haven’t enjoyed her shtick this much since she played Vincent Gallo’s mom in Buffalo 66. Actually, she and Rogen are responsible for a majority of the laugh-out-loud humor that pervades the movie. This is why I’m kind of liking Seth (at least in this role) now. I’m not a fan of raunchy humor, so I didn’t like his movies like Knocked Up and Superbad. I know lots of viewers love this type of comedy and, by the way, you’ll get a little of that in 50/50, but it’s not over the top. Tasteful raunch. Anyway, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was not in Superbad but instead, he chose projects as various as Mysterious Skin, 500 Days of Summer, and Inception. I also have to mention Anna Kendrick, who plays Katherine, the psychologist. Anna was nominated for an Oscar for Up in the Air, and she’s even better in 50/50. I won’t reveal any more of the plotline here because you should have the pleasure of enjoying each element of the story as it unfolds. I’ll just say that for anyone looking for an excellent comedy that has depth, great acting and smart dialogue, this is it. – [DVD]

Comedy/Drama

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 1/24/12

Toast

Set in Britain in the 60’s, the story starts with young Nigel (Oscar Kennedy), a seemingly unobtrusive boy, who wants lots of fancy food, but his Mum (Victoria Hamilton) can’t cook anything that isn’t in a can, except of course for toast. When his mother dies of a lung disease, Nigel is left alone with his curmudgeonly father (Ken Stott). They try to struggle on, but aren’t doing very well on their own. Enter Mrs. Potter (Helena Bonham Carter), the new cleaning lady, whom Nigel suspects of having eyes for his father. Not helping matters is the fact that Mrs. Potter is a glorious cook, causing more ruffled feathers with Nigel. The third act of the film jumps ahead to when Nigel is 17, and now played by Freddie Highmore. He’s taking home economics, and learning to cook, challenging Mrs. Potter for the role of meal preparer, leading to a tense tug of war for his father’s affections.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this is a Benny Hill sketch, Toast has a lot of serious drama. Oscar Kennedy, who can go from sullen to surly in nothing flat, makes you feel the loss of his Mum in a way I wasn’t expecting. Ken Stott’s distant and disapproving father was so real, I would never want to meet the man for fear that he would be mad at me. Helena Bonham Carter is good as usual, and it’s nice to see her not playing a witch, or a monkey, or a bobble-headed queen. The only thing that really disappointed me was the under-use of Freddie Highmore. He really is only in the last third of the film, and his section makes me want this to be a 4 hour epic.

Toast is a well acted, well executed drama. Highly recommended for fans of the British section, and anyone who likes a good story. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

The setting is Paris, and the cinematography is a beautiful complement to the storyline. And speaking of the storyline…

Owen Wilson plays Gil, a successful Hollywood screenwriter who wants to be a “real” writer, and feels unsure about his talent. He is in Paris with his fiancée, Inez, (Rachel McAdams, both beautiful and comedic) and Inez’s politically conservative parents. Gil romanticizes the idea of actually living in Paris. He also romanticizes the past and shares with all of us the feeling that the present, by its very nature, is a little dissatisfying. In this story, Gil is given the opportunity to do some “time travel” and come to terms with that yearning to find a “Golden Age” that is always in the past, and that holds some magnetic appeal.

During the course of this “time travel”, we get to meet Salvador Dali (we haven’t seen you this good since The Pianist, Adrien Brody), Ernest Hemingway (madly in love with Corey Stoll in this role), F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates nails it), Pablo Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, T.S. Eliot, Luis Buñuel, and on and on. The supporting cast, A to Z, are all great.

The basic plot and characters remain unchanged: suburban teen Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) discovers a vampire (Colin Farrell) has moved in next door, and to battle his undead neighbor he enlists the aid of supposed vampire expert Peter Vincent (Dr. Who’s David Tennant).

But instead of being of a fan of traditional horror films who has to convince others of the supernatural threat, Charley is a reformed nerd with a hot girlfriend (Imogen Poots) who is convinced by his nerdy former best friend Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) as to why high school kids have gone missing. And instead of being a lowly late-night-horror-movie TV host, Vincent is a slick Las Vegas showman.

Normally I’d hate it that someone messed around with one of my favorite ’80s flicks, but that wonderfully gothic horror show is a creature of a different era, one that now, admittedly, feels a little dated. So the changes screenwriter Marti Noxon and director Craig Gillespie make to it here, including setting the action in an isolated Vegas housing tract, are both necessary and surprisingly smart.

It also includes replacing the suave ladies-man bloodsucker played by Chris Sarandon (who makes a cameo here) in the original with perfectly cast Farrell’s sexier, more aggressive model, who not only flirts with Yelchin’s not unattractive mom (Toni Collette), but finds a clever way around the whole a-vampire-must-be-invited-in thing, menaces Yelchin and Collette from underneath their minivan while they’re driving and, in the film’s best scene, coolly tries to talk his way into their house.

The 22-year-old Yelchin (Star Trek) is a good choice for Charley, bringing a certain confident nervousness to the role. Plus, he actually looks like a teenager, at least compared to William Ragsdale, who was Charley in the original. Tennant isn’t quite as memorable as Vincent as was Roddy McDowell, but his is still a cocky and colorful performance that provides a lot of the film’s humor.

And while the film certainly contains smart dialogue, amusing displays of current technology and neat little nods to the original movie, it also succeeds in making the characters’ situations and relationships more interesting and emotionally resonant than you might expect, in particular Mintz-Plasse’s hurt and anger at ex-friend Yelchin, and Yelchin’s stressing over having a hot girlfriend.

I concede I could have done without the occasional CGI jaws, which look even more fake to me than a bad makeup job, or the idea that Tennant and Farrell have met before. Gillespie’s direction lacks style, too, though he does know how to generate suspense, and stages a pretty decent finale in which Yelchin and Farrell flip and fly around as they fight. They both end up getting burned. One just a little more than the other. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Comedy/Horror

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 12/13/11

Here the guys (Cooper, Galifianakis, Ed Helms) endure in Thailand, where Helms is getting married, what they endured two years earlier in Las Vegas: waking up worse-for-wear, having little to no memory of the previous night, and embarking on a search for a missing member of the wedding party, in this case the teen brother (Mason Lee, son of director Ang Lee) of Helms’ hot how-did-he-snag-her fiancée (Jamie Chung).

As the spoiled man-boy brother-in-law/Teen-People-reader of returning (and little used) straight man Justin Bartha, Galifianakis again proves to be a reliable source of funny, primarily in the pre-Thailand scene where we get to see inside his bedroom, during which he immunizes himself and complains to his mother that she forgot to give him dessert. Later, he refers to a monk as “Grand Wizard” and makes the world’s most inappropriate wedding rehearsal dinner speech.

The real comedic meat of the film, of course, is the guys’ trip through Bangkok to find Lee, a quest in which they, among other hilariously outlandish things, encounter the drug-dealing Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong, having a lot of fun), briefly adopt a jean-jacket-wearing, chain-smoking capuchin monkey, get attacked by a monk and end up in a car chase. Not to mention meeting a mean American businessman (Paul Giamatti in a brief what’s-he-doing-here role).

And that’s just the tip of this incredibly raunchy iceberg, mainly thanks to director and co-writer Todd Phillips, who seems energized by the Thailand setting. He not only ups the danger level for the boys, having them accidentally shoot guns, get shot and even lose a finger, he goes for some pretty big gross-outs, including full-frontal nudity and splattering pig guts.

Best of all, though, is how Phillips not only turns Bangkok itself into a character, with the guys walking through its people-choked streets and having characters intone that the city “has” Lee, but makes the movie seem all the more epic by showing us panoramic shots of it, be it via helicopter views of the tops of tall buildings, or by having the boys use a speedboat to get to Helms’ wedding on time.

Phillips can’t quite maintain the furious comic pace all the way to the end, however, which is when Mike Tyson pops up and Helms makes a clunker of a speech to his future father-in-law, who previously compared him to a bland rice porridge. And the film might have been more interesting had Bartha been part of the quest this time around. As it is, he feels shoehorned into the story.

None of this is to dismiss Cooper, who gets the film’s best line (“I refuse to eat cantaloupe at a bachelor party!”), or Helms, who freaks out like nobody’s business, and in the film’s best scene hilariously recaps the guys’ escapades to the tune of Billy Joel’s “Allentown.” Of course, there are those who will think the best scene is the one involving the monkey, an elderly monk and a beer bottle. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Tom Hanks

He genuinely seems to like it.

Maybe it’s because he was born there. Maybe it’s because the town of Los Angeles has treated him relatively well (two Oscars in a row can’t hurt). Maybe he is just an innately upbeat guy–whatever the reason, the projects that he has creative control over seem to regard showbusiness and the environs of Hollywood with a refreshingly optimistic eye. This was fairly apparent with his fun directorial debut, That Thing You Do!, which, while not ignorant of the pitfalls of fame and fortune, ultimately ends on a hopeful if humble note.

Larry Crowne is only Hanks’ second film as a director, co-written by himself and Nia “Greek Wedding” Vardalos. It’s certainly among the more likable and cheery of the recent crop of Recession Fairytales (see also: The Company Men, Up In The Air, etc.). Whatever its flaws as a film (and they are often far from subtle), it is a buoyant enough slice of 21st Century Americana, and easy to watch.

The eponymous Mr. Crowne is an affably divorced middle manager at a Walmart lookalike, who, improbably, is laid off because he deserves a promotion but can’t get it without a college degree. He decides to attend the local community college to remedy this, and there meets Mrs. Tainot (Julia Roberts), a cynical public speaking teacher and inevitable love interest. He also meets Talia (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), an aggressively–but surprisingly appealingly–perky fellow student who recruits him into her Vespa gang and helps him stylize and simplify his life.

The chemistry between Hanks and Roberts is not exactly electric, but both actors remain charismatic enough to carry things forward well enough. Scenes are often stolen by Mbatha-Raw and by George Takei, who has a lot of fun as an imperious and punctilious economics professor. There are strange, unnecessary scenes, neutered jokes (witness the PG-rated pornography secreted by Roberts’ husband, a role wasted on Bryan Cranston), and exaggerated caricatures. But I couldn’t help really liking Larry Crowne. It kind of reads as a fun recipe for enjoying a lower-income life and actually feeling better off for it. There are worse things for us to hear these days, methinks. - [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Comedy/Drama/Romance

Rated PG-13

DVD Release Date: 11/15/11

You know, the inscription on the gates of you-know-where.

“Suspend all disbelief all ye who enter here.”

You know, the invisible credo above the door to any movie theatre which, depending on the film, can seem like you-know-where, at least for the length of a matinee on a Wednesday afternoon.

The script for Flypaper must be carved on some lintel over a doorway in you-know-where.

From the peerless scribes of The Hangover (1 & 2) our cups are overfilled with this amalgam of TV’s Monk meets The Usual Suspects with crayon scrawled shadings of Agatha Christie. They’ve signed up Patrick Dempsey and Ashley Judd in this bank caper/mystery/screwball romantic comedy and then let the lack of chemistry, er… hilarity ensue.

A bank is locked down and through the night two sets of robbers banter and bluster with hostages, compare their respective ratings on the FBI’s most wanted list, and ineptly try to go about their felonious business as one by one people start getting killed. Dempsey, as a twitchy and under-medicated OCD savant, realizes this whole endeavor is a macguffin foibed off on everyone involved by some criminal mastermind. Nobody is who they seem to be. Which means they’re not actors not, not chewing scenery. Is that the right amount of double negatives? Gosh but it’s suspenseful, funny and sweet all at the same time.

No it isn’t.

Cue the “abandon all hope…” thing in really, really doom laden tones. Throw in some brimstone. – [DVD]

Jason Bateman

The twist here is that instead of a kid and adult switching bodies, it happens to two adults. Those would be the pals played by Bateman, a stressed-out corporate lawyer with a wife (Leslie Mann) and kids, and Reynolds, a single, potty-mouthed man-boy/aspiring actor with a very active love life. They each get their wish to live the other’s life the morning after peeing into a mysterious fountain.

I tend to dislike these kinds of crude comedies, but this one is admittedly funniest whenever one of the stars is swearing his head off. For Reynolds, this would be before the switch occurs, as he resurrects his smooth ’n’ smarmy Van Wilder act to hilarious effect, swearing in front of Bateman’s twin babies and describing to Bateman’s adorable daughter how he likes strippers. He’s not quite as fun after the switch, when he has to take on Bateman’s straight man personality.

Bateman is actually perfectly solid as the straight man, but at this point he could do it in his sleep, and so it’s refreshing to see him loosen up. Not just by swearing ad nauseam, but by adopting Reynolds’ vulgar attitude and manners, like telling Bateman’s daughter to solve a bully problem with violence, or excusing himself from the dinner table and taking a whole chicken along with him. The last time he was this entertaining was when he played a sports commentator in Dodgeball.

I’d be lying if I said the film’s crass nature didn’t get to me a little. Thankfully, for every scene in which Mann has diarrhea, Reynolds participates in a “light” porn film or Bateman gets baby poop right in the face, we get a genuinely funny one, like Bateman-as-Reynolds trying to wrangle the babies in the kitchen, or Reynolds-as-Bateman tutoring Bateman-as-Reynolds in the ways of marriage. There’s also an amusing variation on the whole ask-me-something-only-he-would-know bit.

As with other body-swap flicks, though, the characters inevitably learn their lessons, and I wanted to gag. The sentimental change-of-attitude stuff works well enough in the PG or PG-13 versions of this formula, since they’re basically big-screen sitcoms and are softer to begin with, but the shift here to roll-your-eyes sappy is not only a little jarring, it robs the film of its foul-mouthed manner, which, despite my criticisms about it, is really the only thing that makes the movie worth a look. - [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Comedy

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 11/8/11

As the story opens, Oliver is packing up Hal’s house and adopting Hal’s dog, Arthur. Cosmo stars as Arthur, and this film is so good that even the dog is outstanding. So anyway, a short time into the film, Oliver attends a Halloween party, and he meets Anna, a French actress. Mélanie Laurent is so very good in this role. She looks like a young Catherine Deneuve. Actually, her face changes with every camera angle. Oliver and Anna hit it off, and the remainder of the movie is the telling of their story and the telling of Hal’s story in flashback.

I have to mention the supporting cast. Not a single dud in the group. Goran Visnjik embues Hal’s much younger boyfriend, Andy, with playful energy. Oliver’s mom is played by Mary Page Keller, and she fleshes out the back story beautifully. Kai Lennox is Oliver’s graffiti artist/poser friend Elliot, who provides some of the many quirky moments of the movie. If this were my Oscar acceptance speech for the film, I’d probably say that I know I’m leaving many people out, but you get the idea: Beginners is not to be missed by anyone who loves indie films, appreciates performances where you couldn’t ask for more, or wants to view the blending of dark humor with serious themes and a lot of heart. – [DVD]

Comedy/Drama/Romance

Rated R

Yearning, aching, thirsting, wanting, needing a new romantic comedy.

Well, rejoice my brothers and sisters, here it is. Crazy Stupid Love stars Steve Carell as Cal Weaver, a middle aged married man who has just had divorce thrust on him by his wife, Emily (Julianne Moore). He’s not very happy about it. He starts patronizing a trendy bar telling anyone who will listen, and some who try not to, about his woes.

This is how he meets Jacob Palmer (Ryan Gosling), gadabout and general dreamboat. Jacob takes Cal under his wing, teaching him the ways of the Lothario. And as Cal gets better at picking up women, the twisted web of love becomes more complicated. Because as much as he’s trying to move on, Cal still loves his wife, who probably still loves him, but there’s this Kevin Bacon guy at the office… Did I mention that Cal’s son loves the babysitter who really loves Cal? Also, Gosling might love Emma Stone who is a lawyer he tried to pick up, but failed.

It’s like the intro to an episode of “Soap”, but in a good way.

The chemistry between Carell and Gosling really works. The evolution of their relationship might be the most heartwarming in the film. Moore, Stone, and a brief appearance from Marisa Tomei are all really solid.

Surprisingly, the emotional heart of the film is Cal’s son, and I wish I were making this up: Jonah Bobo. Always the true believer that love will conquer all, he keeps the other characters on track.

Crazy Stupid Love is a well acted, well written piece of slightly fluffy cinema. There’s no war, no death, just people and their problems, some of which I think most people can relate to. Most of all, it is a genuine pleasure to watch, and how often can you say that anymore? - [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Comedy/Drama/Romance

Rated PG-13

DVD Release Date: 11/1/11