The Accidental Husband

May 3, 2013 Leave a comment

accidental-husbandGenre: Romance/Comedy| Year: 2008 | Duration: 90 mins | Director: Griffin Dunne | Medium: VCD (EROS Video) | Trailer: HERE | My rating: 2.5*/5*

Favorite Dialogue: Patrick: [with a mouth full of sample wedding cake] This cake is fantastic!

FDNY fireman Patrick Sullivan (Jeffery Dean Morgan) is a happy-go-lucky, soccer playing man about to marry a girl from Astoria, when his life goes topsy-turvy through an advise taken by his fiancee, Sophia, from this famed radio host and love expert, Dr. Emma Lloyd (Uma Thurman), ending with a break-up. Patrick wanted revenge and takes help from his Indian neighbor, who’s a whiz hacker, to falsely put his name as Emma’s husband in public record. Emma gets to know about this sudden change in her life when she goes for registering her marriage with her long time fiance, Richard (Colin Firth), and is asked to get Patrick’s signature on the annulment forms. These forms led Emma and Patrick to fall in love with each other, and eventually get married for real. The movie ends with Tamil music playing in the background.

Dunne’s ‘accidental & forgettable’ flick is my Movie of the Day

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Larry Crowne

April 29, 2013 1 Comment

larryGenre: Romance/Comedy| Year: 2011 | Duration: 98 mins | Director: Tom Hanks | Medium: VCD (BIG Home Video) | Trailer: HERE | My rating: 2.5*/5*

Favorite Dialogue: Mercedes: (mixing a strong frozen drink) “Mmmmm…brain freeze!”

Larry Crowne (Tom Hanks), a divorced middle-aged man and navy’s veteran cook, gets fired from his floor keeper job at a store because he lacked a college level education. Upon encouragement from his neighbor, Lamar, he enrolls at a local community college to pursue better opportunities in future, studying economics and communication. Larry befriends a bunch of young, scooter-riding young people, and strikes a special friendship with a free spirited girl Talia.  The saving grace of the movie is the subtle romance between Larry and ever-radiant Julia Roberts as Mercedes Tainot, the public-speaking professor with an alcohol addiction and a disintegrating marriage.

This tepid rom-com, which is neither full of romance nor comic is my Movie of the Day.

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THE ASSASINATION OF JESSE JAMES

April 27, 2013 2 Comments

jesseGenre: Western| Year: 2007 | Duration: 160 mins | Director: Andrew Dominik | Medium: VCD (BIG Home Video) | Trailer: HERE | My rating:4.5*/5*

Fav Dialogue: Jesse James: [last words] “Don’t that picture look dusty?”

Jesse James was an outlaw in 19th-century Missouri, USA, remembered in legend as the Robin Hood of the wild west. He was murdered in 1882 by Robert Ford, a member of his own gang, for a $10,000 reward. The story revolves around Jesse james (Brad Pitt) and Bob Ford (Casey Affleck), an insecure, unpopular man who has grown up idolizing and obsessing James. Bob joins James gang during a train robbery to prove his worthiness to Jesse.  The obsession is so intense that Bob wants to murder Jesse and take his place finally as he believes that he is better than his ideal. Towards the end of the movie Bob shoots Jesse in the back of his head while he was dusting a painting of a horse.

After the assasination the Ford brothers become celebrities, but Charley is guilt-stricken and eventually commits suicide in 1884.  Bob too suffer from the pangs of guilt and is considered a traitor in public opinion and eventually is murdered by Edward O’Kelley, who later got pardoned for avenging the death of Jesse James. The style of the movie is solemn and remote and hictorically as accurate as all available sources on Jesse James.

This superbly researched and brilliantly cinematographed psychoanalytical historical epic is my ‘Movie of the day’.

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The Astronaut’s Wife

April 25, 2013 Leave a comment

wifeGenre: Sci Fi | Year: 1999 | Duration: 109 mins | Director: Rand Ravich | Medium: DVD (Sony Home Video) | Trailer: HERE | My rating: 3.5*/5*

Fav Dialogue: Nan: “You know, men are like… like parking spaces. All the good ones are taken. All the available ones are handicapped.”

While space-walking, Commander Spencer Armacost (Johnny Depp), a NASA astronaut along with Alex Streck (Nick Cassavetes) encounters a communication glitch, and later return to earth as heroes. Upon return they turn hostile towards each other, and Alex dies bleeding at a conference and his wife commits suicide. Spencer retires from NASA and takes up an executive position in New York. His wife Jillian (Charlize Theron) becomes pregnant with a twin, and she continuously notices behavioral change in Spencer, which gets further suspicious after the account of Reese (Jow Morton) a former NASA employee. Spencer kills Reese and Jillian’s sister Nan after they get some video proof about Spencer being possessed by Extra Terrestrial being. Jillian tries to electrocute both Spencer and herself, to which the true energy alien form of her husband comes out and gets transferred into Jillian thus protecting herself from getting electrocuted. Jillian later re-marries a fighter pilot, and gives birth to the twin who seems to be aliens in human form  being concieved after the return of Spencer from Space.

This intriguingly creepy yet bland thriller lacking better direction and tightness in the plot is my ‘Movie of the Day’.

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21

April 24, 2013 Leave a comment

21Genre: Thriller| Year: 2008 | Duration: 123 mins | Director: Robert Luketic | Medium: VCD (BIG Home Video) | Trailer: HERE | My rating: 4*/5*

Fav Dialogue: Ben: “Winner, winner, chicken dinner!”

21 is inspired by the true story of MIT Blackjack Team. The story is of Ben (Jim Sturgess) who’s a senior math major at MIT and is accepted at Harvard Med School and trying to ‘dazzle’ the director in order to win the coveted Robinson scholarship. After dazzling MIT prof Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey) with his out of the box solution of Monty Hall problem and non-linear math paper, Ben is invited by Rosa to join the balckjack team consisting four other students, where he learns card counting and start making it big at the las vegas casino circuit. He and his team is monitored by security chief Cole Williams (Lawrence Fishburne) for malpractice, and eventually get apprehended and turn in Rosa in lieu of his freedom. The movie ends with Ben recounting the entire tale to a “dazzled” Harvard director.

I liked Ben’s birthday cake in the movie, which read: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13,… These are the first terms in fibonacci series. This is obtained by first writing the numbers ’0,1′, then defining each subsequent number as the sum of the previous two numbers in the series. Thus, the third number in the series is 1 = 1 + 0, the fifth number is 3 = 2 + 1, etc. The next number on the cake would be 21 = 13 + 8, for Ben’s 21st birthday, which goes cleverly with the name of the film or Blackjack!

This mathy gambling  thriller is my ‘Movie of the day’.

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