Red (DVD/Blu-Ray) -- Dir. Robert Schwentke. Starring Bruce Willis, Mary-Louise Parker, John Malkovich.
I'm sick of reviewing this movie.
I haven't even been doing this very long, and this is at least the third time I've had to watch the stupid action spoof about the CIA agent who takes the unsuspecting silly girl on a grand adventure to evade the other CIA agents trying to kill them.
This time it's Bruce Willis kidnapping Mary-Louise Parker and driving her across America. Parker looks a lot like Madeleine Stowe, so it's kind of like a messed-up romantic comedy version of Twelve Monkeys.
Parker's character is frightened of the bald mental patient for about five minutes before deciding to just sit back and giggle at everything. This happens right around the time she gets a suspicious injection, so it helps to imagine she spends the entire rest of the movie high.
She falls in love with him, of course, despite the stalking and the kidnapping and all the murders. Take it from me: this hardly ever works in real life.
Red is at its worst when it's trying to be cute, and much better when it's being a conventional action film--which, thankfully, is most of the time.
The script also somehow attracted a much better cast than it deserves. Besides the two leads, it's got Helen Mirren, John Malkovich, Richard Dreyfuss, and Brian Cox, all of them playing various brands of crazy. And then there's Morgan Freeman, who plays a nonthreatening elderly black gentleman.
It wouldn't be fair to mark down Red just because it's using a mediocre premise that happens to be popular right now. It should be judged for what it is: better than Killers, worse than Knight and Day, and a complete waste of time if you've seen either.
Rated PG-13 for bad romantic advice3 out of 5
Nowhere Boy (DVD/Blu-Ray) -- Dir. Sam Taylor-Wood. Starring Aaron Johnson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Anne-Marie Duff.
Quality biopic about the early years of musician John Lennon.
Nowhere Boy finds Lennon (Aaron Johnson) as a teenager living with his aunt in 1950s-Liverpool around the time he rediscovers his relationship with his estranged mother.
Lennon's introduction to his future bandmates and eventual formation of the Beatles are covered, but they sit in the background like soothing elevator music. This film is about the influence of two female role models on Lennon's developing character: his Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas), loving but emotionally distant, and his mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), openly affectionate but implied to be bipolar. Heavy drama on the homefront led to Mimi taking Lennon from his mother (her sister) when he was five years old.
Lennon's biography has all the heroic myth qualities (along with the usual liberties taken with the truth) it needs to make a good rock star origin tale, but it also brings a certain down-to-earth authenticity. Stories like his were not entirely unusual in the 1940s and 50s, and yet it's easy to see within them the foundations for troubled genius.
Johnson is more than adequate in the lead role, but the stars of the show are Thomas and Duff as Lennon's mother figures. Both are skilled at showing glimpses of the turmoil beneath their characters' respective facades.
Nowhere Boy is the directorial debut of Sam Taylor-Wood, who proves himself by getting a handle on the complex family dynamics underlying each scene. All of his characters feel like complete people with stories of their own.
One of the better musician films.
Rated R because everyone smoked in the 50s4 out of 5
