Change Your Image
mathieu_mcdonald-1
Reviews
Nights in Rodanthe (2008)
Who Cares
Let me get this straight:
"Hotshot plastic surgeon loses a patient on the operating table while removing a cyst from her face and ends up falling in love with recently separated bed and breakfast hostess within about 24 hours of meeting her due to her solid advice on bedside manner."
Wow. Move over "The Notebook", there's a new kid in town.
Where to begin. Well, how about the depth of this "relationship"? I think we can safely sum up the foundation of this undying love in the following steps:
1. Exchange polite pleasantries over a bite of salad. 2. Drink copious amounts of Jack Daniels; play basketball with old food 3. Provide glib, unsolicited advice to each other on your crappy lives. 4. Make love during a hurricane. 5. Devote your lives to each other via airmail.
I noticed George C Wolfe has "The Hairball" and "United Kanye West Project" in his dossier. Would "stick to your genre" be too harsh? Enough said. I think most would agree that the best love stories make us cry, or laugh or even hope. But the reason they are able to do that is that, somewhere during the storyline, we really start to care about the characters we're watching on screen. To make us care, there must be time spent developing these characters...their lives, their history, why we're watching them now. Wolfe didn't seem to want to "waste our time" with such trivialities, and instead provided us with all of about 8 minutes of background information on each character before hurling us into an intense one-on-one interaction between two ACTORS we've all come to adore, but two CHARACTERS we could care less about.
For one brief tender moment when Richard Gere exclaims that he doesn't expect her to listen to his problems, and she invites him for dinner, the viewer sees a glimmer - a beginning - of something special between these two characters. But instead of being allowed to enjoy the anticipation and playfulness of "what happens next" in the wonderful, unpredictable joy that is courtship, we are instead pushed headlong into a love affair between two people we hardly know.
Let's face it. We have all heard cheesy one liners in Romantic films. But the reason we cut some slack to Bogart in "Casablanca" or Nicholson in "Something's Gotta Give" is because our hearts and minds have been lifted to the heavens and dragged through the mud and back again with these characters, and by the time they deliver the line, we're so deeply involved with their plight, we don't even notice the cheese factor. Since Wolfe doesn't allow us to love or even like our protagonists, all we're left with a fromage sandwich and a few snickers in the audience.
Wolfe takes the old Hollywood director's phrase "cut to the chase" much too literally here. As each stilted one liner is delivered by our cast, the viewer is left wondering if director Wolfe is subliminally saying to the audience: "c'mon. it's a Richard Gere romance. just buy in."
It is as a result of this stunning lack of character - or relationship - development that the film's climax fails miserably to tug at our hearts. When Gere's character dies, I felt like I was watching the news about someone I didn't know passing away. Or watching a ladies' eights rowing race during the beijing olympics. Just. Didn't. Care.
Epic. Fail.
We Own the Night (2007)
Tries too hard, mostly fails...
I think we can all agree that, when we sign up to see a bad ass gangster/cop movie, we want - ahem - REALLY bad and ...some ass. This is the appeal of everything from classics like Godfather and Goodfellas to Sopranos and even today's impressive American Gangster. So when the opening scene of "We Own The Night" provides us with a drug fueled, sexed up interlude between a seedy, unkempt Joachin Phoenix and the droolingly provocative Eva Mendes on a red velour sofa, soundtracked by a thumping seventies classic "Heart of Glass" by Blondie, this film from the start showed promise. Unfortunately for the viewer, this was one of very few "can't look away" moments in an otherwise dreary and transparent attempt by Gray to mirror his favorite gangster movies of days gone by.
Built around an impressive cast and set in the notoriously violent 1980's New York City, the film's basic premise revolves around a father (Robert Duval) and his two sons. The first son is a new york police officer (Mark Wahlberg) and the other a gang-associated nightclub manager on the "wrong side of the law" (Joachin Phoenix). As the story progresses, Phoenix's character is faced with several "moral dilemma's" as his loyalties are divided between his two "homes" - the gang world and his family. This is the crux of where the film fails: his dilemma is simply not believable on many levels. First, the director fails to convincingly convey a stark contrast between the appeals or drawbacks of seedy gang life versus the virtues of family or the law. All we are shown is a guy who likes to smoke pot before attending family functions, and from there we are left to assume that this is a man truly torn between two lives. As well, the concept of loyalty isn't ever truly explored. While the film attempts to create dramatic sequences to increase tension and make Joachin's ultimate loyalty decision an excruciatingly difficult one, there never remains any doubt which choice will be made by the film's protagonist.
Despite an impressive cast, none of these accomplished actors could overcome the films go-nowhere plot, horrible editing and almost comical dialogue. Let's face it, cheesy one liners and stilted, pretentious "bad ass" dialogue are Jean Claude Van Damn fodder for good reason...Robert Duval just doesn't have the physique to pull it off. From this viewer's standpoint, Mendes executes reasonably in her supporting role, but it's hard to tell because most of the time was too busy drooling to look for flaws.
There are a couple of decent action sequences, but not enough to hold up this flop. If at a vid-rental store, do yourself a favor: skip this wannabe and reach for the real deal - "The Departed".