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It's easy to feel gulled by Our Idiot Brother. After all, Jesse Peretz's film treads dangerously close to a Forrest Gump-ian celebration of passive innocence as the shaper of lives. But whereas Robert Zemeckis's movie disastrously proposed its cutie-pie hero as one of the inadvertent prime movers of post-war American history, Peretz's "idiot," biodynamic farmer Ned (Paul Rudd), turns his unconscious influence to a far smaller task: righting the lives of his three vaguely troubled New York sisters.

While the film does seem to propose the same celebration of insensible ingenuousness as Forrest Gump, in this case by contrasting Ned's earnestness and honesty with several less noble big-city lifestyles, Peretz's movie plays as far less reductive, both because Ned, for all of his cluelessness, lives according to a conscious positivism that looks for the best in other people, and because Paul Rudd's performance is far richer than Tom Hanks's smiley obliviousness.

Rudd's hippie farmer seems at least partly modeled on The Big Lebowski's Dude (in his scraggly sartorial sense, his aggressively bearded appearance, and his pronunciation of the word "man"), but Ned is clearly an original creation. An idiot in the Dostoyevskyan "holy fool" sense, Ned is marked equally by his forthrightness, his generosity, and his cluelessness. Introduced selling weed to a uniformed police officer who claims to have had a "tough week," Ned is sent to jail for a short sentence before being released on parole and moving to the city to stay in turn with his mom and his sisters.

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If Our Idiot Brother clearly courts Gump-ian territory, its pattern finally bears a stronger resemblance to Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema. Though just as Peretz's film imparts an edgy comedy lacking from the Zemeckis, so it conveys a sweetness (never cloying) that's nowhere present in the Italian classic. In other words, Ned doesn't fuck anyone and no one goes crazy. Instead, through his trustworthy demeanor he reaps the confidences of all the film's characters before inadvertently blurting privileged information to the wrong party. As a result, he stirs things up with each of his three sisters (one who refuses to recognize her husband cheating on her, one who refuses to come clean about cheating on her girlfriend, one forced to make questionable ethical choices to further her career in gossip journalism), compelling them to face up to and resolve the issues affecting their lives.

But, ultimately, what makes Our Idiot Brother work is the endless appeal of watching Rudd's lovable idiot run roughshod over the sophisticated New York mini-universe while winning the confidence and admiration of everyone around him. He's never overly idealized (in one scene we see him admit to intentional self-delusion, thus calling into question the extent of his earnest innocence), he doesn't get everything he wants (he develops a special bond with a wealthy royal, but she immediately turns down his request for a date), but his live-and-let-live attitude comes off as simultaneously genuine and irrepressible. Yes, the film often draws too heavily on a limp satire of both Manhattan yuppie-ism and the hippie lifestyle, but such missteps are overcome by the game efforts of a uniformly strong cast of comic talents of whom the most striking are surprise guest star Steve Coogan in ultimate cad mode and the perpetually engaging Rudd himself.

* Director(s): Jesse Peretz
* Screenplay: Evgenia Peretz, David Schisgall
* Cast: Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel, Emily Mortimer, Steve Coogan, Hugh Dancy, Kathryn Hahn, Rashida Jones, Shirly Knight, T.J. Miller, Adam Scott, Janet Montgomery, Sterling Brown, Matthew Mindler
* Distributor: The Weinstein Company
* Runtime: 90 min.
* Rating: R
* Year: 2011


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Source

Guillermo del Toro-produced film plays like a dry run to "Pan's Labyrinth," writes Kirk Honeycutt.

The moral of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is that what scares you as a child doesn’t necessarily have the same effect on a grown-up. The very talented fabulist filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has in many of his best films, Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, explored the heightened emotions and fantasies of very young people. Who knows but maybe this can be traced back, at least in part, to what he describes as the scariest movie he ever saw on television, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, written by Nigel McKeand and broadcast by ABC in 1973?

Now he has remade that telefilm into a feature, which he co-wrote and co-produced while handing directing chores to comics artist Troy Nixey (creator of Trout), making a feature debut. The result is a scary movie that is genuinely scary in parts, although an adult can’t help noticing this is set in the very worn and tattered territory of the haunted-house genre. Then when you get a glimpse of the CGI critters causing all the mayhem, the scares completely vanish. You spend the rest of the movie wondering why someone doesn’t just call a fumigator and get rid of those damn creatures.

The movie may still scare 9-year-olds when it gets released August 26, but anyone much older may laugh rather than shriek. Del Toro is by now a brand name so interest from his extended fan base as well as those from the world of comics should allow Miramax and FilmDistrict to enjoy a modest box-office success before this movie joins its predecessor as a late-night video.

Del Toro showed interest in developing this film before his worldwide success with Pan’s Labyrinth so one can look upon Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark as something of a trial run for some of the themes and imagery connected to that amazing film. A young girl under severe emotional distress enters an imaginary world hidden from adults that seems to be a refuge only to gradually take on macabre and treacherous aspects.

Every child believes a monster is lurking under the bed or in the dark. Only in the case of young Sally (Bailee Madison) something is there. Paying little heed to her fears — although after one frightening episode a shrink is called in — are her distracted father, an ambitious architect Alex Hurst (Guy Pearce), and his interior decorator girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes).

Sally has been sent — “discarded” might be a better term — by her mother to live with her father in a Gothic Rhode Island mansion he is restoring to sell and, he hopes, revive his flagging career. Left to her own devices, the lonely girl wanders through the labyrinthine grounds and spooky interiors of Blackwood Manor where she stumbles onto its secrets, despite the best efforts of its wary caretaker (veteran Jack Thompson) to cover these up.

Voices call to her to come down to the basement and play. Things happen to the adults, especially the shredding of Kim’s clothes, that are blamed on her but she knows she didn’t do. So far so good as the movie, written by del Toro with Matthew Robbins, nicely links events, whether real or imagined, with the distraught emotional state of a child.

Interestingly, the original teleplay has no child. A married couple moves into strange old mansion and it’s the neurotic wife who believes she’s losing her mind as she sees horrible little creatures. By putting a child at the center of the action, del Toro introduces his 9-year-old self, as it were, into the story: This is how he remembers the experience of seeing this movie.

If somehow the forces of evil had remained unseen and perhaps figments or externalizations of the little girl’s fragile emotions, this Dark might have retained its childhood power over all viewers. Alas, when little creatures climb out of a wall grate and scurry across floors and walls, baring fangs, snapping claws and staring with heartless beady eyes, you’ve gone from the world of Turn of the Screw to that of Gremlins.

The film also cheats a bit. You never quite understand the rules of the game: Where do the powers of these creatures come from that they’re able to turn electricity on and off or make sharp objects fly through the air?

Shooting entirely on a large set and a few exteriors in Melbourne, Australia, Nixey shows himself much more of a visual artist than a dramatic one at this stage of his film career. What the film does best is to build up an atmosphere, richly detailed and mysterious, where anything evil is possible. It also manages at least for a while to get you into the head of its young protagonist and see the house and its grounds from her point of view. But the adults are very old stock characters, exasperatingly so, and the pay-off is nil. The title then becomes all too prophetic: You don’t need to be afraid of this dark.


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Venue: Los Angeles Film Fest (Miramax Films)
Production companies: Miramax and Guillermo del Toro present in association with FilmDistrict a Necropia/Gran Via production
Cast: Katie Holmes, Guy Pearce, Bailee Madison, Jack Thompson
Director: Troy Nixey
Screenwriters: Guillermo del Toro, Matthew Robbins
Based on the teleplay by: Nigel McKeand
Producers: Guillermo del Toro, Mark Johnson
Executive producers: Stephen Jones, William Horberg, Tom Williams
Director of photography: Oliver Stapleton
Production designer: Roger Ford
Music: Marco Beltrami, Buck Sanders
Costume designer: Wendy Chuck
Editor: Jill Bilcock
R rating, 100 minutes


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Movie Review Source

Olivier Megaton directs the latest bullets and bras thriller from the Luc Besson film factory.

PARIS — Jean-Luc Godard’s famous remark that all you need to make a movie is “a girl and a gun” doesn’t quite hold water for Luc Besson. In his world, you need one girl wearing as little as possible, and at least fifty guns, preferably firing at the same time. Such is the formula applied to Colombiana, the latest EuropaCorp effort produced and co-scripted by Besson, and directed by in-house auteur Olivier Megaton, whose mise-en-scène is often as subtle as his last name sounds. Still, there are guilty pleasures to be had in this frenzied B starring Zoe Saldana (Avatar, Star Trek), who gives an acrobatic performance that makes the overcooked material watchable, if not entirely enjoyable.

The $40 million, English-language actioner rolls out in France July 27, while Sony offshoot Stage 6 Films will handle all media in the U.S. In both cases, the movie’s promise -- more than fulfilled -- to dish out plenty of bullets and bras should help boost opening numbers, followed by solid back-end business alongside EuropaCorp franchises Hitman and Transporter (the third installment of which was directed by Megaton).

You know you’re in Besson territory when a film’s opening minutes feature a 10-year-old girl (Amandla Stenberg) stabbing a drug capo (Jordi Malla) in the hand with a Rambo knife, then jumping out the window to execute a series of parkour stunts throughout the slums of Bogota, until arriving at the U.S. Embassy, where she vomits on the desk of a CIA agent (Callum Blue). If that wasn’t enough for you, wait for the next sequence, where she steals away to Chicago to find her uncle (Cliff Curtis) beating someone to death, after which he tries to give her a serious life lesson by firing a Colt .45 at random victims across the street from an elementary school.


So much for the back story, which is meant to demonstrate how Cataleya (Saldana) was so traumatized by her parents’ deaths at the hands of a Colombian kingpin (Beto Benites) that, 15 years later, she has become a one woman fighting machine intent on taking out the entire cartel. Conceived as a sort of follow up to Besson’s La Femme Nikita, the scenario (co-written by regular Robert Mark Kamen, creator of The Karate Kid) nonetheless lacks whatever subtlety could have been found in the much artier 1990 thriller, which combined killer looks and pyrotechnics in fascinating ways.

Here, the point is to strip Ms. Saldana down to the bare minimum and then to throw her (sometimes literally) from one action scene to another. This doesn’t mean that Colombiana comes without its own charms, and two well-handled escape sequences prove that the actress can bring both physical rigor and a certain level of class to the stunts. Other moments merely showcase how many times Megaton must have watched the Jason Bourne series, from which he filches both an in-your-face bathroom brawl and a scene where Cataleya calls someone in an office…from an office in the opposite building.

Before things terminate in a drug dealer shootout the likes of which have not been seen since Commando, the film pauses for a few inspired tête-à-têtes between Saldana and Lennie James (24 Hour Party People), who plays a Chicago detective – clearly the most thoughtful character depicted on screen. Such scenes show that once in a while, Besson and Co. can cut away all the fat and fireworks to make something that vaguely resembles what the writer-producer-CEO was once capable of back in the day.



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Opens: July 27 (France)
Production companies: EuropaCorp, TF1 Films Productions, Grive Productions
Cast: Zoe Saldana, Jordi Molla, Lennie James, Amandla Stenberg, Michael Vartan, Cliff Curtis, Beto Benites, Jesse Borrego
Director: Olivier Megaton
Screenwriters: Luc Besson, Robert Mark Kamen
Producers: Luc Besson, Ariel Zeitoun
Executive producer: Ajoz Films
Director of photography: Romain Lacourbas
Production designer: Patrick Durand
Music: Nathaniel Mechaly
Costume designer: Olivier Beriot
Editor: Camille Delamarre
Sales Agent: EuropaCorp
No rating, 104 minutes


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Movie Review Source

Phhir is a suspense love story directed by 'Girish Dhamija' which stars the popular TV Actress 'Roshni Chopra' Phhir is the 'Roshini Chopra`s' first debut movie of Bollywood. Roshini Chopra plays the role of 'Rajniesh Duggal`s wife.

Roshini Chopra disappears mysteriously .. and the suspense continues every frame.

Does 'Rajniesh' find his wife again?

Who is 'Adah' who takes step forward in finding 'Rajniesh' wife?

Where did 'Roshini Chopra' go ?

To know more watch your favourite couple on the silver screen - Adah Sharma & Rajniesh Duggall of horror flick '1920' in Phhir'se'again...

Do Let us know your views on this movie by posting reviews..

Aarakshan Movie Review Updated


Aarakshan 2011 is an upcoming Hindi Movie produced and directed
by Prakash Jha starring Amitabh Bachchan, Saif Ali Khan,
Deepika Padukone, Manoj Bajpayee, and Prateik.





Story of Aarakshan Movie revolves around a strict idealistic
college principal played by Bachchan. Saif plays his student
role who falls in love with principal's daughter played by Deepika.
Prateik Babbar plays his friend's role. Story of Aarakshan Movie
is Centered on recent controversial issue with Supreme Court order
on reservations. Story turns into conflict which tests their love,
and friendship for one another, their loyalty to principal, Saif
portrays role of a Dalit.

Aarakshan Movie Trailer will be updated shortly

Music for Aarakshan Movie is scored by Shankar Ehsaan Loy


Aarakshan Movie Cast and Crew

Hindi Movie : Aarakshan
Produced & Directed by: Prakash Jha
Starring: Amitabh Bachchan, Saif Ali Khan, Deepika Padukone,
Manoj Bajpayee and Prateik Babbar.
Music Director: Shankar Ehsaan Loy
Movie Release Date: August 12, 2011