items tagged with Boaz Yakin

THE FIVE-YEAR ENGAGEMENT

Say what you will about the current state of movies. Yet in the history of the medium, have the actors who populate film comedies ever been as across-the-board-excellent as they are right now? It took about 20 minutes for this question to pop into my head during The Five-Year Engagement, and once it did, I’m not sure I ever stopped pondering it; from the stars to the supporting cast to the bit players who show up for all of three seconds, director Nicholas Stoller’s rom-com features an embarrassment of performance riches. The movie itself? Eh, it’s okay.

OPEN RANGE

What will it take for Kevin Costner to give a performance again? His new movie, the western Open Range, which he also directed, has a lot going for it – beautiful camerawork, impressive editing, a strong, simple storyline, a marvelously cantankerous Robert Duvall – yet smack at the center is sweet, dear, painfully inadequate Kevin Costner, looking and sounding so uninvolved with his surroundings and his fellow actors that he weakens his entire film. (It took great restraint to laugh at him only once, at his hysterically unmotivated reading of the cowpoke classic “Let’s rustle up some grub.”) Some will argue that Costner is actually deeply in character, playing an uncivilized man for whom conversation and companionship offer little comfort, but look at him onscreen: His Zen blankness is indistinguishable from a coma, and his “concentration” resembles nothing so much as a somnambulist struggling to stay awake. As usual, Costner is fine with rare moments of fringe comedy – reminding us why we once liked him in movies like Bull Durham and Field of Dreams and Tin Cup – but he’s positively deadly in Open Range, and not because of his character’s prowess with a gun.

REMEMBER THE TITANS

No one could have been less enthused than I at the prospect of Remember the Titans, the inspirational high-school-football flick starring Denzel Washington. The film’s omnipresent previews – which, I swear, seemed to precede every movie released from June through September – not only appeared to give away all aspects of the film’s plot but all aspects of the film’s subplots, and it was being released right on the heels of the scabs-play-football bomb The Replacements, arguably the most wretched movie of the past summer.