items tagged with Helen Mirren

17 AGAIN

If there were any lingering doubts as to whether the body-switching comedy 17 Again was tailored specifically for heartthrob Zac Efron, you should know that in the movie's very first scene, Efron's character, Mike O'Donnell, not only appears as the star player of a high school basketball team, but quickly breaks into a spontaneous, energetic dance routine with the cheerleaders. That's right, folks! It's High School Musical: Big-ger and Better!

NOTORIOUS

Every musician's life is different, of course, but every musical bio-pic seems fundamentally the same: The humble beginnings, followed by the first hints of greatness, followed by the early romantic interests, followed by the steady rise to fame, followed by the new romantic interests, followed by the explosive success, followed by the personal setbacks, followed by the professional setbacks, followed by the cementing of the legend ... and if the movie can find room for a title card reading "With his life he proved that no dream is too big," so much the better.

NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS

National Treasure: Book of Secrets, the follow-up to 2004's globe-trotting-archaeologist adventure, could generously be termed "perfunctory"; it gives (family) audiences exactly the formulaic, Indiana Jones-lite action, romance, and humor they adored in the original. It could also, less generously, be described as "crummy," as returning director Jon Turteltaub ensures that every remedially staged sequence has the same bland, going-through-the-motions tone as the one that came before. (At least its predecessor provided a few jokes.)

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

I love Christopher Guest's improvisational comedies with a passion bordering on mania, and he and co-scenarist Eugene Levy have been wonderfully consistent about treating fans to a new one every three years; 1997's Waiting for Guffman led to 2000's Best in Show and 2003's peerless A Mighty Wind. Now we have For Your Consideration, a skewering of the annual Oscar-derby madness, and I couldn't have been more excited about seeing it. So why, despite its many, many great moments, does reflecting on the director's latest leave me feeling disappointed, and a little depressed?

Before assessing the Hollywood output designed to fill us all with holiday cheer (Jerry Bruckheimer’s action extravaganza, Oliver Stone’s historical war epic, Tim Allen after a Botox injection ... y’know, that sort of thing), let’s take a brief look at a few titles flying a bit beneath the blockbuster radar.