items tagged with Richard Jenkins

DEAR JOHN

Since no one's been pressing a gun to my head, I haven't read Nicholas Sparks' Dear John, which concerns a pair of star-crossed lovers whose romance is derailed by the young man's Army tenure. I have, however, seen director Lasse Hallström's screen version, which apparently follows the novel's blueprint faithfully (albeit with an altered ending), so permit me a question: Does Sparks have absolutely no shame?

YES MAN

It feels as though the teasers for Yes Man have been running since the first Bush administration, so I'm assuming everyone is aware of the film's 10-word comic premise: Jim Carrey always says "no," then learns to say "yes." If you're thinking the setup sounds an awful lot like the conceit behind 1997's Liar Liar, you're not wrong, and in his one-joke role as a depressed loan officer who decides to embrace life by acting against his natural impulses, Yes Man also requires Carrey to goose the proceedings with the sorts of rubber-faced buffoonery and "spontaneous" madness that the actor can pull off in his sleep. Unfortunately, that's exactly what he appears to be doing here.

STEP BROTHERS

As I see it, the only way you can remotely enjoy director Adam McKay's Step Brothers is by accepting that all of the characters in it, even the seemingly levelheaded ones, are out of their minds. And even then you might not enjoy it.

THE PRODUCERS

Devotees of the theatre had plenty of reason to be excited about The Producers, the movie version of Mel Brooks’ stage work based on his 1968 movie. (Got that?) This tale of two Broadway crooks who plan to make a fortune on the worst musical ever conceived has been brought to the screen by the Broadway production’s director/choreographer, Susan Stroman, with all of Brooks’ musical-comedy numbers intact, and the show’s original stars, Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, reprise their roles as Bialystock and Bloom. It’s enough to make a theatre fan nearly giddy with anticipation.Yet after more than two hours spent with this theatrical adaptation, I wanted nothing more than to get my ass to a movie.

NORTH COUNTRY

At a serious, well-intentioned “issue movie,” you will periodically hear from a sect of the audience whom I refer to as the tsk-ers. Tsk-ers are especially vocal at works in which the leading figure – always righteous and noble, and prone to suffering in silence – finds him- or (generally) herself experiencing painful hardships in the cause of Doing the Right Thing, while their families, friends, and the world at large all turn against them.