items tagged with Viola Davis

BEAUTIFUL CREATURES

As it concerns a sensitive high-schooler who enters a world of trouble after falling for a moodier version of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, it should come as no shock to learn that the supernatural romance Beautiful Creatures is based on the first in a series of popular young-adult novels. But while I’d never argue that the YA-lit genre is completely humorless, surely the gender-reversed Twilight knock-off by co-authors Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl can’t be as legitimately, intentionally hilarious as this big-screen adaptation, right?

“So, Mike, what did you think of the other 2012 movies you saw?”

Gosh, how nice of you to ask!

In descending order of appreciation ... .

LOOPER

Rian Johnson’s Looper, a time-travel thriller set primarily in the year 2044, casts Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a contract killer whose life is upended with the arrival of his latest target: his older self, who has been transported from the year 2074 and is played by Bruce Willis. This means that, with Gordon-Levitt delivering rather uncanny likenesses of his co-star’s traditional scowls and smirks – and with the younger actor’s countenance bizarrely altered to resemble the elder actor’s familiar face – Willis essentially plays both leading roles ... which isn’t the most enticing of setups if, like me, you generally find one Bruce Willis more than enough.

THE LUCKY ONE

Every time I leave a movie version of some Nicholas Sparks novel, I’m relieved if it’s not, thus far, the worst movie version of some Nicholas Sparks novel. It’s to The Lucky One’s good fortune, then, that 2008’s Nights in Rodanthe still scrapes the bottom of that particular barrel, because otherwise we might’ve had a new champion.

The first trophy handed out at the 2012 Academy Awards ceremony was for Best Cinematography, a prize that I predicted would go to The Tree of Life but that instead went to Hugo. (Seriously, after his undeserved losses for 2006’s Children of Men and now the Terrence Malick film, exactly whom does Emmanuel Lubezki have to do to win an Oscar?) But that was actually my second incorrect assumption of the evening, because as soon as host Billy Crystal stepped on stage, I said to the others at my viewing party, “Here comes the standing ovation,” and the audience – despite giving the man a warm reception – remained seated. Did the crowd have a collective premonition of just how spectacularly Crystal would bomb last night?