1961 - SCARLET SAILS, a Russian fairy tale

 From filmmaker Aleksandr Ptushko comes this romantic fairy tale filmed on an elaborate scale.   Ptushko loads the film up with epic photography, large scale sets and characters who are more symbolic than real people.  It kind of tends to overwhelm the story but that's the way Ptushko liked to make films.

This is a very uncomplicated love story/fairy tale.  A young girl living on a coastal town, is filled with stories from some old geezer sailor about how she will meet her true love when he sails into port on a ship with scarlet sails,  Parallel to this plot is the story of a young aristocrat who longs for a life at sea  away from the stifling environment of his rich parents and estate.  Since the film is called Scarlet Sails  he ends up becoming captain of a ship and there isn't much doubt that this twosome will meet and fall in love. 

I always enjoy Ptuhko's films.  He usually worked on a vast canvas in widescreen and with lots of special effects and amazing large scale scenes.  The word subtle was not in his vocabulary.  Putshko's early films were in the stop motion field and I believe some of them are floating around on YouTube and might be worth a look.  

Scarlet Sails running time is short which is probably a good thing especially for such a simple fable.  This film is available on YouTube in a good copy

The screenwriters were  Alexandr Yurovsky and Semyon Nagorny, the running time is 88 minutes. 

2017 - AN HOUR BEHIND - another rom-com with yet another gimmick

When is a rom-com Chrismas movie not a rom-com Christmas movie?  Well in this case An Hour Behind is that movie.  The gimmick in this film is that our heroine the owner of a cupcake cafe is set up on a blind date by her sister with a rich attorney.  The problem is that she screws up the time of the blind date and instead of hanging with the rich attorney she has one of those mistaken identity things where she accidentally ends up with a working class, but good looking fire fighter.

 Yes, it's mistaken identity time as the couple hits it off and engages in the usual romantic montage (going for walks, rowing a boat on the river etc.)  However the firefighter has a secret which will cause the couple to split up but only for a while of course.  Then there is the big town cupcake contest to contend with.  There's a big cash price involved.  If our heroine wins the prize she can open a second cupcake store and begin building her empire or franchise of cup cafes across the United States.

The gimmick of the couple"meeting cute" with the screwed up time change works about as well as any of those contrived Hallmark Christmas movies although this is just as contrived.   The fireman's secret which initially splits up the couple is not much of a secret but you need a reason to put some kind of conflict in this movie.  People sitting around eating and obsessing about cup cakes has a limited dramatic appeal.   

Our female protagonist played by the actor Emily Rose is about the only person in the cast I recognized.  I had seen her in the TV show Haven where she played an FBI agent stuck in some small New England town which had lots of weird supernatural stuff going on and where she lived a bunch of past lives.  Haven was based on a Stephen King mystery which they managed to squeeze five seasons out of.  It was probably a relief for Emily Rose to to play a semi-normal person for a change instead some weirdo Stephen King character.  However I'm not exactly sure a woman with a cupcake baking fixation is all that normal.  

The film was written by Brittany Wisecombe, the running time is 90 minutes. 

2002 - THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE, is a disasterous remake of Charade.

When it was released this remake of Stanley Donen's Charade was considered a complete disaster.  In many ways it depressingly ended director Jonathan Demme's ability to combine off beat film making with commercial viability.  Demme had been having some decent critical and commercial success in his career.  Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia had performed very well for him.

However he stumbled badly with the Oprah Winfrey project Beloved which was a big commercial disaster.  Probably looking for a box office hit he decided to remake Stanley Donen's Charade as The Truth About Charlie.  Demme's approach was to film in Paris as a tribute to the French New Wave movement that had started in the 1950's.  He got financial backing from Universal Studios and was off and running. "Big Mistake" as Arnold says in The Last Action Hero.

About the only thing Demme got right was casting Thandie Newton in the role that Audrey Hepburn had created in the original film.  However things started to go off the rails with his Cary Grant replacement Mark Wahlberg.  In short Wahlberg was to put it very mildly no Cary Grant.  He looks completely ridiculous running around wearing a beret.  Someone should have told him that only tourists wear berets.  More importantly he had absolutely no chemistry with Thandi Newton which for a romantic thriller is kind of a problem.

Demme's idea to film this as a tribute to the New Wave was to shoot the film with hand held cameras.  The Truth About Charlie is a head ache inducing shaky mess and  the camera work a complete distraction to the story.  I suppose I could comment on the frenzied editing but what's the point.  

Demme also stuck some of the old French New Wave gang into this film.  Director Agnes Varda shows up in a couple of scenes and recreates the ending from Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black.  Anna Karina,  Jean Luc Goddard's one time wife and muse appears.  Charles Aznavour the star of Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player makes a couple of appearances crooning some songs.  Finally there is a shot of Francois Truffaut's grave in Montmartre Cemetery.  All these New Wave jokes and tributes get really tiresome when the rest of the film is an unwatchable mess.

The Truth About Charlie is the price movie studios and ultimately the audience pays when a quirky filmmaker is allowed to run amuck with his so called personal vision.   Demme had only himself to blame. He wrote, produced and directed this film. 

The screenplay is by Jonathan Demme, Steve Schmidt, Peter Joshua (the alias for Peter Stone when he knew he was working on a turkey like this), and  Jessica Bendinger.  The running time is 104 minutes.

2004 - THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB, I was expecting the worst.

Five women and a guy form a book club where they decide to read all of Jane Austin's novels.  The gimmick in this film is that each of the club members is living out one of Austen's plot lines.  What this film has going for it is a really good cast of women and honestly a not uninteresting story line interweaving their fascination for Jane Austen's books with their actual lives. 

Kathy Baker is Bernadette sort of the ring leader of the group who kind of orchestrates the whole shebang with the group which includes get mixed up in their personal lives.  Amy Brennerman is Sylvia a woman whose husband has walked out on her for a younger woman.  Sylvia still hopes for a reconciliation with her cad of a husband.  Brennerman who by the way looks way to young, has a daughter in her twenties who is a lesbian having relationship problems.

Emily Blunt with a really bad haircut, is Prudie a woman with an inattentive husband.  She finds herself falling for a high school student in the film's ickiest subplot.  Finally there is Maria Bello as Jocelyn a dog trainer who is ignoring the male member of the group who has a crush on her.  It's easy to see why that is.  He attempts to woo her by giving her science fiction novels to read for some odd reason.   

 The Jane Austen Book Club is one of the better films in this genre. This good cast and a fairly decent screenplay help make this a better than average romantic comedy.  These types of genre films have a preset list of scenes and "meet cute" situations that must always be followed. These boy meets girl stories do have the inevitable march to their happy ending.  In these types of films the entertainment value comes from how the director and writer can pull this bunch of cliches off.  In this case the makers of this film pulled it off fairly well. 

The film was written by the director Robin Swicord, the running time is 105 minutes. 

2010 - TAMARA DREW, a good comedy from a graphic novel for a change

Gemma Atherton is Tamara Drew a woman returning to her small home town in Dorset, England to settle her mother's estate and generally create havoc with a lot of the men in the village.  

The director is the talented Stephen Frears who is a good storyteller and works very well with actors who in this case were carefully cast.  Frears is a filmmaker who manages to pick interesting projects throughout his career.  He hasn't allowed himself to get locked into one particular genre.  The Hit, Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters, The Van, The Hi-Lo Country and Tamara Drew  couldn't be more different but Frears manages to bring a lot of skill when it comes to making entertaining movies

Gemma Arerton is a very talented performer who has been attached to some interesting films but her attempts at some large scale Hollywood films like the stupid Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters and the unnecessary Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and The King's Men have not really been successful.  She appears to have carved out a career in some off beat interesting films.  Arterton comes off on screen as a very likable performer and her character Tamara Drew is not a particularly likable person.

The film was based on a graphic novel aka "comic book."  It was well written by Moira Buffini, the running time is 111 minutes. An entertaining film.

1991 - ENCHANTED APRIL, is really boring

On the never ending search to find films I can share with my wife I found this tiresome bore of a film.  The film's own advertising proclaimed "that if you love A Room With A View you will love Enchanted April."  Well I've seen A Room With A View and I can assure you this film is no A Room With A View.

The story such that it is concerns four women who rent a villa in Italy for a month.  They're all repressed in their lives or under the thumbs of their husbands.  A vacation in Italy for a month is just the thing to turn their lives around.  A month in the Italian countryside is going to solve all their problems never mind the other eleven months of the year.

The story has the usual bunch of British characters that show up in these period pieces.  Everyone acts and talks like they are the most emotionally and unhappily repressed people on the planet.  There's lots of introspection and soul searching as they wander around the villa and they wander around the villa a lot.

The film was photographed in Portofino, Italy so the viewer gets many shots of sunlight glistening off of the lake, spiderwebs artfully photographed and lots and lots of photography of one woman sitting in a garden sunning herself.  Not actually an action packed film. 

Clearly the film was trying to pull off a romantic mood but for a film like this to succeed you really have to know your stuff to put this mood stuff over.  You just can't make a film with four women walking around a villa for an hour and a half and not have something happening.  You need interesting characters, interesting situations and interesting dialog which you won't find in this film.  Enchanted April could barely past the mustard as some dull PBS Masterpiece Theater presentation.

The film was written by Peter Barnes, the running time is an interminable 95 minutes.   

2025 - ETERNITY, another afterlife comedy/romance/fantasy

Apparently in these Hollywood movies about the afterlife you just don't get to go to heaven and enjoy yourself you still are faced with all sorts of decisions about what kind of eternity you are going to enjoy and who you are going to enjoy it with.  This is the dilemma for The Scarlett Witch herself Elizabeth Olsen who has passed on and has to pick who she will spend eternity with her last husband who she was married to for 65 years or her first husband who was the passionate love of her life before he died early.

There's a whole bunch of these afterlife films.  The weird Robin Williams film What Dreams May Come which has a love story/suicide plot line.  Albert Brook's very funny Defending Your Life with Brooks as an advertising executive who ends up in Judgement City.  At time of his death he was screwing around with the CD player in his car instead of paying attention to the road.  

Made in Heaven has Timothy Hutton and Kelly McGillis as a couple of unborn souls who fall in love and have to find each other when they are on Earth or else they will get yanked back to Heaven.  Made in Heaven was directed by Alan Rudolph so you can be sure it's going to be on the strange side.  

A quick shout out to Powell and Pressburger's Stairway to Heaven a very impressive World War II film made at the peak of their skills.  That should go near the top of the list. 

For my money the best afterlife film is Heaven Can Wait the Ernest Lubitsch film. This is not strictly an afterlife film although it starts in the afterlife.  Don Ameche is a philandering husband who has to relate the story of his life to the Devil before he goes to hell.  This is a terrific film filmed in beautiful 1940's technicolor. 

 Let's get back to Eternity.  Yeah it's okay, the actors are decent the world building of the afterlife is some sort of train station.  That's kind of interesting.  It drags in the middle as we have to wait for Elizabeth Olsen to make her husband decision although it's fairly apparent who she will pick.

Eternity was written by Pat Cunnane and David Freyne, the running time is 114 minutes. 

2026 - VOICEMAILS FOR ISABELLE, rom-com time

Zoey Deutch races around San Francisco like a "manic pixie dream girl" (do they still use that term?) bemoaning that she can't keep a boyfriend.  Never mind the fact that she looks like a movie star with makeup and a wardrobe that would be the envy of any single woman living on an assistant chef's salary.  At one point you want to scream at the television set and tell her to calm down and take some Adderall.

Well let's get the synopsis out of the way.  Zoey is a chef working for a Hitler like master chef.  She has a terminally ill sister who she talks to on the phone all the time.  When the sister passes away, Zoey continues to call her sister's phone and leave voicemails to cope with her grief.  Little does Zoey know that her sister's phone number has now been reassigned to a cute real estate salesman who listens to the voicemails and falls in love with Zoey.  He arranges to meet her and we get the usual falling in love montage between the two of them.  Will the cute guy fess up to Zoey about the voicemails so we can get to a happy ending as quickly as possible?

 

 While viewing this I could hardly believe Zoey Deutch was the same performer who did such a good job playing actor Jean Seberg in Richard Linklater's Nouvelle Vague.  Deutch's over the top performance would probably keep any normal guy from ever getting involved with such a disturbed nutcase.

  

The plot owes a lot to You Got Mail and the Ernest Lubitsch film The Shop Around the Corner.  I will give the writer/director Leah McKendrick credit for injecting enough humor and clever moments to make this film watchable.

The running time is 118 minutes.  

2026 - OFFICE ROMANCE, standard rom-com stuff made for streaming

I watched this because why not.  Nobody is going to confuse this with a classic romantic comedy.  In fact nobody is going to confuse this with anything.

 

Jennifer Lopez at 56, still looks great in a two piece swimsuit but probably getting a little old for this stuff, is the head of an airline that is being sued for some reason.  British actor Brett Goldstein remembered for playing Roy Kent in Ted Lasso is the attorney who is representing her company in the lawsuit.  They fall in love, the road to a happy ending is sort of rocky but it will all work out.

 

Some of the jokes are funny most are not.  A few interesting actors show up like Bradley Whitford, Edward James Olmos, Amy Sedaris and Betty Gilpin.  They manage to steal the show from the two leads but that didn't take much.

 

For a "watch with your significant other rom-com" there is a level of raunchy and not particularly funny humor throughout the film.  The photography is pretty.  This film will slide into the abyss of streaming films that show up for a week and are then forgotten.

The film was written by Brett Goldstein and Joe Kelly.  The running time is 115 minutes is should have really been shorter.

1958 - INDISCREET, a polished production of a very slight story

This should have been an entertaining romantic comedy.  The leads were Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman.  The producer/director was Stanley Donen a man of taste and style.  The writer was Norman Krasna an old pro at this romantic comedy stuff.  The cinematographer was F.A. Young who was usually associated with David Lean's super epics, it looks very pretty in technicolor.  The end result of all this effort is a very mild film with lots and lots of talk.

Bergman plays what else, a world famous actress who enters into an affair with rich banker Cary Grant who is apparently married. The film's contrived plot hangs on the premise that Grant actually isn't married but is pretending to be married to avoid having to get married, well something like that.  

 

This film was made under the Cary Grant, Stanley Donen production company Grandon.  It was the first of their three films which included The Grass is Greener and Charade.  The idea seemed to be to film sophisticated and very glossy entertainments of "the privileged class enjoying their privileges" as they liked to say.

For all the good looking clothes and impressive London locations the film just doesn't really come off with it's dumb premise.  Grant and Bergman make a good looking couple but they don't really have any genuinely witty dialog to work with.  They are supported by English character actors Cecil Parker and Phyllis Calvert who are much better at delivering Krasna's lame dialog and frankly when they are off screen they are really missed.  I guess if you are a fan of classic Hollywood stars like Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman the film is sort of enertaining.

The running time is an overlong 100 minutes.   

1963 - CHARADE, excellent romantic thriller

This is an excellent and very entertaining comedy thriller made by Hollywood professionals at the peak of their abilities.  It starred Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn and who ever had the inspired idea to team them up as a romantic couple should have gotten a big bonus.  Here are two stars who really deliver the goods.  Cary Grant had done enough Hitchcock films so he knew how to balance the comedic and suspense elements in this story.  Audrey Hepburn was no slouch either.  She had also performed in romantic comedies and dramas with great success.  These two performers were very experienced actors when it came to making films and they really knew how to deliver the romantic couple goods.

 

The director Stanley Donen had worked at MGM during it's peak period when they were producing stylish musicals.  Donen along with Gene Kelly had created an impressive body of work with films like On The Town, Singing In The Rain and the underrated It's Always Fair Weather.  On his own he directed Seven Brides For Seven Brothers and Funny Face.   As the musical genre wrapped up Donen focused on sophisticated comedies and in this case romantic thrillers.  Charade was one of his best films.

  

A big part of Charade's success is the screenplay by Peter Stone and Marc Behm which balanced the comedy, romance and suspense elements.  The cinematographer Charles Lang was one of Hollywood's top cameraman who had worked with John Sturges, Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang and Joseph L. Mankiewicz. With this kind of talent Charade could hardly miss.  It was a critical and commercial hit. 

 

The running time is 113 minutes.  

2013 - BEAUTIFUL CREATURES , gothic southern teen love story stuff

We're south of the Mason Dixon line in South Carolina where sensitive teenager Ethan Wate is about to fall in love.  How do we know he's sensitive?  Well he's reading Charles Bukowski and Kurt Vonnegut and it's not even on the assigned reading list for his high school English class.  Into his life comes transfer student Lena Duchannes from the far way land of New York City.  Ethan is immediately smitten with her and vice versa.  But Lena has a big secret she is secretly a "caster" (witch) who has magic powers.  When she turns 16 she will either become a good caster or an evil caster.  Can Mason stop Lena from turning into an evil caster?  He will have to fight the powers of darkness to keep this from happening.  I guess that means Mason needs to read more Charles Bukowski novels or something.

 

So what we have here is a variation on the Twilight series except this time it's a girl with supernatural powers instead of a boy.  The viewer has to sit through a lot of mumble jumble about casters, reincarnation, magic spell books and mysterious magic people who secretly co-exist with us mortals.  I am reluctant to say this film reminds me of the old Elizabeth Montgomery TV series Bewitched because that would be wrong.  However it does remind me of the spinoff to Bewitched, Tabatha who was Elizabeth Montgomery's witch daughter. 

 

The cast of this film is the usual bunch of actors in their 20's trying to pass for 15 year old teenagers.  Somehow Jeremy Irons, Emma Thompson and Viola Davis also got roped into this foolishness and they really should have known better.   The writer/director Richard LaGravenese was the one responsible for this southern gothic young adult fiction nonsense.  He's usually a competent writer but in this case he should have known better.

 

Beautiful Creatures stumbles through it's contrived teenage love story trying to create it's magical world  but in the end the world building is just tiresome and dissatisfying.  Beautiful Creatures is part of a four book series and clearly the intention was to make another Twilight series.  But the movie was an under performer and that put an end to the studio's money making dreams.  My advice would be to dig out your copy of The Wizard of Oz and watch that again.

The running time of this film is 124 long minutes.  

1974 - ZANDY'S BRIDE, a western and a love story (maybe)

In the old west rancher Zandy Allen has decided he wants to marry.  He places an ad in a newspaper and Hannah Lund agrees to be his mail order bride.  It turns out that Zandy is a real misogynist and treats his new bride like a piece of crap as he looks at her like she's a breed mare.  It's battle of the sexes time as Hannah fights to earn respect from Zandy. 

The leads are played by Gene Hackman as Zandy Allen and Hannah Lund played be Liv Ullmann.  However I would have to say that Hackman is playing one of the most repellent characters I have ever seen in film.  Watching this film it's impossible to understand why the Liv Ullmann character would ever stick around to be mentally and physically abused by this guy.

 

The other issue with the film is the storytelling. With the exception of Hackman's larger than life asshole of a character this film is mighty low key storytelling. The director Jan Troell is a Swedish filmmaker trying to blend his  European filmmaker sensibility onto a simple American western.  Troell gets some very mixed results.  I suspect the American  settings might have been a little beyond his ability to get a handle on this Hollywood production.

 

The film was shot on location in the Big Sur area of California so the locations are mighty impressive to look at.  Jan Troell was always a very strong visual director particularly in his Scandinavian films..  The scenery is probably the best thing in this film but most film goers usually don't watch movies for the pretty pictures.  

The film was written by Marc Norman, the running time is 97 minutes. 

2026 - SOLO MIO, okay romantic comedy

Unlikely leading man Kevin James is a school art teacher who proposes to his long time girlfriend.  The plan is for them to get married in Rome.  During the wedding she leaves him at the alter and he is understandingly depressed.  He meets the owner of a coffee shop named Gia who he bonds with.  Do I have to paint a picture about how this plot is going to end up? 

This is a very mildly pleasant rom-com.  The actors are decent, Kevin James has spent years on TV sitcoms so he has his comedy sthick down fairly well.  The actor playing Gia, Nicole Grimaudo is likable even if she does overdo the excitable Italian woman character thing a bit much.

 

Really the best reason to see this film is the on location filming in Rome and the Italian countryside actually the only reason to sort of sit through this thing. This is one of those films that was made for streaming at home, you don't need to have any emotional investment in the story.  All right I'll say it, it's the perfect film to watch with your significant other.

 

The film was barely written by the directors, John Kinnane, Dan Kinnane and Kevin James, the running time is a brisk 96 minutes. 

1993 - SHADOWLANDS, a love story

This film is a love story between celebrated Christian author C.S Lewis and an American poet Joy Davidman a Jewish woman who had converted to Christianity,  She had been corresponding by mail with Lewis for some time and finally traveled to England to meet him.  Much to his surprise he found himself falling into a relationship with her.

The leads were played by Debra Winger and Anthony Hopkins and they were played very well.  In fact the entire cast performed at a very high level.  Even the young boy playing Winger's son from a first marriage doesn't have any of those annoying overacting tendencies that a lot of these child performers seem to pick up.

 

This film was produced and directed by Richard Attenborough and it's probably the best film he made as a director.  Attenborough had a long career acting with some of the best British directors.  But as a director himself a lot of his pictures were very stodgy and ponderous.  It seemed that Attenborough was only interested in making "important" pictures," so audiences sat throught long dull films like Gandhi, Cry Freedom and Chaplin.  They may have been intended to be of great cinematic significance but they sure were boring. 

 

In Shadowlands he had a good script, good actors and an excellent cinematographer in Roger Pratt.  The end result is a very touching love story which was filmed in the classic film style and worked very well.

The film was well written by William Nicholson, the running time is 131 minutes. 

1963 - LOVE IS A BALL, undemanding romcom

An innocuous time killer for the most part.  Love Is A Ball is the kind of film that the slowly dying movie studios were still pumping out in their foolhardy attempt to compete with television.  The film was filmed on location on the French Riviera so it looks pretty.  It has a good cast and some of the situations are rather humorous at times.

The semi complicated rom com plot goes like this.  Charles Boyer is a person who arranges very rich people to get married to impoverished royalty. He takes a penniless aristocrat in this case Ricardo Montalban and does a Pygmalion thing to him.  The makeover will make him acceptable to a rich American heiress played by Hope Lange.  Lange is playing a sexy party girl, she was an okay actress but the sexy party girl role may have been a little beyond her acting range.  Glenn Ford figures in this story as a championship auto racer who has to teach Ricardo how to be a race driver.  Glenn ends up going undercover as Hope's chauffeur so the director and writers can create a contrived romance between the two of them.

 

The film has an interesting cast besides the above mention actors.  Telly Savalas is Hope's guardian.  Savalas played a lot of "he-man" roles but in this film he's kind of a foppish character. Character actor Ruth McDevitt is Hope's Grandmother or Aunt or something.  I've seen McDevitt in a lot a lot of movies and TV shows, she was always a reliable presence in a movie.  Also showing up is Swedish actress Ulla Jacobsson in her first American film and clearly trying to break into the international film scene.  She's barely in the movie and really doesn't make much of an impression.

 

The director David Swift was kind of an old hand at this fluffy stuff.  He worked for Walt Disney and make a couple of good films, The Parent Trap and a very good version of Pollyanna.  He went on to make Good Neighbor Sam and an excellent film version of the musical, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.  

 

For such a light piece of film junk the production was apparently not a happy one.  Glenn Ford clashed with the director frequently, he was apparently in his 'I'm a movie star" mode.  Ford and Hope Lange were a couple in real life which didn't help matters.  Swift was an unhappy camper during the shoot.

The was written by David Swift, Tom Waldman and Frank Waldman, the running time is 111 minutes.

2011 - WE BOUGHT A ZOO, entertaining thanks to one really good performance

A very slight film from one time wonder boy Cameron Crowe.  No need to rehash this story since it's in the title.  It's generally known that Crowe was a big admirer of Billy Wilder a director who really knew how to blend comedy and drama into his films.  However We Bought A Zoo seems more like a Frank Capra film than a Wilder film and we're talking a Frank Capra film from the 1950's when Capra was in his big time artistic and creative decline.

This film is kind of a mix of comedy, family drama and romance.  It has some good scenes and some good actors but it you are allergic to cute little kids beware because this one has a real scene stealer.  The underrated Scarlett Johnansson is a zoo keeper and potential love interest and Thomas Hayden Church plays the brother of the main protagonist.  He isn't in the film enough but he's very funny

 

What makes this film very watchable is Matt Damon as the widower father looking to restart his life with his family by buying a decrepit zoo.  Damon pulls off the comedy and family drama stuff expertly and manages to sell even the silliest scenes in the film with his sincere performance.  He makes this film worth seeing.

 

An uneven film at best, this is another example of actors coming to the rescue of a less than perfect screenplay.  

The film was written by Cameron Crowe and Aline Brosh McKenna.  The running time is an overlong 124 minutes.