Jun 17, 2011
– not many actors can claim they’d have no career if they chose to work out at a gym and lose their unsightly pudginess or lack of muscle tone. Such is the case of Will Ferrell who has made stardom and box office success from playing macho losers in “Anchorman” about a newscaster, and last year’s “Talladega Nights” about a race car driver. This time he’s a skating champ. Of course the first question that comes to mind is who’d fall for him in something as disciplined as a figure skater, but if you’re willing to believe….Chaz Michael Michaels (Ferrell) is an ice skating sex addict known to his fans as “sex on ice” a smoking cowboy whose stiffest competition is a pretty-girly-butterfly- skater named Jimmy MacElroy (Jon Heder “Napoleon Dynamite”). When the two get into a slapping match that ends their careers on ice, they think their lives are over. Heder now works at a sports store and Ferrell is a plain old drunk in costume for a generic Ice Capades matinee. That is until their coach (Craig T. Nelson of “Coach” fame) realizes the guide book doesn’t say anything about performing as a couple. Now the duo will join forces to fight off their toughest team to beat – Stranz and Fairchild Van Waldenberg (Will Arnet and Amy Poehler) the evil siblings who plan to stand in their way. It’s complete silliness. It’s one SNL skit after another, but their over-infectious passion for their zany characters works. The cameos of Nancy Kerrigan, Dorothy Hamill, Scott Hamilton and Peggy Fleming only add to the hilarity. Three Tiaras
Jun 17, 2011
(rated R, 108 mins.) Exploding from the pages of Marvel Comics comes the thrilling follow-up to the blockbuster Blade. Blade (Wesley Snipes) is half man and half vampire and consumed by a desire to avenge the curse of his birth and save the human race from a blood-drenched Armageddon. Yeah, sure. Seems these filmmakers saw The Matrix and decided to go for it. Wrong. Kris Kristofferson portrays Whistler, Blade’s sidekick, which explains where no-where-to-be-seen-on-screen-Kristofferson’s acting career has headed. Together the two take on a high-powered team of “Bloodpack” vampires attempting higher levels of evil like nothing they’ve ever faced. Couldn’t they just bite a few necks?
Jun 17, 2011
Director Darren Aronofsky delivers a film that begins as an odd duckbefore transforming into a brilliant swan. Natalie Portman gives an Oscar-worthy performance as Nina, a repressed ballerina whose every-little-girl’s-dream is to land the lead role in a ballet. When she’s offered the prized part of the Swan Queen in Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake,” her whip-cracking company director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), tells her this will be a different version – raw, stripped-down and emotional. Traditionally, the ballerina who plays the pure and tragic white swan, Odette, also plays the wicked seductress Odile, the black swan. But can Nina embody both? The short answer is no. As the white swan Nina is flawless, innocent, a self-consuming over-achiever…but as the black swan – her lustful twin – she’s frigid and frightened where she ought to be passionate and sexual. Nina lives in a world of self-mutilation (much like Mickey Rourke in Aronofsky’s last film,The Wrestler). She has red rashes on her back where swan wings might grow, and she peels the skin from her fingers until they bleed. Aronofsky’s vision – the fluidity of the dancers, the demands, the bound toes, the emaciated features – is at once disturbing and inviting, beckoning us to explore a world we wouldn’t have otherwise known. Lily (Mila Kunis) is Nina’s nemesis and friend, introducing her to a world of sex, drugs and rock & roll – she’s the ultimate black swan predator.Winona Ryder portrays the older prima ballerina, now washed up and forced to retire, though her career is the shining example Nina wants to emulate. Barbara Hershey plays Nina’s demanding and suffocating mother, who expects her daughter to be disciplined 24/7, keeping her room girly-frilly, surrounding her with stuffed animals. Portman has been a sexy nymph in other films, so we might anticipate what eventually happens to this unstable little creature. (Remember her in Closer and The Other Boleyn Girl.) The film is hypnotic, mesmerizing, head-spinning – this isn’t your mother’s Turning Point. And it keeps us wondering where reality ends and fantasy begins – that is, until the very last scene, when we fade to black. “Black Swan” is incredibly dark, but so rich and exciting that you come out of the theatre on a high.Four tiaras
Jun 17, 2011
Remember those ghost stories that our Scout Leaders would drum up as we gathered round the campfire? Well whoever thought Mary’s little lamb would be a killer?! Here comes the summer’s surprise hit “Black Sheep” not about some sexually wild Uncle in our family, but instead about some herd of docile sheep turned “Violence of the Lambs!” The story opens in New Zealand on two brothers – think Cain and Abel – and the unexpected death of their father. Fast forward fifteen years later, and the younger brother, Henry (Nathan Meister) finds himself in serious therapy for his childhood hauntings of woolly creatures. When Henry comes to visit his brother Angus (Peter Feeney) – the mastermind of a plot-gone-wrong from a genetic scientific experience – all hell breaks loose on the farm. That’s because Grant (Oliver Driver) and his girlfriend, Experience (Danielle Mason) are enivornmentalist on a save-the-sheep mission. These two inept characters alone are worth the price of admittance – part vagan, part save the whales – they cover every activist issue known to man. While the movie brings new heights to the words ‘squeamish’ its never taken serious enough to be scarey. Instead it does a fabulous job of bahhhhhhhh-lancing out a screwball spoof that is part funny and part fake fright. It’s “Blair Witch” hype all over again in a genre both original and entertaining. Screen Queen gives it 4 out of 4 tiaras for originality and entertainment.
Jun 17, 2011
(Rated R, 2 hrs. 23 mins.) In a land of “beautiful beaches, beautiful sun – it’s almost a nice place to visit” says Josh Hartnett, if it weren’t for war. Hartnett plays Sgt. Eversmann stepping out of his boyish role of last summer’s “Pearl Harbor” and into the shoes of a man. Black Hawk Down is based on the inspiring, true heroic account of a group of elite U.S. soldiers sent to Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993 as part of a U.N. peacekeeping operation gone wrong. Their mission: to abduct several top lieutenants of a Somalian warlord as part of a strategy to quell the civil war that is tearing away at the country. For us, it’s the biggest firefight since Vietnam. Yet, in “Platoon” while Oliver Stone focuses on the men’s emotional makeup during Vietnam, director Ridley Scott of this movie, never really allows us to get close to these men too busy dodging bullets, explosives and body parts as they scream orders to one another for over two hours. We never know these guys as individuals. Instead, we only see their pain in learning that war is an ugly place and that good-hearted soldiers have no intentions of harming innocent women and children. But, the spooky resemblance to present day Afghanistan will depress the audience already inundated in real life war. This movie, while to be respected, is one sad atrocity after another multiplied by producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s slick staged visuals and pumped up soundtrack. But unlike “Armageddon” or “Con Air” there is no soft spot or room for a story love-line except for their love of heroism.
