SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN

Romantic comedy

PRINCIPAL CAST MEMBERS
Emily Blunt: management consultant Harriet Chetwode-Talbot
Ewan McGregor: Department of Fisheries expert Dr. Alfred Jones
Rachael Stirling: his wife Mary
Amr Waked: Sheikh Muhammad
Kristin Scott Thomas: Prime Minister's press secretary Bridget Maxwell
Tom Mison: Harriet’s boyfriend Capt. Robert Mayers

REVIEW
There are more than a few chuckles and laughs in the telling of this rather unusual story including the premise itself of sport fishing in the desert. The acting is first rate and some of the scenery is pretty impressive.

It is thoroughly entertaining even though the British accent keeps you on your toes so as not to miss any of the dialogue.

In the words of one movie-goer “it’s a charming gem of a movie with almost unbelievable challenges facing them with great acting by all the principals”.

CLASSIFICATION

for some violence, sexual content and brief language.

A BOTTLE IN THE GAZA SEA

Drama
In French and Arabic with English subtitles

PRINCIPAL CAST MEMBERS
Agathe Bonitzer: 17-year-old Tai Levine, resident of Jerusalem
Riff Cohen: her older brother Eytan
Mahmoud Shalaby: 20-year-old Naim Al-Farjouk, a resident of Gaza
Hiam Abbass: Naïm’s widowed mother

REVIEW
There’s always hope: that’s the message we take away after seeing this small scale film about the on-going situation in the Gaza strip, an area surrounded by Israel.

The acting is uniformly good and the story is a credible one taking time to portray the contrasts such as rich/poor, freedom/confinement, Jew/Arab. I know which side I’d pick.

CLASSIFICATION

for brief scenes of the aftermath of a bombing.

FOR NITPICKERS ONLY
• Tai uses a search engine to find out the distance between Jerusalem and the Gaza and it shows it to be 72 km; in fact it’s 78 km.
• Naim’s mother takes one dish from the pile and places it on a cupboard shelf but it crashes down on to the empty counter where the other dishes used to be but have somehow disappeared.

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY

Mystery, suspense

PRINCIPAL CAST MEMBERS
Mark Strong: Jim Prideaux, field agent in Czechoslovakia
Tom Hardy: London based field agent Ricki Tarr
Benedict Cumberbatch: his immediate superior Peter Guillam
Simon McBurney: Oliver Lacon, the Civil Service officer responsible for the Intelligence Service
Gary Oldman: George Smiley, retired former Deputy Head of the Service
Toby Jones: Percy Alleline, Chief of the Circus.
Colin Firth: one of his deputies, Bill Haydon Commander of London Station
Ciarán Hinds: Roy Bland, Second in command of London Station
David Denick: Toby Esterhase, one of four who ran Witchcraft

REVIEW
Based on the novel written by John le Carré, seeing it as a movie requires you to be more alert to what is going on regarding people and events because you do not have the luxury of turning back the pages to refresh your memory when things get confusing. And things get confusing very quickly: to begin with a lot of jargon is used so it takes some figuring out to realize reference to “the circus” is the name for the British secret service agency MI6 and not some place where you find animals and clowns performing. Similarly the cousins are not relatives of these agents, that is the name they have given for the C.I.A. and Control is the person at the head of the agency rather than some kind of device.

Some of the other terms are less difficult to figure out (such as a mole and a honey-trap) but you have to have your wits about you simply to understand what is being said. But that's not all: trying to keep track of all the people coming and going is nearly impossible. The end credits list a cast of 44 people and these are just the “principal actors”.

Somewhere along the way I lost track of who the good guys were and which ones were the bad guys (or was it the other way around?) and so I left after two hours feeling totally overwhelmed and at a complete loss. Not a nice feeling I can assure you.

CLASSIFICATION

for violence, some sexuality/nudity and language.

FRIENDS WITH KIDS

Romantic comedy

PRINCIPAL CAST MEMBERS
Adam Scott: advertising executive Jason
Jennifer Westfeldt: his long time friend foundation staffer Julie
Maya Rudolph: 38-year-old Leslie
Chris O’Dowd: her husband 32-year-old Alex
Kristen Wiig: their friend Missy
Jon Hamm: her husband Ben
Megan Fox: Broadway chorus dancer Mary Jane
Edward Burns: divorced father Kurt

REVIEW
A lot of the dialog is just one notch up from gangster rap what with the blatant references to all things sexual and rude hand gestures just in case you missed the point. Almost every verbal exchange includes the f-word at least once as this potty-mouth crowd even uses the word in front of children. What a fine example of parenthood that is!

The visual jokes are infantile: I kid you not, relying on such hilarious things as a photo of their child’s first "poo in the potty" or a feces smeared father changing the child’s diaper. Doesn’t get any better than that I’ll tell you.

Although I walked out and didn’t get to see the ending I have little doubt about how everything plays out given the fact everything up to that point was so déjà-vu.

CLASSIFICATION

for sexual content and language.

FOR NITPICKERS ONLY
• The product placement rotating bottle nitpick. From one shot to the next the bottle rotates without being touched so that the label is clearly seen. In this instance all this takes place while Jason and/or Kurt are drinking their beer of choice, Budweiser.
• When Jason abruptly turns his car around he does so illegally because he’s on a one-way street.

P.S.
Ralph’s Rule of Redundancy once more holds true:
“Any film where one person (Jennifer Westfeldt in this case) takes on more than 2 key positions (Writer, Producer, Director and Star) has a major shortcoming: the absence of independent critical judgement, that results in something less than it might have been.”

THE LORAX

Animated musical comedy

PRINCIPAL VOICES
Zac Efron: 12-year-old Ted Wiggins
Taylor Swift: Audrey, the girl of his dreams
Betty White: Ted’s Grammy Norma
Jenny Slate: Ted’s mother
Danny DeVito: the Lorax, self-appointed guardian of the trees
Rob Riggle: Aloysius O'Hare, head of the O’Hare Air company
Ed Helms: the Once-ler

REVIEW
Sending a strong message of what might happen with uncontrolled use of our natural resources, this tale spins out amidst some of the most colourful backgrounds seen lately. Everything is bright, even gaudy, with some cute cuddly creatures with great big eyes appearing from time to time.

It moves along aided in part by some upbeat song and dances and Ted’s speedy sequences on his motorbike. Unlike most films geared to the younger set, there are no rude noises for them to giggle at and no double entendres for us older folk.

CLASSIFICATION

for brief mild language.

FOR NITPICKERS ONLY
When Tim and Audrey are laying down head to foot, the relative position of their heads to one another varies from scene to scene.

BIG MIRACLE

Drama

PRINCIPAL CAST MEMBERS
John Krasinski: local television news reporter Adam Carlson
Ahmaogak Sweeney: native Alaskan 11-year-old Nathan
Drew Barrymore: his ex-girlfriend, Greenpeace volunteer Rachel Kramer
Kristen Bell: L.A. television news reporter Jill Jerard
Ted Danson: oil executive J.W. McGraw, President of Alaskan Oil Corporation
Dermot Mulroney: Alaska Army National Guard Colonel Scott Boyer
Vinessa Shaw: presidential aide Kelly Meyers

REVIEW
This family nature story is based on an actual event that took place in October 1988 (although the producers have taken a few liberties as noted below in the Nitpick section) when three gray whales got trapped in the ice near Point Barrow, Alaska. With a straight forward timeline, we get to see the frantic efforts against-the-clock to rescue these animals as winter approaches.

It’s interesting to see the various agendas the participants had but in the end the feel-good message is that everybody sets aside their petty differences and comes together in a common purpose.

CLASSIFICATION

for some strong language.

FOR NITPICKERS ONLY
• Nathan takes one look at a woman and states “she’s hot”. These events took place in 1988 about 20 years before that colloquial expression became part of the lexicon of descriptive terms.
• The whales were given Inuit names Putu, Siku, and Kanik and English names Bonnet, Crossbeak, and Bone not Fred, Wilma and Bam Bam.
• The two Skycrane helicopters did not tow the barge they planned on using because it was frozen solid in the ice. Instead they repeatedly dropped a 5-ton concrete pillar in an effort to break up the ice.
• If your eyelashes freeze over just put your hand over your eye until the ice melts and you can open your eye. There is no need to resort to more unconventional methods.
• The lowest recorded temperature was 30-degrees below zero, not 50.
• When Rachel dons scuba gear she puts on a pair of gloves and plunges into the hole but in the underwater shots she no longer is wearing gloves but they reappear when she surfaces.
• Winter had not yet set in so the ice was only four or five inches thick not the ten inches or so when seen on edge.
• Water pumps were used to keep the water moving to prevent the ice from forming. Underwater heaters can not raise the sea temperature even one degree and so would be useless.
• The authorities would not allow the rescuers and the international media covering the event to remain standing directly in the path of a huge icebreaker intent on breaking though to them.

P.S.
Stihl chainsaws is one of the most blatant product placement campaigns ever, lacking the subtly usually associated with this form of marketing with close-ups of their product every chance they get.

P.S.S.
Stick around for the end credits when the photos of the real people are paired with their movie counterpart.

SAFE HOUSE

Action/adventure

PRINCIPAL CAST MEMBERS
Denzel Washington: ex-CIA agent Tobin Frost
Ryan Reynolds: low level CIA agent Matt Weston
Brendan Gleeson: his boss David Barlow
Liam Cunningham: MI6 operative Alec Wade
Vera Farmiga: Catherine Linkater
Sam Shepard: CIA Director Harlan Whitford
Robert Patrick: CIA interrogation squad team leader Daniel Kiefer

REVIEW
They have squandered the talents (and good looks) of an A-list cast with a clunker. What a mess, literally, because it’s shot almost entirely with a hand-held camera resulting in jerky indistinct images flitting by. The editing it seems was done trying not to have any one scene appear for more than two seconds, three at most.

Despite this meat-cleaver style of editing too much has been left in with the result it goes on for almost 2 hours. That’s far too long for a movie that has very little in the way of a script with hardly any character development relying instead on non-stop action. It simply charges ahead at breakneck speed without much regard to telling a story, one that’s been done better by others many times before. Typical of this genre, it’s purposely confusing so you wind up scratching your head wondering “what the heck was that all about?”.

One more thing: bring ear protection because everything is loud, really loud and if you have something to say to your neighbour be prepared to shout. Better still: skip the whole thing and don’t waste two hours of your time.

CLASSIFICATION

for violence and profanity.

FOR NITPICKERS ONLY
Matt winds up with a scratch that looks like railway tracks near the temple on the right side of his face. Throughout the film it changes from a single scratch to a double one.