Movie Box Review

LARRY CROWNE:  Watch It At Home - Giant Stars/Tiny Ambitions

Allow me to play Nostradamus for a moment.  the day will come--and it's not far off--when you'll be sitting in front of your TV set, remote in hand (or maybe you'll be looking at your online streaming site, the vision is a little blurry).  In any case, you'll be going through the available titles, and among them will be LARRY CROWNE.  Oh that one, you'll think:  with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts.  You'd sorta thought of seeing that.  So you'll turn it on, and for 99 minutes, you'll chuckle a little bit, you'll feel moderately good when (spoiler alert) the stars fall for each other, and more than once you'll find your attention drifting and have to direct it back to the screen.  When it's over, you'll think:  that wasn't so bad.  And half an hour later, if someone asks you what you've watched lately, you'll have a hard time even remembering the title.

Larry Crowne is unfailingly, even insistently, amiable and positive, and yet there's something hollow about it.  It's clearly a project that Tom Hanks cares about passionately--he's not just the star, he co-wrote the script (with My Big Fat Greek Wedding's Nia Vardarlos), serves as one of the producers, and chose it as his first feature directing vehicle since That Thing You Do! in 1996--but none of that passion shows itself on screen.   He's telling the story of a middle-aged man who finds that losing his job and attending classes at a community college brings him new, young, vibrant friends (including Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Wilmer Valderrama), true love (with guess who) and a renewed commitment to life; the movie feels like it could have been made by George Clooney's character in Up In the Air for the scene where he convinces J.K. Simmons that downsizing can be a good thing. 

As a filmmaker, Hanks is professional enough, but he showed more of an eye, more sense for pacing and rhythm, and certainly more interest in performance detail, in That Thing You Do! 15 years ago.  Larry Crowne's supporting cast, which also includes George Takei, Cedric the Entertainer, Taraji P. Henson and Bryan Cranston, play sitcom level characters, and the plotting by Hanks and Vardarlos is lazily slack.

When Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts want to charm you, goddamn it, they're going to do it, so Larry Crowne is enjoyable enough in its negligible, disposable way.  No one does bumbling good-heartedness or sudden the-sun-just-came-out! grins like Hanks and Roberts.  But these are parts that could have been filled just as well by Peter Krause and Julie Bowen; and really, Krause and Bowen might have brought more reality to the story than these people who've been mega-stars for more than 20 years. There's a sense in which watching Hanks and Roberts play "ordinary people" is like an all-star episode of Undercover Boss--Hanks and Roberts have done so many movies from inside their movie-star bubble, with no relation to real life, that for them, "ordinary" is a character part.  

That, I think, is why there's something slightly smug and complacent about Larry Crowne.  It was one thing when Hanks portrayed the music world in That Thing You Do! as a glossy fantasy of the 1960s, because his protagonists were young and new to stardom.  But middle-aged men who lose their jobs, and in the case of Roberts' character, women who are unsatisfied by their professions and stuck in lousy marriages, recognize their own pain.  That's a pain Hanks doesn't care to acknowledge, so Larry Crowne barely misses a step on his way to fulfillment.  Consequently, his serenity feels easy and unearned.  Larry Crowne was made by tycoons who don't even know how out of touch they are; it's entertainment for the little people.

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Opening at 4,011 theaters, Transformers: Dark of the Moon should average a strong $20,800 per theater (for $83.5 million for the traditional Friday-Sunday weekend).  The third Transformers has already grossed $5.5 million in Tuesday previews and $13.5 million in Wednesday midnight showings.  The film should do $75 million Wednesday through Thursday, the $83+ million Friday-Sunday, and about $18 million on Monday, July 4.  Add all that up and it should reach $195 million through Monday.  Critical reception so far has been soft for the Transformers sequel, 39% positive at RottenTomatoes, although this film should be fairly critic-proof because of the spectacle. Be sure to check out Mitch Salem's review of the film.

At about 2,750 theaters, Tom Hanks' Larry Crowne should average a mediocre $5,200 (for $14.5 million the traditional Friday-Sunday weekend).  Critical reaction to the R-rated comedy has been mixed (47% positive reviews at RottenTomatoes).  The film should gross about $19 million Friday-Monday.

In the afterthought department, Monte Carlo with Selena Gomez should average a way below par $2,500 per theater at about 2,400 theaters.  The film, which has not been released for reviews, should total $6 million Friday-Sunday and $8 million Friday-Monday.


                                               (millions)

Cars 2 and Bad Teacher should take moderate hits in their second weekend (when looking at our standard Friday-Sunday comparison period).      

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FAMILY ALBUM was one of the more buzzed-about FOX pilots of this past development season, and although it's not on the network's announced schedule, Deadline reports that it's in contention for midseason and will even shoot a second prototype episode.  So this isn't so much a postmortem as a look at how the show could improve its way onto the air.  (Let's leave aside the fact that even as-is, it's already far more promising than I Hate My Teenage Daughter--reviewed here--which FOX did pick up for Fall.)


For one thing, the gimmick that gives Famiiy Album its title is awkward and should be deemphasized.  In the pilot, written by the team of Joe Port & Joe Wiseman, the concept has the show's lead couple Marni and Dave (Rachael Harris and Mike O'Malley) explaining a group of online familiy photos to someone; in so doing, they flash back to the story that links the photos.  These interstitial bits are probably meant to be a parallel to the "interviews" that punctuate episodes of Modern Family, but in this case the breaks in action don't add perspective or offer different angles on the storyline.  They just distract from the flow of the episode.

Of course, for any single camera sitcom about a dysfunctional but loving family, Modern Family is the elephant in the room generally, setting a fearsomely high bar for the genre; Family Album doesn't have any particular distinctiveness, unlike a show like Raising Hope, and since it dwells in a millieu very much like Modern's, it's hard to avoid unfortunate comparisons.  Album centers on Marni and Dave and their 3 kids, one adopted (that's Damaris Diaz; the others are Ted Sutherland and Isabella Cramp), and also Marni's wacky brother Steve (Rob Huebel) and his new girlfriend Holly (Joy Osmanski).  Dave is bumbling but goodhearted, not unlike Ty Burrell's Phil on Modern, and his son has some complexes, sort of like Phil's boy.  But where Modern Family broadened its scope to include gay and May-December couples, Family Album just gives us another irresponsible brother-in-law character.  The show badly needs to find some ideas that are less generic.  Also, although it was considered a "get" to have Shawn Levy direct the pilot, since he's a big-time movie director (Night At the Museum, Cheaper By the Dozen, the Steve Martin Pink Panther remake), he opts for broad physical humor in lieu of character, and that doesn't help.

What works in Family Album is the cast, especially the leads.  O'Malley finally had his breakthrough role on Glee, and he brings the same Everyman likability to Dave, while Harris (who's superb in the small indie movie Natural Selection, hopefully coming to theaters soon) has intelligence and snap timing to spare.  It wasn't a mistake to build a show around the two of them, and it's still not too late to make this one come together. 

Family Album is already better than several of the other family comedies heading for the air this season (that's you, Last Man Standing), and its central couple has more charm and chemistry than, say, the leads in Whitney.  If the show can find a voice of its own, it might make its way off the Island of Busted Pilots.

The Sked's Verdict:  Worth Another Look.

Read more about TV's new shows at THE SKED PILOT REPORT.

Li Xiaoran, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Sandra Ng, Peter Chan

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CBS has joined FOX, ABC and The CW in announcing its Fall premiere schedule.  (See Mitch Metcalf on the calculations that go into these announcements HERE).  As with the other networks, most premieres will be the week of Sept. 19-25, with a few exceptions:

Wed Sept 14:  early premiere of SURVIVOR

Mon Sept 19:  2 BROKE GIRLS premieres out of time slot, given the benefit of airing after the season opener of 2 1/2 MEN, which is sure to have a ratings bump that night over curiosity about the Sheen/Kutcher transition

Thurs Sept 29:  HOW TO BE A GENTLEMAN debuts a week late (probably so the network can use an extra THE BIG BANG THEORY the previous week to give PERSON OF INTEREST a good lead-in for its premiere).

This is what gives ulcers to control freak movie directors:  despite Michael Bay's well-publicized orders to theater projectionists, at tonight's premiere IMAX showing of TRANSFORMERS:  DARK OF THE MOON in West Los Angeles, the 3D system imploded an hour into the film and was never fixed, causing the rest of the picture to be projected in a mere 2 dimensions. 

As much as I would have liked to see the entire film as the director intended, there's something reassuringly karmic about Michael Bay being betrayed by his own technology, since that's ultimately all he's got.  Transformers 3 isn't suspenseful or surprising, and it isn't even exciting, really; what it is, is Big.  Fantastically, impossibly, spectacularly Big.  And Big is one of the things movies do better than any other form of entertainment.  No medium can so convincingly create the illusion of seeing and experiencing a reality that couldn't exist.  So Transformers 3, if it's to be seen, should by all means be caught on the biggest theater screen, with the loudest sound system, by means of 3D technology that actually works.

This third installment in the fabulously successful Transformers franchise ($700M worldwide gross for the first movie, $835M for the second) is easily the best, which is faint praise but nonetheless earned.  The stupid comedy scenes have been minimized (although Ken Jeong is briefly around to remind us why), Kevin Dunn and Julie White as the parents of Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBouef) are barely around, the plot (script by Ehren Kruger) is more or less comprehensible, and Bay's action sequences have a geographical coherence they've lacked in the past.  More to the point, unlike Pirates of the Caribbean 4, Green Lantern, Thor or any of the other summer action blockbusters except X Men First Class (which is on a far smaller scale), Transformers 3 delivers the set-piece goods, one giant scene after another of massive machines blowing up buildings, people, entire cities, and each other.

None of this makes the picture "good," exactly.  Kruger's script may be an improvement over its predecessors, but it takes far too long to get going and I won't even bother to detail what the plot is (something about materials hidden on the moon for the nefarious use of the bad robots), and the dialogue credited to him (which may well have been partly written by others) is for the most part horrible.  The robots themselves are completely uninteresting piles of machinery, some of them good and some bad (and some purportedly cute, which is painful).  Most of the people don't fare much better.  LaBouef has become less appealing with every part he's played, and as his new love interest, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley manages the considerable feat of making Megan Fox look like an accomplished actress (in the one scene where she's called upon to do some, you know, acting, she makes Fox look like Meryl Streep); even in the looks department--which is why, let's face it, she was cast in the first place--her gorgeousness is pretty generic.  Patrick Dempsey, Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson are among the others who barely register amidst the carnage.  Luckily, Bay has a few self-starters in the smaller roles:  Frances McDormand, John Turturro, John Malkovich and Alan Tudyk supply some bright moments as they support the more worthy independent work they do. 

But Michael Bay movies aren't about scripts, characters or actors.  So it should be noted that in the hour of 3D that was screened, the quality was exceptionally good, by far the best since Avatar--his insistence on bright projection doesn't just rescue the image from dank blurriness, it eliminates the eye-strain we've all been taking for granted the past year and a half.  The special effects, too, are absolutely top of the line; the presence of those robots on real streets, ripping apart real buildings, is completely convincing.  Amir Mokri's cinematography is crisp and fluid, and even though the movie is inevitably overlong at 154 minutes, the editing by the team of Roger Barton, William Goldenberg and Joel Negron moves things along.  The score by Steve Jablonsky is mostly pounding noise, which is surely what Bay wanted.  

The depressing thing about Transformers:  Dark of the Moon is that it's good enough to guarantee more installments.  Which is also the depressing thing about Michael Bay--he's undeniably talented, and so successful he has no reason to change, but there may never have been a talented filmmaker less interested in humanity or nuance.  On some level, he is Megatron; he wants us under the dictatorial thumb of his overwhelming, unstoppable imagery.  And yet, take some comfort in this:  he can be defeated by as little as a busted 3D projector.

For Thursday, June 23 2011

Photos courtesy of Yahoo! Movies Hong Kong

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