Movie Box Review

NEW YEAR'S EVE:  Not At Any Price - Calling it a "Sit-Com" Insults TV

NEW YEAR'S EVE is such a calculated piece of commercial manufacture that it deserves a Powerpoint presentation more than a review.  Although strictly speaking it isn't a sequel to Valentine's Day (and in fact a few of the same actors turn up in this one playing different roles), everything has been done to duplicate the style and execution of that $216M worldwide grosser, including hiring the same screenwriter (Katherine Fugate) and director (Garry Marshall).  But the joke's on them, because this one is even worse than Valentine's was.

The setting this time is NY rather than LA, but the format is the same:  intercut between a dozen mostly  romantic comedy storylines featuring recognizable actors, all taking place on the same holiday night.  (It's quite cost-efficient because since the episodes are mostly self-contained, the actors are each only needed for a week or so, making them available at a bargain price.)  That date, of course, is December 31, and the focal point of the various stories is Times Square, the dropping of the ball, and the splashy party that's supposed to be taking place afterward. 

To the extent there's any one central character, it's probably the woman trying to make sure the ball-drop goes smoothly (Hilary Swank, uncomfortable as usual in a standard Hollywood role).  The other stories radiate outward from that.  We get the rock star singing as part of the Times Square festivities (Jon Bon Jovi) and his ex who happens to be catering the party (Katherine Heigl); the back-up singer (Lea Michele) caught in an elevator--let me repeat that, caught in an elevator, because that plot hasn't been used since 1964--with a neighbor who hates New Year's (Ashton Kutcher); the teen (Abigail Breslin) who's desperate to get to Times Square for the sake of a boy and her mother (Sarah Jessica Parker) who's trying to find her; the guy who works for the company throwing the party (Josh Duhamel) and has to be at a certain corner after midnight to meet the mystery potential love of his life; the drone office worker with tickets to the party (Michelle Pfeiffer) who offers them to a delivery boy (Zac Efron) if he'll fulfill her fantasies--and no, not those kinds of fantasies; and so on.  In a nearby hospital we also get a dying old guy who wants to see one last New Year's (Robert DeNiro) with the help of his nurse (Halle Berry) because he seemingly (accent on "seemingly") doesn't have any family, along with a truly cringe-inducing race between Jessica Biel and Sarah Paulson to be the first to give birth in the new year and win a cash prize--this one should have had a separate soundtrack, although screams of horror might have been more appropriate than a laugh track.  There are a few supposed mysteries about how the stories will connect, all easily guessable, moronic or both, and since this is a Garry Marshall movie, Hector Elizondo shows up.  And Ryan Seacrest.

Marshall has never been a subtle craftsmen, but his best romances have some grace and charm.  New Year's Eve, though, is a slack assembly of flat scenes, given the illusion of pace by the fact that double-digit plotlines are jumbled into 2 hours.  Worse even than the holes where laughs should have been is the shameless sentimentality that's wielded throughout with utter cynicism.  Even though he's considered an "actors' director," Marshall doesn't do any of the stars favors:  the cinematography by Charles Minsky is so ugly that many of the performers look awful, and there's no chemistry between any of the couples (particularly Heigl and Bon Jovi, whose scenes together are like a traffic accident).  It's embarrassing to see Sofia Vergara, consistently hilarious on Modern Family, reduced to playing a sidekick with a funny accent, and simply painful to watch Robert DeNiro, once one of the great actors of his day, collecting yet another bored paycheck.  Also, someone should have told Heigl that the last thing her career needed was a role where she constantly screams and complains stridently.  The survivors include Breslin, who is able to appear half-way human, and Pfeiffer and Efron, who have a ludicrous storyline but manage to skate above it.

Complaining about a movie like New Year's Eve is like complaining that the sun will go down in the evening:  with its cast, and the fact that it owns the romantic comedy genre for the next few weeks (Young Adult is only barely a comedy and definitely not a romance), it's going to make money.  Which means in a year or two, it may well be our duty to sit through "Fourth of July" or "First Night of Passover."  Sadly, the calendar will run out of holidays before Warners runs out of ways to exploit them.

The double meaning of "little" in the title of Fox's busted sitcom pilot LITTLE IN COMMON is that the 3 couples at its center are brought together only because their respective kids all play on the same little league team.  That's about it for cleverness, though, in this comedy that's light on laughs. 

The show was written by Rob Thomas, creator of the beloved but low-rated Veronica Mars, and it's a smooth piece of work that wouldn't have embarrassed anyone had it gotten on the air.  (It's been reported that the pilot is still alive for midseason consideration, although apparently there would be a fair amount of redevelopment involved.)  The pilot's main couple is made up of Rob Corddry and Paula Marshall; they've moved from California to a suburban town in Texas so he can become the new middle school principal.  (There's zero attempt to suggest any kind of Texas atmosphere--it's just generic suburbs--and although one assumes that if the show had gone to series, we would have seen something of Corddry's job, it's just a conversation point in the pilot.)  They have a daughter who's a demon soccer player and a son who's never shown any interest in sports--until he sees the cute girl who's playing shortstop for the local little league team.  That brings Corddry and Marshall in contact with Kevin Hart and Gabrielle Union, since Hart is the (fanatical, of course) coach of the team, as well as with Lombardo Boyar and Alanna Ubach, their next-door neighbors who are also parents of the cute shortstop.   At first Corddry and Marshall don't get along with the other couples, but by the end of the pilot, they're all becoming friends; you know the drill.

Little In Common could have shared an hour with Raising Hope on FOX, but in comparison with that show it lacks any distinctiveness.  The couples are all equally bland (big laughs are supposed to come from Corddry's character getting back spasms at inconvenient moments; Boyar makes beignets dosed with tequila), and so is the storyline--there's a disastrously unfunny bit in the 3rd act where Corddry and Marshall are briefly mistaken for racists.  The cast is attractive and they play together reasonably well, but without any ensemble sparks; the strongest impression comes from Fred Dwyer, channeling Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino as a cranky older neighbor.  As directed by Adam Bernstein, who's directed a lot of single-camera cable shows, the overall feel is easygoing if impersonal.  

There's nothing horribly wrong with Little In Common, which actually makes it a challenge to redevelop; the show just isn't particularly interesting or funny.  (If I were playing FOX creative chief--and I guess I am--I'd say Family Album has more possibilities; see my review here.)   Little In Common is a comfortable half-hour that's got all the impact of Muzak.

In the 137 minutes of Pirates of the Caribbean:  On Stranger Tides, the 4th installment in Disney's hugely successful franchise (and yes, you have to sit through all 10 minutes of end credits for a not-crucial coda scene), there is exactly one inspired idea.  About halfway through, we're introduced to the movie's version of mermaids, which are more like mer-pires, who drag men underwater, sprout fangs and devour them.  For a few minutes, it's almost like we're watching a real adventure story.  But after one action scene, the only mermaid we're left with is Serena (Astrid Berges-Frisbey), a depressed creature who pines for love of a dull clergyman (Sam Claflin)--and we remember that actually, this is just a deeply uninteresting corporate product.

The last Pirates entry, 2007's At World's End, was an overlong mess, impenetrably plotted and mistaking spectacle for story, but it nevertheless made almost $1 billion worldwide--and that was without 3D ticket premiums.  So it stood to reason that Johnny Depp would reluctantly accept his $35 million paycheck and don his Jack Sparrow garb once again.  This time the Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer team have moved on from director Gore Verbinski (who directed the terrific Rango instead), and replaced him with Rob Marshall.  The result isn't particularly successful:  Verbinski may have lost control of the last picture, but he brought a buoyantly crazy, almost surreal visual touch to the movies that set them apart from most blockbusters, while Marshall, known previously for musicals like Chicago and Nine, is out of his element and brings no personality at all to the proceedings.  (His action sequences are edited like the musical numbers in Nine, and that's not a compliment.)

On Stranger Tides also dumps much of the supporting cast from the first trilogy, notably Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom, as well as comic relief Mackenzie Crook and Lee Arenberg.  While this makes sense in a way--the Knightley/Bloom storyline was pretty much exhausted--writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (who've been on the series since the beginning) haven't replaced them with any worthy substitutes.  Although the Knightley/Bloom characters were criticized, especially when compared to the outrageous fun of Depp, as being the conventional parts of the movies, they provided the tales with their narrative spine and something like a heart.  Turning On Stranger Tides into The Johnny Depp Show, for all Depp's skill, makes Jack Sparrow's comic scheming and sneaky heroism feel mechanical. 

The story is more straightforward this time than in the previous couple of movies (although it still could have lost a couple of complications and 20 minutes of screen time).  Everyone is searching for the Fountain of Youth, meaning Jack, his old adversary Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), the British and Spanish fleets, the villainous Blackbeard (Ian McShane), and Angelica (Penelope Cruz), an old love of Jack's who also happens to be Blackbeard's daughter.  Naturally use of the Fountain requires not only finding it, but also assembling some mystical elements that include chalices located on Ponce de Leon's ship and a teardrop of the aforementioned mermaid, which means everyone has to go chasing around the Caribbean one step behind each other.  Cruz brings spirit to her part, and she's good in her sniping scenes with Depp (the two of them co-starred in Blow 10 years ago), but there's not much to her character beyond being fiery--Depp had more subversive chemistry with Knightley--while McShane plays yet another bad guy who's a pale shadow of his classic Al Swearingen in Deadwood.   

On Stranger Tides is less painful to sit through than vaguely dull.  The Disney/Bruckheimer brain trust has toned down the scale of the movie--no giant sea monsters this time, no huge ship battles.  We just get a lot of enormous studio soundstage sets that as filmed by Marshall and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski (who's shot all the other Pirates movies as well as several Tim Burton films) never fully mask their origin.  The transferred 3D provides little more than a few outstretched swords pointing at the audience.  (A 3D note:  if the trailer is to be trusted, Michael Bay, for whatever else one can say about him, may have some much more impressive 3D visuals on hand in the next Transformers.)  Hans Zimmer contributes the bombastic score he gives to action movies when he doesn't have a director like Christopher Nolan to challenge him, and the music and editing try to convince us we're watching something much more exciting than we really are.

Even if On Stranger Tides is "disappointing" at the box-office (and Mitch Metcalf's prediction has its opening weekend running 20% behind At World's End), it'll still make hundreds of millions around the world, so as long as Depp wants to keep cashing those paychecks, the franchise will no doubt continue.  Sadly, we in the audience can mark its progress from entertaining surprise to predictable exercise.  

(PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN:  ON STRANGER TIDES - Disney - PG 13 - 137 minutes - Director:  Rob Marshall - Script:  Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio - Cast:  Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Geoffrey Rush, Ian McShane, Sam Claflin, Kevin McNally, Astrid Berges-Frisbey - Wide Release)