Movie Previews by Neil Cohen

The Life Before Her Eyes

3 popcorns

Despite stellar performances from everyone in the cast, confident direction by Vadim Perelman and beautiful cinematography, The Life Before Her Eyes is a long lead-up to a colossal cheat that utterly ruins all that came before it.

Evan Rachel Wood and Uma Thurman play Diana, a high school girl who survived a horrifying school shooting, and 15 years later must deal with the guilt of having lived when her best friend died. Wood and Eva Amurri (Susan Sarandon’s daughter) are wonderful as polar opposites, the bad girl and the good Christian girl, and their friendship grounds the film for most of its length.

Thurman is given the harder role of playing a shell-shocked mother trying to make it past the worst kind of anniversary. Despite having the life she always wanted, with a handsome older husband and adorable child, Diana can’t forget that she heard the school shooter say he was coming to school with a gun and didn’t say anything, and that Maureen (Amurri), her best friend, died in the resulting massacre. I was thoroughly engrossed in the story’s ruminations on the choices we make and how people change from their “young and wild” days, but only when I thought it was leading to a satisfying ending.

Unfortunately, Perelman rewards your attentiveness with a slap in your face, one that starts to sting more the longer you reflect on what it does to the mystery you invested so much time in unraveling. I’m also bothered by the fact that we know what Uma Thurman looked like at Evan Rachel Wood’s age, and the latter actress would not have grown into the former. Perelman’s The House of Sand and Fog was a much better film, and The Life Before Her Eyes certainly looks gorgeous, but coming on the heels of the Virginia Tech and Columbine shooting anniversaries, The Life Before Her Eyes is more like The Tacky House of Smoke and Mirrors.

May madness! Great movies big and small kick off the summer

While the Summer Movie Season doesn’t officially start until Robert Downey Jr. becomes the kind of Iron Man you didn’t see running in a marathon last month, there are a lot of movies opening up that will hold a special appeal for the GLBTQ community.

Son of Rambow was a big hit with Phoenix Film Festival goers as it told the hilarious and touching tale of two British boys who set out to make their own version of Rambo in 1980s England, even though it goes against the staunch teachings of the one boy’s family. “Rambow” will duke it out with Iron Man in early May, with Downey playing wealthy industrialist Tony Stark, who creates an armored suit, then decides to battle evil-goers.

McDreamy lovers may flock to Made of Honor, although it sounds suspiciously like a cross-gender version of My Best Friend’s Wedding. For my money, I feel the need for speed, Speed Racer, that is! Who can resist both the adorable Emile Hirsch (Into the Wild) and the fabulous Christina Ricci in a black bob (as gal-pal Trixie)? Add to that the Wachowski Brothers’ hallucinatory visuals and I think that Speed Racer will mop up the track with all competition, including mysterious Racer X (equally hot Matthew Fox).

I hope to have a review next issue of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, which opens May 16. Moreover, I hope that this sequel to the surprise megahit will wipe all memories of the ghastly Epic Movie from my mind. Again the Pevensie siblings return to Narnia to battle evil and help the rightful heir to assume the throne.

Finally, keep a look out for Then She Found Me, Helen Hunt’s directorial debut which stars Hunt as a school teacher whose life is turned upside down when her husband leaves her, her adoptive mother dies and her birth mother played by Bette Midler appears hoping for a happy reunion. And after these films? Well, let’s just say a sexagenarian with a bullwhip and fedora should rule the box office with his crystal skull and Shia LeBeouf!

Baby Mama

3 popcorns

Kate Holbrook (Tina Fey) is the kind of woman who on a first date tells her suitor she is 37 and desperately wanting to have a baby. The result is that the men pretend they are going to the bathroom and desperately flee her clutches by any means necessary before her wish can come true.

Holbrook decides to seek the help of a surrogate organization, led by an extremely fertile, though over-the-hill Chaffee Bicknell (Sigourney Weaver).

Through Bicknell, Holbrook meets Angie Ostrowiski (Amy Pohler), a white trash girl-woman from the other side of the tracks who agrees to carry Holbrook’s child. After breaking up with her greedy boyfriend, who is cheating on her and only in it for the money (Dax Shepard), Ostrowiski moves in with Holbrook and the movie becomes a female Odd Couple. Holbrook babyproofs the house, including the toilet, and Ostrowiski is so dumb she can’t figure it out so she pees in the sink, etc.

Fey and Pohler play off the fun relationship they built as Saturday Night Live “Weekend Update” co-anchors with great aplomb. Fey is the “straight man,” Pohler is the cut up. Many of the film’s funniest moments come from Fey’s deadpan reactions to Weaver, who is at least in her 50s, being able to conceive, though a cameo by Steve Martin as a trippy health food guru often feels forced.

A formulaic mid-movie romance blooms between Fey and a Jamba Juice-esque storeowner played by Greg Kinnear, but it’s the relationship between the women that makes up the core of the film.

Though slightly predictable, there are more than enough laughs in Baby Mama to make the trip to the theatre worthwhile — and who doesn’t love Fey, a comedienne so skilled she can make you bust a gut with a simple stare.

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