Leading Ladies: February 4, 2005
Heading to the movies this weekend? Find out what's worth your time according to the top women film critics at the nation's best publications. Every Friday morning we'll give you the female perspective on what to expect when the curtain rises.
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The Wedding Date
Stars: Debra Messing, Dermot Mulroney, Holland Taylor
Director: Clare Kilner
Rating: PG-13
It may have chick flick written all over it, but our Leading Ladies are RSVPing "no" to the invitation for this Super Bowl-weekend romantic comedy about a woman (Messing) who avoids going solo to her sister's wedding by hiring a male escort (Mulroney) to pose as her date.
The Philadelphia Inquirer's Carrie Rickey says the movie is "a vaguely creepy and mildly diverting rom-com," while Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum calls it a "weird robotic lark," with little chemistry in the "the fizzle between Mulroney and Messing."
The New York Daily News's Elizabeth Weitzman says The Wedding Date is "as generically superficial as its title," where "not a single scene connects smoothly with the next." And there's no dissention from the Los Angeles Times' Carina Chocano, who says the lack of chemistry and the attempt to sell the use of a gigolo as a feel-good scenario leads to "an oddly depressing, lost little movie that eventually caves in on itself."
As for the performances, the critics seem to agree that Mulroney steals the show. Salon's Stephanie Zacharek says Mulroney "is a stealth actor: Whenever you see him in a picture, you're not just reminded of how good he almost always is ‑- you have the sense of discovering it for the first time." Meanwhile, Zacharek says Messing's "timing always feels calculated ‑- I began to imagine that I could see her eyes shifting just as she's getting ready to fire off a zinger."
Female consensus: Even Messing's TV fans may want to leave this Date off their calendar
Boogeyman
Stars: Barry Watson, Lucy Lawless, Emily Deschanel
Director: Stephen T. Kay
Rating: PG-13
It's never a good thing when not even one major-market film critic in the country has reviewed a certain movie, which is the case with this scary flick starring 7th Heaven's Watson. It does, however, probably tell you all you need to know about the quality of the movie.
The sole female voice to weigh in on Boogeyman: Horror.com's Staci Layne Wilson, who says, "If you're 12 years old, or if you scare easily, Boogeyman is not a bad way to spend an hour and a half."
Female consensus: Unless you're 12, skip it
In limited release: The marriage drama Daybreak is a clichéd disappointment according to the Village Voice's Melissa Anderson, who says, "The failings of Daybreak can be summed up in this maxim from The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan: 'Tynan's Law of Responsible Cinema: all films that seek seriously to diagnose the Contemporary Human Predicament are bad.'" TV Guide's Maitland McDonagh points out the irony in The Nomi Song, a documentary about the titular '80s underground performance artist: "Nomi's old collaborators all bemoan his transformation from scrappy little scene maker into slick commercial act, as though the essence of the New Wave in general... weren't inherently slick and commercial." Sundance favorite Rory O'Shea Was Here, an Irish drama about a pair of rebellious, wheelchair-bound twenty-somethings, is a "funny, compelling and poignant celebration of friendship," says USA Today's Claudia Puig. TV Guide's McDonagh says "[Geoffrey] Rush and the luminous [Judy] Davis contribute powerful, nuanced performances" to Swimming Upstream, the inspirational true story of dysfunctional family survivor and Australian swim champion Tony Fingleton. Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum says Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda "finds a gentle and cumulatively mesmerizing way to convey the connection among the children" in Nobody Knows, the Cannes favorite drama about a group of Tokyo siblings who survive their parents' abandonment. Assisted Living, a drama about a slacker orderly at a nursing home, didn't make a fan of the New York Post's Debra Birnbaum, who says the flick is "jarringly insensitive and amateurish."
