Leading Ladies: January 7, 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.
A note about the links: Some sites require registration or are for paid subscribers, and some links are good for a limited time only.
White Noise
Stars: Michael Keaton, Deborah Kara Unger, Chandra West
Director: Geoffrey Sax
Rating: PG-13
The good news: Michael Keaton is back, after a dearth of big-screen action in recent years, and our critics are happy to see him. The bad news: he should have chosen a better comeback vehicle that this creepy thriller about an architect who communicates with his dead wife via household appliances. For one thing, says the Los Angeles Time's Carina Chocano, the movie focuses way too much on said appliances. "Perhaps the scariest things about it are how hard it tries to be cool and how fundamentally it equates cool with possessing the right stuff," Chocano writes. USA Today's Claudia Puig is also disturbed by the "lackluster, scary-free" story's reliance on gadgetry, which she says, throws "a lot of unimpressive, not exactly cutting-edge technology in our faces."
And what about the performance of the likable Mr. Keaton? The New York Times's Manohla Dargis says the movie is worthy "neither of Mr. Keaton's talents nor even a desperate horror fan's attention."
Female consensus: They'd prefer sweet silence.
In Good Company
Stars: Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace, Scarlett Johansson
Director: Paul Weitz
Rating: PG-13
Fortunately, our critics also find something to love this week with this lightweight, but endearing dramedy starring Quaid as a successful magazine ad exec who's suddenly replaced by a younger, though definitely not better, upstart (Grace.). Director Weitz (About a Boy) "delivers an amusing and unusually compassionate look at today's corporate culture," says the New York Daily News's Jami Bernard. The NY Times's Manohla Dargis is also happy that "this is one of those unusual American movies in which the women, though manifestly marginal to the story's core meaning, have inner lives that linger long after the characters have served their purpose." All our critics agree that Dennis Quaid is only getting better with age. Salon's Stephanie Zacharek compares Quaid to Jimmy Stewart, saying "he carries his role here with just the right proportions of lightness and craggy bitterness -- he's sexy because of his adamant refusal to suffer fools gladly." The New York Daily News's Jami Bernard agrees: "Quaid's performance is amazingly good," she says, adding that "Grace gradually pulls his character up from what could have been a cliche."
Female consensus: Thanks to an aging-like-fine-wine Dennis Quaid, moviegoers are definitely in good company.
In limited release:
The soapy Southern drama A Love Song for Bobby Long is "not terrible for a movie featuring John Travolta as a literature professor, but not too good either," says L.A. Weekly's Ella Taylor, while the L.A. Times's Carina Chocano says the flick's New Orleans characters "really know how to turn a phrase, in itself a pleasure so rare it all but demands any flaws be forgiven." Despite rave reviews for Sean Penn's performance as a deranged man with a plan in the fact-based drama The Assassination of Richard Nixon, the New York Times's Manohla Dargis says that "because there's no discernible point to (the movie), no sense of larger purpose, the film has only craft and technique to recommend it." On iVillage.com Beth Pinsker says it's almost hard to concentrate on anything else in the film except the acting of the leading man. The movie's not the thing with the first major big-screen adaptation of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, starring a raving Al Pacino, says the New York Daily News's Jami Bernard: "Taking one's pound of flesh and having it, too, leads to a queasy comedy in which Pacino burns a hole in the screen while the frivolity around him sputters." On iVillage, Beth Pinsker says the focus on Pacino actually levels the playing field for Skylock and the Merchant.
Seen these films? Tell us what you think.
Find out about last week's releases: Meet the Fockers and Phantom of the Opera.
