The Film Junkie

Though this film is fun and visually stunning, it is terribly predictable from the first five minutes.  I really wanted a mystery here and I was hoping that they were somehow going to surprise me and that the outcome would not be exactly what I saw coming…alas it was.

Josh Hartnett has a lot of fun playing a sort of dark hero caught up in a modern film noir through a case of mistaken identity.  He revels in some great one-liners and I hope he will continue to get more roles that let him get kicked around like this rather than the romantic leads.

Lucy Liu is probably the highlight of the film as Hartnett’s love interest, a hyper coroner thirsty to solve every mystery.  It is a joy to watch her stretch her legs by playing other than the bitchy dominatrix type.

Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman and Stanley Tucci play the type of characters they always play and Ben Kingsley brings it with another creative characterization as The Rabbi.

A fun frolick of a film, but I saw it all coming a mile away.

Grade: B+

For some reason this TV movie was nominated for a ton of Emmys and Golden Globes.  This movie is slow, dull and badly written.  The best part of the film is a great performance by the eternally wonderful Annette Bening, and I have no idea how she pulls it off because the script and director and certainly giving her no help.

This is the story of the girlfriend of famed dietician Herman Tarnower (Ben Kingsley, smarmy and great) who shot him in cold blood while claiming that she only intended to kill herself.

Bening plays Jean Harris as the together and confident woman she surely was, but we are never really given a good idea of why such a woman would be attracted to the womanizing and chauvanistic Tarnower.  Harris says again and again that she wants to be told where and when instead of asked, but for such a complex character as Jean Harris this seems a pathetic excuse that doesn’t ever really work.

This movie is dull, but Bening gives it light.

Grade: C+