Movie Review Imagine Me and You

Imagine Me and You (2006) 

Directed by Ol Parker 

Written by Ol Parker

Starring Piper Perabo, Darren Boyd, Matthew Goode, Lena Headey

Release Date June 16th, 2006

Published June 24th, 2006

New Rule: Never watch a romantic movie after you have had your heart broken. You can't possibly be objective. Take for instance the new to DVD romantic comedy Imagine Me and You starring Piper Perabo. This pencil thin romance barely scratches the surface of it's characters and is certainly no visual wonder and yet I loved it. I loved it because like great comfort food even the most flawed romance can't help but instill good feelings.

Piper Perabo stars in Imagine Me and You as Rachel, an English girl on her wedding day. Like all brides she is beautiful and beaming in love. Her soon to be husband is Hector (Matthew Goode), Heck to his friends, a super nice guy, handsome, kind hearted and her best friend. According to the best man, Heck's best friend Cooper (Darren Boyd), Rachel and Heck have been married for years and are only now making it official.

The wedded bliss seems unstoppable even after Rachel meets Luce (Lena Headey) and the two have a typical romantic comedy meet cute, Rachel dropped her wedding ring in the punch bowl and Luce fished it out for her. The chemistry between the ostensibly straight Rachel and the openly gay Luce is palpable but Rachel just got married.

Nevertheless Rachel is feeling something and attempts to make friends with Luce but soon the attraction becomes undeniable and someone is going to get hurt.

It's not all that complicated a story. Poor Heck was doomed from the start of the film. We know this going in so all that director Ol Parker, in his debut picture, can do is try and be funny along the way to prolonging the inevitable which naturally comes with a chase to the airport, don't they always.

The key to Imagine Me and You are the performers. Piper Perabo, employing a surprisingly good British accent, uses her unending likability to smooth over much of the ill will her rather flighty decision making might engender. Lena Headey is a strong presence that any straight woman might have a hard time resisting. She too is likable and pleasant enough that we forgive her for breaking up the cute married couple.

Matthew Goode is a star in the making. Watch him in one of last year's best films, Woody Allen's Match Point, and now here in Imagine Me and You and his charisma is undeniable. The inevitable Hugh Grant comparisons are made only because he is British. Goode is far more weighty and present than Grant who could not pull off the performances Goode has in his first two features. Combining wit, charm and a deep soul Goode's Heck is the only character we truly feel that we get to know in the picture, everyone else is likable but pulled along by the plot.

Even as the characters are thin representations of real people and the plot is terribly predictable and the script is filled with awful platitudes about love at first sight, love eternal and all that romantic stuff, I can't find fault with such a lovable picture.

Never watch a love story when your heart is broken. Remember that. You might watch a movie like Imagine Me and You and with judgment impaired recommend it to all of your friends and various strangers. Like a great piece of comforting candy or ice cream, I can't help but love this ridiculous little romance Imagine Me and You.

Movie Review: Angel Has Fallen

Angel Has Fallen (2019)

Directed by Ric Roman Waugh

Written by Robert Mark Kamen, Matt Cook, Ric Roman Waugh

Starring Gerard Butler, Morgan Freeman, Piper Perabo 

Release Date August 23rd, 2019 

Published August 22nd, 2019 

Angel Has Fallen stars Gerard Butler as Secret Service Agent, Mike Banning. Banning was the protagonist of Olympus Has Fallen and London Has Fallen in recent years. In Angel Has Fallen we find a battered and bruised Banning suffering from post-concussion syndrome and relying on opioid to get by. Mike is hiding his condition from his wife (Piper Perabo) and even from his employer, President Trumbull (Morgan Freeman). 

The only person aware of Mike’s issues is his closest friend, heretofore never mentioned in either previous movie despite also being a military and security expert whose tactical abilities might have come in handy in Mike’s previous adventures, Wade Jennings (Danny Huston). The two come together for beers and reminiscing and Mike confides that he is having some issues even as career-wise things are going well. Mike is soon to be named as the new head of the Secret Service. 

The plot kicks in when Mike is guarding the President while he fishes on a private lake in Virginia. As Mike is taking a break to get more of his pills, the President’s security team is attacked by drones. All of the security team is killed except for Mike who also manages to rescue the President who is left in a coma from the attack. Mike is knocked unconscious and when he wakes up the next day he finds himself in handcuffs. 

It seems that Mike’s fingerprints and DNA were found inside of a van from which the drones were launched. There is also the matter of some $10 million dollars traced back to Russia that has been found in an offshore account in Mike’s name. The FBI, led by Agent Thompson (Jada Pinkett Smith), is convinced that Mike is guilty of having orchestrated the attack on the President. He’s arrested and things get even weirder when Mike is busted out by a group of military trained mercenaries. 

From there, Mike will escape the mercenaries and go on the run alone until he reaches the survivalist compound of his long absent father, Clay Banning (Nick Nolte), who gives him a place to hole up and regroup while the entire world searches for him. Mike has to figure out who set him up and how to prove to the good guys that he’s innocent so he can go after the bad guys and take them down while making sure the President is safe. 

Where to begin with this idiotic plot. Angel Has Fallen is a singularly stupid movie. Most modern action movies are kind of brain dead but Angel Has Fallen takes brain death to a place of oxygen starved severity. Where movies like Fast and Furious Presents Hobbs and Shaw are dumb loud action movies that also happen to be fun, Angel Has Fallen is dumb, loud and unwatchably insipid. Angel Has Fallen lacks the charm to be fun and dumb. Instead, we are simply inundated with one dumb action scene after another in service of a deeply idiotic plot. 

The dopey script, in order to get to the Mike Banning as The Fugitive plot they pre-ordained, has every other character in the movie turn into a complete moron. I was reminded of how the original movie, Olympus Has Fallen, in order to set out Mike as the greatest badass in history, turned the rest of the American military into fumbling doofuses who couldn’t shoot straight, a plot so offensive I was shocked that the movie found an audience among those who claim to support our military. 

In Angel Has Fallen, it’s US intelligence that gets struck dumb in order to put over Mike as the one smart person in a sea of idiots. Poor Jada Pinkett Smith is forced to try and make this uniquely moronic plot work but in order to do that, she’s forced to act as the single most fog brained FBI agent in movie history. Only the most obvious clues are the ones that matter to her according to the plot and her single-minded, unquestioning, performance renders her witless. 

That shouldn’t be too surprising as the movie has an equal amount of contempt for the audience. The plot of Angel Has Fallen could not be more predictable if they had handed out laminated copies of the script, color coded with notes about which characters are good and trustworthy and which ones are duplicitous baddies. If you can’t identify the two big villains of this movie within the first 5 minutes of the movie starting, you might want to check into a hospital to have your faculties checked. 

Then, there is Gerard Butler, arguably the most charm-free and talentless of our modern action heroes. While some might seek to compare Butler to the Stallone’s and Schwarzenegger’s of the 80’s action genre, a better correlative would be Steven Seagal. Both are lunkheads with an arrogance that far surpasses their talent and a doughy, gormless quality to their appearance that betrays their over abundance of confidence.

Butler’s Banning, like every one of the characters Seagal played, is invincible, indestructible and due to some unspoken supernatural force, always capable of outsmarting people clearly smarter than they are. Butler, at the very least, hasn't tried to bring the ponytail back and is actually capable of running where Seagal's heroes were more stationary than your average couch, but the two share far more in common with their utter lack of genuine talent. 

The screenwriters of the Fallen movies sacrifice the dignity and self-respect of every other character in these movies in their vain attempt to convince us that the sweaty, grunting, lummox that is Mike Banning, is the most cunning and crafty character on screen. It’s a failing effort from the start and that becomes an almost poignant source of campy laughs as these movies where on.

I genuinely began to feel sorry for Angel Has Fallen screenwriter Mark Robert Kamen as this movie wore on. Kamen's blood, sweat and tears must be all over these pages as he violates basic screenwriting ethics and general good taste just to try to make this one character remotely believable in the hands of this lunk headed star. 

Angel Has Fallen is thus far the worst movie of 2019.

Movie Review The Cave

The Cave (2005) 

Directed by Bruce Hunt

Written by Michael Steinberg, Tegan West

Starring Cole Hauser, Morris Chestnut, Eddie Cibrian, Lena Headey, Piper Perabo

Release Date August 26th, 2005

Published August 27th, 2005

Did you know that Cave Diver is a legitimate profession?

I had no idea! To me it sounded more like the title to some long lost "Mystery Science Theater 3000" feature than any legit money making venture. That perception was only enforced by the goofy goings-on in the new creature feature The Cave in which a group of cave divers line up to become lunch for some alien knockoff.

Cole Hauser leads a multicultural cast to their doom as the head of a cave diving team brought to some third world European locale to investigate a massive series of caves uncovered during an archaeological dig. Hey wouldn't you know it, these caves are the cursed remains of a once destroyed church.  They almost always are. Once inside, our intrepid divers are picked off one by one as if the plot had been written by an efficiency expert.

Director Bruce Hunt has little time for developing characters, what with all of this cool cave diving equipment to show off and all of the cool underwater photography to play with. Instead Hunt, with screenwriters Michael Steinberg and Tegan West, opts for multi-cultural placeholders who stand in line and wait for their turn to be monster food. Naturally such a simplistic story has attracted Morris Chestnut who just made this same movie last year with a giant snake, Anaconda 2: The Search For The Blood Orchid. Chestnutt is not a bad actor but has been a magnet for bad scripts (Like Mike, Half Past Dead) and parts well below his talent (Confidence, Under Siege 2) ever since his terrific debut in John Singleton's Boyz In The Hood.

Cole Hauser's rise to above the title star continues to puzzle me. Last year he top lined Paparazzi, a film that never should have seen light outside the video store. Now he leads The Cave which at least has the budget required of a big screen feature but little else. Don't most actors have to prove they can open a movie before they are given two starring roles in a row. Whoever decided Cole Hauser was a star may need to rethink that after The Cave. I would not speak so ill of Hauser, who wasn't bad as one of those nameless character actors with a recognizable face in films like White Oleander and Pitch Black, if he had just stayed with those types of roles.

Almost unrecognizable in this B-list cast is Coyote Ugly star Piper Perabo. Oh how the once promising star has fallen. Ms. Perabo really did look like a star in the overheated Jerry Bruckheimer dramedy Coyote Ugly but she is far from that shining promise here in The Cave where she is only the second most prominent female character in the movie behind Brothers Grimm star Lena Headey. Ouch! If you don't know how good Ms. Perabo is, forget Coyote Ugly, avoid The Cave, and check out the tiny Canadian independent Lost & Delirious. Her earnest romantic tragedy in that film is at times trite but more often moving and lovable.

With all apologies to my mother who always liked to drop that classic mom-ism, 'If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all',  there is simply nothing nice to say about the acting of former underwear model turned TV actor turned movie blackhole Eddie Cibrian. The guy is like a placeholder waiting for a real actor to step in. His blank stare and thudding delivery makes one wonder if he was simply there to block the lighting and then the real actor never showed up.  That is the only way I can make sense of his being here.

Cibrian plays Tyler and Morris Chestnut plays Tom Buchanan. However, whether it was due to bad editing or simple oversight, the actors appear to switch character names throughout the film. In an early scene where the team is plotting its cave descent both characters are referred to as Tyler at least once. That is slightly better than poor Daniel Dae Kim ("Lost") who may as well have been called That Asian Guy because he just doesn't seem to have a name throughout the film.

There were actually some things I liked about The Cave. The underwater photography, for example, is very cool. The crisp, clear blue water is beautifully shot, credited to Cinematographer Ross Emory, although second unit Director Wes Skiles is credited as the Underwater Unit Director. The scuba equipment, so lovingly dissected by the expositional dialogue, I'm told is top of the line stuff by a friend who dives for a living. My friend was also quite impressed with the underwater scenes for what that's worth. He does that professionally as well.

That is about it for the niceties unfortunately. Out of the water, The Cave is a knockoff of the two Anaconda films, Deep Rising, Mimic, Deep Blue Sea and any number of creature features in which an ensemble of B-listers comprise a buffet for some computer generated baddies. All of those films are mere retreads of the ultimate Sci-Fi ensemble flick Alien, which is also the only film to get that formula right, not once but twice if you count its excellent first sequel.

It's a given that particular plots are going to be rehashed, especially when they have been financially successful in the past. In the case of a film with a plot such as this you have to grade on a curve. The key to taking a cliched plot like that of The Cave and making an entertaining movie of it is to dress it up with lighting, with sets, with great dialogue, and with at least a few interesting premises. The Cave has some nice underwater locations that are very well photographed and some cool looking scuba gear but not much else.

Movies like The Cave make me long for the long lost wit and sarcasm of "Mystery Science Theater 3000" in all its movie-bashing glory. Just imagining the fun that Crow, Mike Nelson and Tom Servo could have had slicing up The Cave is more entertaining than anything in the film's 90 some odd minute runtime. Naturally the Alien plot will continue to have knock-offs produced again and again and again as years go by but perhaps they'll die out once we stop throwing our hard-earned money at them. 

Movie Review Because I Said So

Because I Said So (2007) 

Directed by Michael Lehmann 

Written by Jessie Nelson

Starring Diane Keaton, Mandy Moore, Gabriel Macht, Tom Everett Scott, Lauren Graham, Piper Perabo

Release Date December 2nd, 2006 

Published December 2nd, 2006 

In my nearly seven years writing film criticism I have seen some awful movies. Rarely however, have I seen something as brutal as the new romantic comedy Because I Said So starring Diane Keaton. It's not that the film is as badly made as say, Deuce Bigelow, or as poorly acted as the indie feature Undiscovered. No, what makes Because I Said So so notably awful is the cast.

How does a movie starring the legendary Diane Keaton, the lovable Mandy Moore and the reliable Lauren Graham, end up this brutally awful? That is a notable achievement, taking three beloved actors and forcing them into a movie so insufferable that even their innate appeal is dimmed by how terrible this movie is. That director Michael Lehmann once directed Heathers, a legit cult classic, makes this epic misfire so much more of a mystery. Then again, Lehmann also directed Hudson Hawk. Hmm.

In Because I Said So Diane Keaton plays Daphne, a mother of three beautiful daughters who, on the verge of turning 60, has just one wish. Daphne wants to find a man for her youngest daughter, Millie (Mandy Moore). To this end, Daphne commits herself to the task of finding Millie's ideal man by creating an online dating ad for her and then interviewing potential candidates herself. The search leads to a nice guy architect named Josh (Tom Everett Scott) who mom absolutely loves. Also in the running is a nice guy guitar player named Johnny (Gabriel Macht) who mom doesn't so much like but is Millie's perfect type.

If you need a road map to figure which guy Millie ends up with you have either never seen a movie before or have lived your entire life in a cave; cut off from logic. Because I Said So is not merely predictable, predictability I could forgive. No, Because I Said So is such a trainwreck of romantic comedy cliches and artificial roadblocks that it becomes unbearable to watch this cast enact such sub-sitcom levels of convoluted comic idiocy. 

Diane Keaton is a legend. She has won the Oscar for best actress. She has even made a few very bad movies, First Wives Club, Hanging Up, to name a few. But, she has never been this awful in a movie. Her performance in Because I Said So is an epic disaster of over the top gesticulations, shrill dialogue delivery and logic free character development. As a director herself, it's a wonder how Keaton did not see this character going so badly. Or maybe she did. There is a good ten minute sequence in the film in which Keaton doesn't say a word. I can't prove this, but I like to think this was Keaton's silent protest of the movie. I can hope, can't I?

Because I Said So doesn't just slime the great Ms. Keaton, it nearly destroys the career of Mandy Moore. The former pop star had come a very long way in her acting career since her ugly debut in the weepy teen romance A Walk To Remember. She was terrific in a bitchy supporting role in Saved, charming in a bitchy role in American Dreamz, and utterly darling in her cameo on TV's Scrubs. Sadly and unfortunately in Because I Said So, Moore looks like a novice actress, tripping over punchlines and allowing the movie to make her look like a fool in nearly every scene. 

Moore should find some way to sue director Michael Lehmann for allowing her to appear so utterly befuddled onscreen. This is a career low-point that would be difficult to recover from for the veteran Diane Keaton. For Ms. Moore, she may have to look to a TV career before considering film again. Lauren Graham of TV's Gilmore Girls and Piper Perabo of Coyote Ugly round out what is, on paper, a stellar cast. How you make a movie this awful with this cast is truly astonishing. Both Graham and Perabo are thanking their lucky stars that their roles barely rise above cameos.

How bad is Because I Said So? Here is just a hint of what this movie believes is funny. Two scenes of Diane Keaton watching internet porn. Two scenes of Ms. Keaton, legs in the air screaming to the heavens, a dog humping furniture. Some of the most stilted and awkward sex talk in the history of film. Not one, but two all family sing alongs. And, because the family runs a catering business, 3 scenes of people covered in cake.

Now, I can hear skeptics out there reading along and thinking 'of course he doesn't like this movie, it's a chick flick'. Allow me to explain how this works. I loved The Holiday, I loved Love Actually and I gave a glowing recommendation to the movie The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. This is not about genre, or target audience. This is about Because I Said So being one of the worst movies I have ever seen.

In the words of the great Roger Ebert, from the title of one of his great books, I hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this movie. Because I Said So is a painfully awful, nightmare of a movie that poor Diane Keaton may never recover from. She is lucky that she was once in Annie Hall and won a very deserved Academy award for Best Actress because otherwise it would be very easy to write her off after a disaster like this.

As it stands, I'm sure Diane Keaton will be back. Let's just hope she fires her agent before he allows her to make another movie remotely as awful as Because I Said So.