Looper - DVD Review

Starring Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt, Jeff Daniels, Paul Dano and Piper Perabo. Directed by Rian Johnson.

★★★★

JGL does an amusing Bruce Willis impression, and that's just one of the smaller pleasures of this movie.  JGL plays Joe, an assassin in 2044 who kills people for the mob in the future.  But when his 2074 self is his next target, he hesitates, and Old Joe gets away.  Joe needs to catch and kill his old self, or he may not be allowed to live to see 2045.

The movie has several twists and turns, and it's another home-run for Rian Johnson (Brick), who's quickly becoming one of my favorite directors.

50/50 - DVD Review

Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, Anna Kendrick, Bryce Dallas Howard, Anjelica Huston, Philip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer.  Directed by Jonathan Levine.

★★★★

Tremendous.

I don't think anyone has ever attempted a serious comedy about cancer before, but Seth Rogen has, and it's great. And I like that it's another showcase for Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who continues to prove himself as one of today's most interesting actors.

JGL plays Adam, a normal guy working a job he likes, wishing maybe his relationship with his girlfriend was better, but then one day he finds out he has cancer. And so down the unknown road he must go.

Everyone knows someone who's had cancer, someone who lived through it and someone who died from it, and the title comes from the survival odds of Adam's particular kind of rare spinal cancer. He and his friend Kyle (Rogen) have all the dark humorous moments that people have when flirting with death, and when the girlfriend leaves, Kyle figures having a buddy with cancer can serve as a chick magnet.

I liked all the different avenues explored and how they were played. Anna Kendrick plays Kathryn, a 24-year-old therapist working on her doctorate, and Adam is one of her first patients, so just as Adam is new at cancer, Kathryn is new at helping him through it, and I liked how you can see her mind accessing college-book answers whenever a new emotional wrinkle develops. I liked Bryce Dallas Howard as the girlfriend (can't remember the character's name right now). It could have been played as the stereotypical bad-girlfriend that our hero must inevitably part from, but she was given more emotional depth than normally allowed. And with what she's given to do, Anjelica Huston is really strong as Adam's worrying mother.

This movie always felt honest. It earns its laughs and it earns its touching moments.  In fact, I've updated my Top Ten of 2011 list over it.

Hesher - DVD Review

★★

Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Natalie Portman, Devin Brochu, Rainn Wilson and Piper Laurie.  Directed by Spencer Susser.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, he of 3rd Rock from the Sun and 10 Things I Hate About You and Brick and 500 Days of Summer and Inception, is a really good actor, and here comes another character he can sink his teeth into, a headbanging, vandalous squatter, a dangerous grenade who throws himself into other people's lives.  He's clearly having fun. 

Add to that the touching work of Devin Brochu as TJ, the real protagonist, a quiet kid whose mom just died.  He gets bullied at school, his father's too depressed to get off the couch, and they live at his grandmother's, who's suffering from the dementia.  When TJ runs into Hesher, Hesher follows him home and moves in, like a much more assertive Nick Nolte in Down & Out in Beverly Hills.

Then comes the leap of faith the movie asks that I could never quite make.  The dad's so depressed and beat up by life that he doesn't insist Hesher get out of his house, he doesn't call the cops, and he lets TJ go whereever with this clearly bad influence.  The movie made me sympathetic and angry at the struggles that TJ's going through, but it made me more angry at the total lack of concern on the part of the dad.

The movie's very profane and goes back and forth between dark comedy and depressing drama, and while it has its elements, it's not worth wallowing through the ones that don't.  But remember the name Devin Brochu.

Catherine Zeta-Jones as Russell Crowe's cheating wife

- Catherine Zeta-Jones will play the philandering wife of the New York mayor (Russell Crowe) in Broken City, directed by Allen Hughes (co-director of Book of Eli). Mark Wahlberg co-stars as a private investigator hired by the mayor to confirm his suspicions.

- Tyler Perry has signed Kim Kardashian to a supporting role in his next movie The Marriage Counselor.

- Joseph Gordon-Levitt (50/50) is in talks to join Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, reuniting him with his Inception co-star Leonardo DiCaprio. It also stars Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Don Johnson, Dennis Christopher, Gerald McRaney, M.C. Gainey and Laura Cayouette.

- Bradley Cooper is the front-runner to star in Steven Soderbergh's big-screen treatment of the action-comedy The Man from U.N.C.L.E.