Grown Ups (2010) * *

Directed by: Dennis Dugan
Starring: Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, David Spade, Kevin James, Rob Schneider

Grown Ups made me laugh or wince a few times, but otherwise it's a rather low energy comedy in which there were too few laughs to go around.     The five actors mentioned above play the grown ups, but throw in seasoned actors like Salma Hayek, Maria Bello, Colin Quinn, and Steve Buscemi and you're really stretching your resources.    There just isn't enough here to prevent many of the actors from standing around waiting for his turn for a one-liner.

The five leads are kids who win a little league basketball championship in 1978 and reunite 30 some years later when they all attend their beloved head coach's funeral.  They rent the lakehouse where they hung around as kids and bring their families to take part.   Hayek is married to Adam Sandler and is counting down the minutes until they can split for Milan and a fashion show.   James and his wife Bello drive a flashy Caddy and their four year old son still breast feeds. This provides a funny line in which James says his son is "48 months old".

Spade is single and loving it.   Rock is a henpecked house husband with a pregnant working wife, while Schneider is married to a woman old enough to be at least his mother.   There are many jokes about Schneider's wife's age.     Some hit, some miss, much like many of the jokes in the film.

There isn't much tension between the families despite what you would expect and maybe even hope for.  Conflict arises in the form of Colin Quinn, who played on the losing team in that championship game and insists Sandler's foot was out of bounds when he hit the winning shot.    Anyone who is surprised that a rematch between the teams takes place has not seen many movies before.   When the game does occur, there really isn't much to it.    Quinn's crew aren't established as real villains enough to root for their demise, while Sandler's crew is pleasant but not heroic.

There are one-liners, cut ups, farts, belches, and a couple of scenes of squirting breast milk, plus two hot girls who just couldn't possibly be Schneider's daughters, could they?    However, Grown Ups doesn't work up much enthusiasm from me.   The actors are definitely having a good time hanging around and shooting the breeze, but Grown Ups doesn't take off like a strong comedy should. 

Salt (2010) * * *

Directed by: Phillip Noyce

Starring: Angelina Jolie, Liev Schrieber

Salt is a thriller with lots of car chases, explosions, and shootings. Yet unlike The Bourne Identity, Supremacy, etc., these things don't come at you so fast and often that they actually begin to bore.  I actually cared, even when the motives of the title character were murky at best.  The plot in these types of movies border on ridiculous anyway.

The title character is CIA operative Evelyn Salt, played by Jolie with her usual amounts of smarts, physicality, and skin.   She is a married operative who is on her way home to her loving husband when a Russian defector (do they still have those now that the Soviet Union is kaput?) walks into CIA headquarters claiming that the Russian President will soon be assasinated by a sleeper Russian spy named... Evelyn Salt.

Salt, of course, maintains her innocence, but escapes capture by her superiors.   Part of the escape involves the ability to make explosives out of anything lying around, which these folks can usually do.   Is there a class in CIA training devoted strictly to this?   Must be.

Salt's escape leads to a chase ending up in New York and then Washington. I will go no further with the plot details because I have a heart and don't wish to spoil anything for you.   But what's more important is how much Jolie made me care despite all of the absurdities and jumps from one moving truck to another. Jolie is probably the most famous actress on Earth thanks to the tabloids, but the Oscar winner exudes intelligence and vulnerability even while she's killing ten agents at once.

The standard rules of shoot-em-up thrillers definitely apply here, which are, in no particular order:

1. The good guy kills the nameless pawns with one shot, while the pawns fire endless rounds at the good guy without one hit.

2. The hero can jump or fall from great heights (or even lesser heights) and not break or bruise anything.

3. The hero is always able to whip out a fake ID and credit card at will. Where does she get these? Wouldn't the CIA be able to track the usage especially if they supplied them?

4. Despite having never been in a certain boat, building, etc. before, the hero will always know how to escape and how to get around without running into a dead end.

Salt doesn't really come up with anything really new, although it is good to have Russian villains back after being pretty much phased out with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But what it does, it does well.   Sometimes that's enough.

All About Steve (2009) *

Directed by: Phil Traill

Starring: Sandra Bullock, Bradley Cooper, Thomas Haden Church

Ugh. I've probably said this 100 times in my life if I said it once, but how can such a likable actress like Sandra Bullock choose her projects so poorly?   She has almost infinite energy and a completely winning smile, but yet stars in vehicles like All About Steve which only serve to have an ordinary guy like me question her career path. Bullock took a couple of years off to reassess her career and make better films, but in 2009 she released The Proposal, The Blind Side, and this film.   Even though The Blind Side won her a Best Actress Oscar, it, like the other two films, was a subpar entertainment.

All About Steve has Bullock play a woman named Mary who creates crossword puzzles for a small Sacramento newspaper.   She currently lives with her parents because her apartment is being fumigated, but how does she have an apartment in the first place?   Can one actually make a decent living creating crossword puzzles?   Especially ones that don't even appear every day in the newspaper?  Then again, acting the way she does, she doesn't strike me as the type of woman who ever lived with anyone but her parents.

Her personality is maddening.   Her communication skills consist of constant, inane chatter packaged in tinted red hair and wearing bright red boots everywhere. She explains later on why she wears these boots all of the time.   Something about a toe massage, but I was pretty much zoning by then.   Dealing with a woman like Mary requires a saint's patience and the ability to zone often.

In the film, she is set up on a blind date with Steve (Cooper), a camerman who works for a field reporter on a CNN-type of cable network. Cooper is nice enough, but Mary can't resist his good looks and proceeds to pounce on him.  Steve manages to get rid of her with aplomb, but soon she is following, er, stalking him from Oklahoma to Texas and elsewhere.  If you think that this stalking would involve numerous pratfalls and Mary falling into things like an abandoned mine, then you would be right.

The abandoned mine thing happens near the end of the film and it represents a dead end. Because Mary is such an over-the-top nut, it is obvious that Steve won't do a 180 degree turn and start to fall for her. There isn't much to fall for because Mary is a dead zone and has no positive qualities except an above-average vocabulary.   This leaves the filmmakers scrambling for a happy ending, which it kinda sorta achieves as Mary rescues a deaf girl who had also fallen into the same mine.   Do you really want me to bore you with the logistics of this plotline?

I can't imagine what attracted Bullock to this character. Bullock must've figured her likability would automatically make the character likable, despite the fact the character is certifiable. But All About Steve did have one plus: It introduced me to the word "cruciverbalist", which apparently is the name for one who creates crossword puzzles. Mary said this during one of her seemingly endless bouts of verbal diarrhea.  

Patton (1970) * * *

Directed by: Franklin J. Schaffner
Starring: George C. Scott, Karl Malden

Funny how I've seen two films with similar ideas in the past week, albeit presented in very different ways. Patton and Chariots Of Fire both contain characters that are lost unless they have one more battle to fight.    In Chariots Of Fire, the Harold Abrahams character expresses these sentiments by saying, "I know the fear of losing, but this is the first time I've expressed the fear of winning." General George S. Patton surveys a battlefield and says, "I love this. More than I love my life."   The end of World War II left Patton itching to start a fight with the Russians, but his death in December 1945 ended any chance of his doing something about it.

Watching Patton, it's not that farfetched to think he would do his damndest to get something started with the Soviets.   When he's not fighting the Germans, he's fighting his superiors or even a shell-shocked soldier whom he famously slapped in the head and called a coward.   For this general, fighting wasn't merely an obsession.   He believed in reincarnation and believed that he was a soldier in all of his past lives.   He believed the glory of battle was a destiny handed down through the ages.

The movie based on General Patton's life, Patton, won Best Picture in 1970 and garnered a Best Actor Oscar for George C. Scott which he famously refused; likening the Oscar ceremony to a "meat parade."  Oscar or not, Scott carries this film with a full, three-dimensional characterization.   The film was criticized for being pro-war when it was released during the height of the Vietnam war. Gen. Patton sure was pro-war, to the point that the film excludes any hint of his personal life and focuses strictly on the idea that Patton the man was incomplete unless he had an army to command.

Of course, Patton's behavior and attempts to embarrass his superiors put him in hot water.    His criticisms of Allied strategy and disobeying orders put him on the sidelines during the planning and execution of D-Day.    Why was he always so critical of Eisenhower and British General Montgomery?   Two reasons: a. Since he believed he was Hannibal's reincarnation, who is Ike to overrule his quest to dominate the world? and b. Because it was a battle to fight in between the ones involving troops and ammunition.

Patton runs nearly three hours and takes us from Patton's rise to fame in North Africa to Italy and on into France and Germany. At no point does Scott fail to fascinate.  He was only 43 at the time of filming, but yet carries himself with a gruff intelligence and bulldog-like tenacity which the General (who was 60 at the time of his death) was famous for.   Does the film prove to be as fascinating as Scott?   Sometimes yes, but the film suffers because the editing needed to be tightened on some of the marching and battle scenes.

The lead role was offered to other actors before Scott, such as Rod Steiger, who turned down the role and regretted it later.   Steiger's penchant for overacting wouldn't have served the role well. Especially if you consider one scene in which Patton screams at his subordinates to carry on a 100-mile trek to Bastogne, Germany with no sleep or rest. His right-hand man asks, "The men don't know if you're acting or for real." Patton replies, "I'm the only one who needs to know that." Scott pulls off that fine line.