Text Size:
A|
A|
A
Email
Print
Make way for Team Rob.
Unlike Team Edward or Team Jacob, Team Rob is all about -- who else? -- Robert Pattinson, starring in "Remember Me." If his name weren't attached to this movie, it likely would have gone directly to DVD.
With it, "Remember Me" is a test of Mr. Pattinson's popularity away from the "Twilight" franchise. He plays Tyler, a brooding 21-year-old New York student with daddy and authority issues, a younger sister he adores and an older brother he mourns.
"Remember Me," however, is built around twin tragedies with NYU coed Ally (Emilie de Ravin), the daughter of a nurse who was shot to death on a subway platform in 1991. Ally witnessed the murder and now lives with her overly protective police officer father (Chris Cooper) in Queens a decade later.
Tyler and Ally are brought together for all the wrong reasons, which you suspect will backfire, but fall in love.
The movie, however, boasts enough conflicts, outbursts, foreshadowing and fatalistic viewpoints to go around. Pierce Brosnan, who revealed he couldn't sing in "Mamma Mia!," here proves he cannot do a Brooklyn accent as Tyler's father.
Mr. Pattinson takes a step away from Edward but isn't exactly shaving his head and playing an Army enlistee. Some of his best scenes are with young Ruby Jerins as Tyler's 11-year-old sister, and they share an easy, believable bond.
Heaping sorrow upon characters isn't the same as drama, and the themes here are worthwhile but clumsily explored. The power of the movie rests in its ending and is, indeed, memorable, but too little preceding it is.
Rated PG-13 for violence, sexual content, language and smoking.
"Guess Who" meets "I Love Lucy" in this romcom about an African-American groom named Marcus (Lance Gross) and his fiancee, Lucia (America Ferrera), who hails from a Mexican-American family.
When they leave New York for Los Angeles and their families, they're just full of surprises: They're engaged and want to marry in three weeks before going to Laos to work, she has dropped out of law school but hasn't told anyone and, obviously, they wouldn't answer the race or ethnic origin question the same on a census form.
His father (Forest Whitaker) is a successful disc jockey and playboy who raised Marcus, a physician just like Sidney Poitier in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." Her happily married father (Carlos Mencia) operates a car restoration business and tows cars for the city on the side.
They have the opposite of a meet-cute, setting the stage for family disagreements over almost everything as the young couple learn their new mantra: "Our marriage, their wedding."
"Our Family Wedding," from director and co-writer Rick Famuyiwa, who made "The Wood" (which explains the Taye Diggs cameo), embroiders the usual wedding woes with midlife crises or realizations, culture clashes, some nice nuggets and superfluous silliness involving wedding cake and a randy goat.
Watching an animal try to get frisky with Mr. Whitaker, I thought, is this any way to treat an Oscar winner who played Idi Amin? It's typical of the movie, which zig zags all over the place, feels padded and walks down a familiar aisle, but one populated by appealing faces.
Rated PG-13 for some sexual content and brief strong language.
There's a reason why all the good cop shows always have two officers in the car on a stakeout. That's so they can talk to each other, as opposed to this movie, which features the world's most boring police assignment and yet one that can change or ruin lives.
A Romanian policeman named Cristi (Dragos Bucur) is tailing a teenager who offers hashish to his school friends. That makes him a target even though Cristi insists, "Nowhere in Europe are you arrested for smoking a joint. ... I don't want to ruin somebody's life for a law that will change soon."
While other cops might not blink at the bust, he cannot understand why the boy's so-called friend is willing to squeal, who is supplying the drugs and why a kid should do seven or even three-plus years in jail.
"Police, Adjective" is all about a country in transition and the power and precision of words and how they, like the law, can change or be open to interpretation. They can be used to lay a trap, sketch an image, and lead a man to a fork in the Romanian road.
But they can also try the patience of a moviegoer, even one who appreciates the dramatic tension built into a scene in which someone reads a series of words and their meanings from a dictionary. As we all know, actions speak louder than words, even Romanian ones.
Not rated. In Romanian with English subtitles. Opens today at the Harris Theater, Downtown.
Looking for more from the Post-Gazette? Join PG+, our members-only web site. You'll get exclusive sports content, opinion, financial information, discounts from retailers and restaurants, and more. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.
