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Romance
The Switch (2010)
When I heard about The Switch, a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Aniston as a Manhattan singleton who decides to get pregnant on her own, I confess that I had no desire to see it. I’d already been through Jennifer Lopez in The Back-Up Plan, and frankly, one screwball sperm-donor chick flick per year seemed more than enough. But The Switch is a pleasant surprise. It’s a by-the-numbers movie, but the dots that get connected feel new. Aniston, playing a forward-thinking…
Sex and the City 2 (2010)
Carrie has finally snagged Big, but misses the excitement of evenings out on the town. Charlotte’s worried that husband Harry is smitten with the new and very bra-less nanny. Samantha’s overdoing pills and ointments to stave off the menopause. Miranda’s packed in her job because she can’t hear her own voice at work.
In short, they’re all getting older, and developing a new set of neuroses to cultivate between their continued shopping frenzies.
“Neuroses” is a heavy way of putting…
Killers (2010)
In Killers, Spencer (Ashton Kutcher) is a gorgeous spy with a perfect body who hangs out with hot models and drives fancy cars when he’s not killing bad guys (shirtless!) but longs to give it all up because the bad guys aren’t always bad and suburbia and normalcy is starting to sound awfully good. Just as he’s coming to this conclusion, he meets Jen (Katherine Heigl), an awkward, neurotic, freshly dumped woman who’s on vacation in Nice with her parents;…
Date Night (2010)
Phil and Claire Foster (Steve Carell and Tina Fey) are a self-proclaimed boring couple from New Jersey. Work and parenting dominate every moment of their lives, leaving them in a comfortable but passionless rut. Not wanting to end up like their divorced friends, Phil and Claire opt to do something really special this time for their regular date night away from the kids: dinner at a posh Manhattan restaurant. But when it looks like they won’t land a table, Phil…
Valentine's Day (2010)
The best and really only sensible thing to say about the dire romantic comedy “Valentine’s Day,” which is neither romantic nor remotely comedic, is that it makes you appreciate and long for the breeziness, acting and basic competency — the decent lighting, focused cameras and choreographed action — of “Love Actually,” the ingratiating British movie it transparently and ineptly rips off. What else? The movie poster for “Valentine’s Day” that features more than a dozen performers is something of a…
Dear John (2010)
There is nothing misleading about a film based on a Nicholas Sparks novel. For the past decade, titles like The Notebook, A Walk to Remember, Nights in Rodanthe and Message in a Bottle unabashedly wielded the looks of love (and two more of his novels are in studio development). The trend continues with Dear John, a romantic tale of love found, love lost and love stupidly misplaced. It starts off well enough, however, and one character in particular stands out.…
Step Up 3D (2010)
I’m still not certain the Step Up films take place in the real world. Dance is so important to the characters that inhabit this plane of reality that I barely recognize it. Is every move a metaphor? “Battling” surely seems a surrogate for a fistfight, while love is manifested with more delicate gymnastics. Context regardless, the seriousness with which they approach their art is unshakable. Conversely, as someone who finds their rhythmic jiving inherently silly — yes, I saw Step…
When in Rome (2010)
It goes without saying that we root for Beth (Kristen Bell) and Nick (Josh Duhamel), the appealing would-be couple at the center of “When in Rome,” to find bliss together. And it goes without saying that they will. This is a romantic comedy, after all, and no genre is more reliable in its outcome. But if that foreordained result — in this case an Italian wedding at the end to echo the one where Nick and Beth met cute at…
Eclipse (2010)
The Twilight films may be as ruthlessly exploitative a franchise as Harry Potter; they may be devoted to a creepy ideological agenda to promote pre-marital chastity; and they may be simply retreading much of the high-school vampire shtick that made Buffy a TV hit more than a decade ago. But in a universe where almost all CGI-laden, blood-spilling tentpole movies are aimed at ensnaring the teenage male, there’s something to be said for a series of films aimed squarely –…
The Bounty Hunter (2010)
As Nicole, Aniston plays a very unlikely news reporter whose apparently hot shot career (which includes writing stories about parking tickets) ruined her marriage to Milo. Somehow, being a reporter on the beat does not look too dissimilar to Carrie’s life in Sex and the City as far as expensive property and clothing go, but at least Aniston’s character Nicole has enough sense to take off her heels when she’s doing vaguely Law and Order-like fake detective work on a…
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