Aniston of the week: The Switch

Posted on by harrietwarman

This is one of the few Aniston film’s this writer has watched more than once, probably due, not only to Jennifer’s charisma, but the presence of Jeff Goldblum and Juliette Lewis in the cast. A silly plot, conventionally structured, but clearly it’s got through to me somehow. 00031357

FILM: The Switch
DIRECTOR: Josh Gordan, Will Speck
YEAR: 2010
CHARACTER NAME & PROFESSION: Kassie Larson, TV Producer
PLOT SUMMARY: Kassie and Wally (Jason Bateman, later seen with Aniston in Horrible Bosses) are best friends who once dated. Kassie wants to have a baby, and being single, decides to use a sperm donor. At her artificial insemination party, Wally gets very drunk and destroys the sperm sample. He switches it for his own ‘sample’ and forgets about it due to his ridiculous hangover. Kassie moves away from NYC to raise her son. Seven years later, she moves back to the city and reconnects with Wally. He notices that he and Kassie’s son Sebastien (Thomas Robinson) share are lot of the same anxieties and idiosyncrasies. Figuring out he must be the father, Wally decides to pursue Kassie, for whom he has always had feelings.

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Aniston with Bateman as Wally

CHARACTER TRAITS: Strong willed, nurturing, witty, and ambitious.
NOTES ON PERFORMANCE: Aniston is mainly required to be charming here, and she demonstrates a convincing motherly chemistry with Robinson, as well as a sort of endearing, exasperation with Bateman’s Wally.

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When your best friend behaves like an idiot, you’re all like…

NOTES ON FILM: I like to imagine (as I have before) how different this Aniston film would be, if it were told from her character’s perspective. Single mother has her pregnancy hijacked by her ‘best friend’ and struggles to reconcile her feelings for him, while dating the man she thought was her son’s father. What about her insecurities, her dilemma of what to do for her son? Instead it’s essentially all about sperm, and a man’s ‘right’ to his child. Well, you could read it that way, annoyingly it’s also very enjoyable in parts and has the kind of happy ending that only works because the performances – Aniston, Bateman and Robinson – are so convincing.
CONCLUSION: A hugely watchable Aniston outing.

Aniston of the week: Rumour Has It…

Posted on by harrietwarman

The year after Friends ended, Aniston made two films, one of which, Derailed we’ll cover in the coming weeks. The other is an odd identity crisis comedy/drama based on the idea of The Graduate being a true story related to Aniston’s character. Aniston pretty much carries the film, which, amongst the weirdness, almost saves it.

FILM: Rumour Has It…rumorhasit
DIRECTOR: Rob Reiner
YEAR: 2005
CHARACTER NAME AND PROFESSION: Sarah Huttinger, Obituary Columnist
PLOT SUMMARY: Recently engaged Sarah and Jeff (Mark Ruffalo) fly to Sarah’s sister’s wedding in Pasadena. Sarah feels like an outsider in her own family and doesn’t know why, she’s also unsure about marrying Jeff. When he figures out that Sarah must have been conceived before her parents wedding, she insists that her mother (who died years earlier) must have had an affair with someone before she got married. Sarah questions her Grandmother, Katharine (Shirley MacLaine) and discovers that her mother ran off to Mexico and had an affair with a man called Beau Burroughs (Kevin Costner) before the wedding, and that this story became the basis for the book/movie/play, The Graduate. Sarah sets off to find out if Beau is her biological father.

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Shirley MacLaine as Katharine and Mark Ruffalo as Jeff

CHARACTER TRAITS: Withdrawn, introverted, insecure, caring, thoughtful.
NOTES ON PERFORMANCE: Aniston underplays for the most part here, portraying Sarah as someone really lost, but trying to keep it together. She handles Sarah’s arc very convincingly, and any awkward moments seem more down to the screenplay and direction than anything else. (See the moment she thinks she might have slept with her Dad – 1. Why include this scene? 2. Why play her reaction for laughs when it’s clearly a horrifying prospect?

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Kevin Costner: practically sleeping through his role as Beau

NOTES ON FILM: This is an odd one. The film’s writer, Ted Griffin previously penned Ocean’s Eleven and Matchstick Men, so clearly had some successes to his name, he’s also from Pasadena, which explains his interest in depicting the particular gossip mill of the area. Director Rob Reiner, is half responsible for When Harry Met Sally, one of the greatest comedies of all time, so the missteps in this film are curious. What’s good about it, is that it at least focuses on Sarah’s identity crisis, and leads towards her eventual closeness with her sister. What doesn’t work is the way this potentially thoughtful subject is explored – through perfunctory sexual encounters (with zero chemistry thanks to Costner) and ‘comedic’ incest issues. Sarah and Jeff do not seem like a good fit from the start, and the film doesn’t totally convince in concluding that Sarah just needs to appreciate what she’s got. One other note: Shirley MacLaine is excellent, as usual.
CONCLUSION: Aniston gets through it, and Ruffalo is charming, but this is just feels like Aniston testing out themes she’s explored better elsewhere (See Friends with Money, 2006).

 

My week in film: Berlinale and a ‘hateful’ Tarantino

Posted on by harrietwarman

You might have missed this weekly viewing journal of late – this writer has been engaged elsewhere, covering the Berlin Film Festival competition (and some other films) for other outlets. For CineVue, I reviewed André Téchiné’s rewarding French drama Being 17 (****); Alone in Berlin (**) starring Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson; the dense and deftly handled Death in Sarajevo (****), which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize; the desperately frustrating Genius (*) which starred a manic Jude Law and a tired Colin Firth; and finally Gianfranco Rosi’s Golden Bear winning documentary, Fire at Sea (****). Meanwhile for Sight & Sound, I reviewed Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest feature, Things to Come, which deservedly won the Silver Bear for Best Director. Starring the endlessly watchable Isabelle Huppert, it’s a deeply thoughtful, mature work.

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Isabelle Huppert in Things to Come
On my return from chilly Berlin, I checked out the new Quentin Tarantino film, The Hateful Eight screening from the 70mm roadshow print at Filmhouse. The 70mm differs from the digital version in that it has 20 minutes of additional footage, an overture and an intermission. I must say that the experience of viewing the film this way, with the prestige of the red curtains pulling back following the overture, the sheer beauty of the print itself, which really enhances Tarantino’s skills as a filmmaker, and the anticipation that the intermission created, was a great pleasure.

Having made that clear, it remains that The Hateful Eight is a very unpleasant film. Even considering that the film’s title makes clear the scorn of its characters, the negativity of the film permeates everything, from the characters, to the dialogue and the message, making it hard to understand what exactly Tarantino thought the audience would find fun about the film. Oh, wait – violence is really fun, isn’t it?

Tarantino loves creating puzzles for the audience to solve, and creating no-win situations for his characters, his passion for narrative and story-telling is clear. It’s just that in The Hateful Eight there’s no reason to be invested in the outcome. hateful-eight-jennifer-jason-leighA note on the other big problem with the film. Of the female characters that get more than one scene, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh, pictured above) is repeatedly beaten, constrained, abused and made powerless – we’re told she’s a dangerous murderer – yet we do not see the evidence of this. By the film’s end, the male characters have done despicable things to each other, and yet, Daisy’s punishment is to be gleefully hung and laughed at, dwelling on her pain as though a relief from the horror of the past hours. The Hateful Eight dispatches violent men quickly and explosively, but a non-compliant woman must be made an enduring example of. It’s exhausting. For a more in depth review, see Matt Zoller-Seitz’s piece for rogerebert.com – his assessment is spot on.

With that, ‘My week in film’ will be a little less active for a couple of months while this writer switches from reviewing festivals to programming a festival, to produce the Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival . Aniston of the week however, will continue!