By Cary Darling


FILM: This Is Where I Leave You
CAST: Tina Fey, Jason Bateman, Jane Fonda, Adam Driver
DIRECTION: Shawn Levy

There’s one thing nobody can take away from This Is Where I Leave You: its stellar cast.
Tina Fey, Jason Bateman, Adam Driver, Jane Fonda, Rose Byrne, Connie Britton, Timothy Olyphant and the underrated Corey Stoll. If there’s a dramedy to be made about contemporary upper-middle-class Americans going about their contemporary upper-middle-class lives, then this is the crew that can pull it off. And they are certainly the best thing about This Is Where I Leave You, an amiable and occasionally funny but flyweight film that’s probably what would happen if someone ever made Modern Family The Movie.
There’s certainly nothing new about the premise. Members of a far-flung, dysfunctional family are called home after the death of the father and the reunion prompts a variety of secrets and simmering grudges to surface. Bet you didn’t see that coming.
Bateman is Judd Altman, a producer for a radio shock-jock, who has discovered his wife Quinn (Abigail Spencer) is having an affair. Younger brother Phillip (Driver) is a slacker who is in a relationship with his therapist, Tracy (Britton). Oldest brother Paul (Stoll) and his wife Alice (Kathryn Hahn) are having trouble conceiving a child. Alice used to date Judd years ago and it’s still a sore point between the brothers. Sister Wendy (Fey) seems the most grounded, though all is not well in her marriage to a high-flying exec. Meanwhile, Judd’s childhood friend Penny (Byrne) is glad he’s back in town because she’s still crushing on him.
Shepherding all of them is mom Hillary (Fonda), who just wants everyone to get along, play nice and share their memories of dear old Dad. Hilarity, or at least amusement, ensues.
Based on a novel by Jonathan Tropper (who also wrote the screenplay) and directed by Shawn Levy (who has a resume of middlebrow comedies like The Internship and the Night at the Museum movies), This Is Where I Leave You has nothing new to say about families as it predictably runs the emotional arc from manic to maudlin.
While there are chuckles, there’s little that’s laugh-out-loud funny and the drama feels prefabricated.
Still, Fonda is terrific as a woman trying to keep her family and herself together while Driver is engaging with his lanky goofball persona and Fey gets to show off a slightly more serious side.
If it weren’t for the cast though, This Is Where I Leave You would be just another sitcom with a bigger budget and more swearing. - Fort Worth Star-Telegram/TNS

Descending joy


By Troy Ribeiro


FILM: Jupiter Ascending
CAST: Channing Tatum, Mila Kunis, Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne, Douglas Booth
DIRECTION: Lana Wachowski and Andy Wachowski

With directors Lana and Andy Wachowski helming this project, Jupiter Ascending is a perfect example of the phrase, “too many cooks spoil the broth”.
This ridiculously convoluted sci-fi tale with a love story thrown in and mounted on a magnificent scale of an action-epic will certainly be the cause of Warner Bros’ descent into oblivion.
With “plot” holes galore, the narration follows Jupiter (Mila Kunis), daughter of an astrophysicist father and a mathematician mother, living in Russia.
“Born without a country and home” and after the death of her father, “in the house of Leo”, Jupiter and her mother live with an extended family that includes her mother’s sister and her family. The mother-daughter duo depends on her aunt’s family for subsistence. Jupiter leads a pathetic life. She is constantly shown cleaning toilets.
Then one fine day, a bunch of extraterrestrial creatures land up in her room and soon she is kidnapped. Apparently, she is some royal queen of the planet Earth.
On the other hand, on the planet Jupiter, royal siblings older brother Balem (Eddie Redmayne), sister Kalique (Tuppence Middleton) and younger brother Titus (Douglas Booth) are plotting to take control of planet Earth. They have been harvesting humans in order to create a regeneration serum. So they are all out to capture the queen of planet Earth.
Then there’s the half-wolf in shining armour, Caine (Channing Tatum), with a blonde goatee and elfin ears, who rescues Jupiter from her captors. He has recently lost his wings and wears shoes that enable him to lift off the ground and zoom across the sky. And during the rescue operation and in between inter-planetary transitions, romance brews between Caine and Jupiter.
Packed with characters with strange power dynamics and no co-relation or strong motivation, it is difficult to decipher what is happening on the screen. The setting too is absurdly off beat and the plot graph lacks logic.
The performances of the A-list star cast are perfunctory and disappointing, especially after watching award winning performances from Channing Tatum in Foxcatcher and Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything. Also, the chemistry between Mila Kunis and Tatum feels overtly forced.
The film is technically spectacular with brilliant sets and graphically-designed spacecraft. It is visually beautiful. - IANS

FILM: Eat with Me
CAST: Sharon Omi, Teddy Chen Culver, Nicole Sullivan
DIRECTION: David Au

Complications in the menu


Elliot (Teddy Chen Culver) is a restaurateur of what is presumably a Chinese eatery in a rather generic downtown LA. As the restaurant with its mediocre menu faces shuttering, Elliot’s mother Emma (Sharon Omi), after a falling out with her husband, suddenly shows up out of nowhere and starts lodging at her son’s pad.
Complications ensue. Eat With Me is most insightful when it shows how Elliot’s parents’ failure to communicate is passed down to him, resulting in his inability to form lasting relationships and his miscommunications with the sensitive musician Ian (Aidan Bristow).
The strength of Eat With Me is its cast, led by the estimable Sharon Omi, who is stellar as a loving if traditional, conservative mom struggling with her son’s “deviance” and with her deep maternal instincts, which she expresses by cleaning his loft and by (but of course!) cooking for the son she is desperately trying to reach to and connect with.
Up to now, Omi has mostly been confined to small big and little screen roles, but here this gifted artist is allowed to shine in a lead role, and we are all the better for it. Nicole Sullivan is a sheer delight as the wacky, quirky next door neighbour Maureen, who accidentally “enlightens” Emma in a droll sequence. Sullivan adds much of the comic relief needed to defuse what could have been a tense drama in other hands.
Jamila Alina plays the obligatory kooky Asian gal pal Jenny, who works at Elliot’s restaurant. She’s good fun whenever she’s onscreen. -ED

DVDs courtesy: Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha