Owen Wilson, Morgan Freeman, Sara Foster, Charlie Sheen
Some movies, such as 2001's Ocean's Eleven, coast by on knockabout charm. They don't make a lot of sense and there isn't much at stake, but they are still loads of fun to watch. Not so The Big Bounce, a painfully meandering comedy based on an Elmore Leonard novel of the same name. (Ryan O'Neal and Leigh Taylor-Young, wed at the time, appeared in an equally undistinguished but sexier 1969 film version.)
Wilson is Jack Ryan, a drifter working as a hotel handyman in Hawaii. He hooks up with a rich man's spoiled mistress (Foster), who suggests they steal $200,000 from her sugar daddy's safe.
The preternaturally cool Wilson is amusing enough, but Foster, a tall, skeleton-thin model-TV hostess (ET on MTV) making her movie debut, is beyond abysmal. Watching her try to summon up an expression—any expression—is akin to seeing a hapless game-show contestant mentally flail for an answer before blurting out a laughably erroneous choice. (PG-13)
COMEDY
Scarlett Johansson, Chris Evans
Please mark your answers clearly with a No. 2 pencil. You may begin...now.
1)If you were reviewing this heist caper about high school seniors trying to steal SAT answers from the test service's headquarters, you would describe it as:
A)a brilliant satire on the desperation of the American dream
B)a mediocre bit of nothing pandering to the youth market
C)way cool-head of its class!
D)worthy of a sequel about the LSATs
2)Johansson's askew rosebud of a mouth is to a camera as honey is to
A)bees B)Bee Gees C)Beyoncé
3)The most annoying thing about the movie is:
A)Leonardo Nam playing his role, a bong-hitting underachiever, exactly as if he were Jack Black
B)Evans, who as the leader of the gang remains a complete blank
C)the wuss-out ending
D)all of the above
Time!(PG-13)
DOCUDRAMA
Nicholas Aaron, Brendan Mackey
If your mountain climbing partner, badly injured and dangling like a dead weight at the end of a long rope attached to you, failed to respond to shouts or tugs on the line, what would you do? That question faced Simon Yates when he and Joe Simpson (see page 79) ran into bad luck while scaling the 21,000-ft. Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes in 1985. Yates cut the rope, saving his own life. Because the two Englishmen narrate the film (actors Aaron and Mackey play the pair in scenes recreating the 1985 events), we know they both made it off the mountain alive. What it cost them, and what they learned, makes for a compelling, cautionary tale, though the film's hybrid nature—sometimes it's actors onscreen, sometimes the real guys—undercuts its emotional impact. (Not rated)
Michael Caine
What's it all about, Michael? Try roles from Alfie to Austin Powers's pa in more than 100 movies, two Oscars, a 31-year marriage and two kids. Now 70, Caine plays a fugitive Nazi collaborator in The Statement.
ON HIS EVIL STATEMENT CHARACTER: I've done everything. If you ask me to play a Cockney gangster, I can do it with my eyes shut. I thought to play someone I hate so much would be a tremendous task to set for myself. He's the worst character I've ever played. I think of all racists as pathetic, so I decided to make him sad. That was his only redeeming feature.
ON ACTING AT 70: What's great now is I don't have to work for a living. It's rather like an extraordinary, highly paid hobby. I've got to enjoy myself because at my age, you don't want to get up at 6:30 in the morning and be with a load of people you don't like, doing what you don't want to do.
ON NO LONGER GETTING THE GIRL IN MOVIES: It's all right. I did it enough when I was young. And I've got a very beautiful wife at home, so it doesn't bother me.
ON MARRIED LIFE: Shakira and I are home people. We built a house out of a 200-year-old barn in Surrey. This is where we are happiest.
- Contributors:
- Leah Rozen,
- Tom Gliatto,
- Sabrina McFarland.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
