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REVIEWS PREVIEWS: Perfect Pie
Perfect Pie is a chick-flick about how visiting the past can heal present wounds as well as open up some old ones. The movie focuses on two friends Patsy (Wendy Crewson) and Francesca (Barbara Williams).
Francesca left her hometown and became successful as an opera singer. She revisits her roots when she is invited to her hometown by her old friend Patsy for a charity concert. Both the old friends are happy to get together again and it doesn’t take them much time to reconnect, even though on the surface they have become very different people. Through a series of flashbacks, we get to learn about their past, particularly about Patsy’s problems that unabled her to pursue her dreams and leave her home. Francesca is also reunited with her ex-boyfriend, played by Tom McCamus and is now faced with a dilemma; she has to decide whether to return to her life of glamour or stay back and find emotional security.
None of the leading cast members are major stars, yet they give solid performances. In terms of picturization, the beautiful locales of Ontario have been well shot which is starkly different from the clustered urban American settings of the usual Hollywood fare. Though slow-moving, Perfect Pie is the perfect choice for a lazy and relaxing weekend.—AS
Brown Sugar
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Brown Sugar is a sweet story drawing a parallel between the love for hip-hop music and the relationship between lifelong friends Taye Diggs and music journalist Sanaa Lathan. This flick attempts to be When Harry Met Sally but is cooler. It also has an emotional series of testimonials from hip-hop greats about their passion for rap music.Years back, the lead couple met on a New York City street corner and fell in love-with hip-hop music. Fifteen years later, Dre (Taye) is a successful music executive for Millennium Records while Sidney (Sanaa) is a music writer. But when Millennium enters a recording deal with a gimmicky rapper, Dre becomes disappointed with his career and turns to Sidney rather than his wife Reese (Nicole), for support. He tells Sidney before announcing his decision to start his own label called Brown Sugar. But it’s not long before Dre and Sidney’s development in their friendship creates problems all around.
Both come to realize that their true-life passions will only be fulfilled by remembering what they learned on that street corner.
Overall the movie is a romantic comedy and provides good entertainment and music. Recommended for the weekend.—Nazia Mirza
Simone
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Simone is a long, intermittently funny re-working of the Pygmalion myth devoted to the proposition that you can fool all the people all the time.Al Pacino, in his usual ‘man on the verge of a nervous breakdown’ persona, plays Viktor Taransky, a Hollywood director on the skids, filled with nostalgia for both the old studio system and the early days of independent cinema in the 1960s. Disgusted with the increasing demands of stars who want bigger trailers and first-class plane tickets for the nanny even though they don’t have children, he’s given a machine by a recently deceased scientist that enables him to digitalize stars and come up with Simone, who entrances the world in Sunset Sunrise, Eternity Forever and a movie with a coded title that Viktor intends to ruin her reputation — I Am Pig.
Viktor’s problems in concealing Simone’s identity and then trying to dispose of his creation are fairly amusing, and the movie (shot on the same Paramount lot as Sunset Boulevard) oozes Hollywood self-loathing. The movie’s biggest problem, however, is that it is difficult to suspend willingly one’s disbelief when the virtual star Simone is so much less than the sum of her parts (bits of Audrey Hepburn, Garbo, Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren, Jayne Mansfield, Jane Fonda). In fact, she resembles a blonde bimbo moving on from presenting weather forecasts to hosting her own chat show.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
28 Days Later
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Danny Boyle’s exhilarating new film is in the spirit of the classic small-screen post-apocalypse fantasies from the 1970s and 1980s: dramas such as Threads and Survivors.A fatal virus is released when animal rights activists release chimps infected with “rage.” Twenty-eight days later, a terrified bike messenger called Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in a London hospital, the city in ruins and apparently deserted, the infected populace rampaging around somwhere like vampiric mad dogs. It is when he teams up with some of the few uninfected people — played by Brendan Gleeson, Naomie Harris and Megan Burns — and heads for a supposedly safe army encampment that the horror begins.
Boyle’s use of locations — bleak countryside, gaunt motorways and weird deserted London streetscapes — is aided by fast, fluent shooting on digital video, which also facilitates some creative special effects (you can see more ambitious examples in the digitally ruined Warsaw in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist at the beginning of next year). The verminous “infected” are satisfyingly horrible: there’s a good scene in which Jim and companions are shin-deep in swarming rats actually running away from these viral un-dead.
It flags during the encampment scenes, with some redundant gore, but this is a muscular, virile piece of film-making from Boyle.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
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