How many foreign lives does it take to save a white American family? Thanks to the new chase-yarn, ‘No Escape,’ we now have an answer. The guiltiest of guilty pleasures, director John Erick Dowdle has expertly crafted a taut action-thriller crammed with enough white privilege to make The Donald blush.
At 34, Nancy (Londoner-accented Lake Bell) is a flakey journalist on the reluctant look for love at the pestering of friends and family. Through a case of mistaken identity hinging on a self-help book, she winds up on a date turned epic day with Jack (Simon Pegg), an online marketing manager. Charming, right? It’s this on-the-nose “charm” which will divide audiences into lovers and haters (with this viewer falling more towards the latter). In spite of a stellar cast, Man Up falls flat on its promising premise of being a rom-com for nonbelievers.
The procedural crime thriller, tales of murder investigation and corruption, a hallmark of hard boiled fiction from the 1970’s onwards, has tailed off. This is particularly frustrating when such a film emerges that should really have been a shot in the arm but was instead a bullet in the head. Step forward the hugely promising and ultimately disappointing Pride and Glory, a true Jekyll and Hyde.
Million Dollar Arm Written by Tom McCarthy Directed by Craig Gillespie USA, 2014 There’s a scene roughly halfway through Million Dollar Arm that speaks to the film’s inherently generic nature. In it, our ostensible hero, workaholic agent/pitchman Don Draper—er, J.B. Bernstein (Jon Hamm) is brought in to talk with USC baseball coach Tom House (Bill …
In A World… Written and directed by Lake Bell USA, 2013 In A World… tells the story of Carol Solomon (Lake Bell), a struggling young voice coach who lives in the shadows of her acknowledged “king of voiceovers” father, Sam Soto (Fred Melamed). Sam kicks Carol out of his house so he can live alone …