The Screengrab : michelle monaghan

Precursors: Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Nick Schager — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Those interested in fully readying themselves for this Friday’s Star Trek would be wise to bypass the franchise’s myriad small- and big-screen iterations and instead take a second look at Mission: Impossible III, the first and most recent franchise to get a vigorous kick in the behind from J.J. Abrams. Unfairly dismissed during its summer 2006 release because of star Tom Cruise’s couch-hopping antics and crazy comments about psychology and anti-depressants, the third Mission: Impossible remains the series’ most accessible and breathlessly exciting, characteristics mainly attributable to its director, who took on the project without any prior experience helming a tentpole extravaganza, and yet provided the no-nonsense adrenalized excitement absent from Brian De Palma’s intricate first and John Woo’s embarrassingly flamboyant second installments. Abrams borrows liberally from his TV series Alias as well as countless other sources for his story about IMF agent Ethan Hunt’s efforts to hunt down a Maguffin from a master criminal (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who’s kidnapped his new wife (Michelle Monaghan). And to be sure, not all of the narrative works, most notably with regards to its efforts to humanize the more-or-less superhuman Hunt. Still, Hoffman’s villain is excellent, and Abrams’ action-and-espionage centerpiece sequences have a visceral, invigorating electricity that one hopes Star Trek – which I’ll be reviewing here at The Screengrab later this week – also possesses.

DVD Digest for December 30, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday! This week, the big studios drop a ton of new DVDs and Blu-Rays into the market to compete for your newly-acquired Christmas cash.

In recent releases, DVD shopping begins early this week, with three new Paramount titles: Shia Labeouf and Michelle Monaghan in Eagle Eye (also Blu-Ray); Ricky Gervais in Ghost Town (also Blu-Ray); and Keira Knightley in The Duchess (also Blu-Ray). Today brings us Nick Broomfield’s Battle For Haditha (Image Entertainment), as well as a “head to head” match up (sorry) between Alan Ball’s Towelhead (Warner) and the Duplass Brothers’ Baghead (Sony).

In TV on DVD, today’s new releases include The Tudors Season 2 (Paramount) and Nip/Tuck Season 5 Part 1 (Warner).

Finally, this week’s bumper crop of new Blu-Ray-only releases includes: Tom Cruise in Days of Thunder (Paramount); the Shining-in-space thriller Event Horizon (Paramount); Demi Moore and the Swayz in Ghost (Paramount); Queen Latifah in Last Holiday (Paramount); Jim Carrey in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (Paramount); Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn in Wedding Crashers (Warner); and finally, the Browncoats’ favorite, Joss Whedon’s Serenity (Universal).

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Trucker"

Phil Nugent — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

James Mottern's Trucker is a throwback, the kind of low-budget, low-impact drama about grubby, ordinary people that used to be as plentiful at film festivals as fleas on a sheepdog in summertime. They still make these kinds of movies, of course, and one way to get one not just made but shown in a few places is to cast an attractive, up-and-coming actor or actress who's tired of being used as set direction and wants to show that he or she can act, or at least pass for ordinary. The title character in Trucker stars Michelle Monaghan, who looked a little too dewy fresh to be spending her afternoons interrogating neighborhood barroom toughs in Gone Baby Gone. She looks much looser and happier in her first scenes here, playing Diane, a long-haul trucker who owns her own rig and lives by herself in her little San Diego crash pad. You can see what attracted Monaghan to this role. She's terrific in her opening scene, preparing to leave a motel and get back on the room but first impatiently trying to keep a straight while listening to the naked, nameless stud in the bed sheepishly assure her that he wasn't just "using" her. She also does fine teamwork with Nathan Fillion, who plays the less macho half of their relationship; he's the married "best friend" who's been pining for her for four years while serving as her steady platonic date between one-night stands. When she joins him at a kids' softball game and stares at him in dismay when she sees what's in his go-cup, Fillion drawls, "I'm not drinkin', per se, I'm celebratin' life."

Trucker might have sustained itself better if it hadn't had any plot at all, but probably Mottern didn't feel that he was ready to try anything too avant-garde. So Diane, like half the women in movies these days, acquires a kid. Unlike Tina Fey in Baba Mama, she got hers the old-fashioned way, by getting pregnant by Benjamin Bratt and then leaving him a dozen years before the movie starts. The little life changer lands on her doorstep when Bratt succombs to colon cancer and is too busy dying to stay on top of the play date schedule. (Bratt, who could use a career jump=start of his own--didn't his character leave Law & Order because his wife was sick? has he considered offering to come back to the show, given that she must have died by now?-- has a big tearjerker death bed scene with the kid. "I guess you can tell by looking at me that I'm not in the best shape of my life," he says, but in fact he looks pretty and well-fed and hale enough to bench-press a horse. Maybe the film crew couldn't afford to rent some footage of sick people for him to look at, though the makeup department did do its best to help out by apparently painting his head light gray, perhaps to see what he'd look like playing the early version of the Incredible Hulk.)

Monaghan and the kid have a decent exchange early on; she asks him why he doesn't want to talk to her, he replies, "I don't talk to bitches," and she says, "Fair enough." But soon she's turning all motherly and repentant in the face of all the contrivance, with the little bastard functioning as a living, breathing "J'accuse!" Trying to push him away for his own good, she bawls, "I am who I am! I'm always gonna be like this," and from her tone you may end up wondering if you missed a couple of reels where she was robbing banks and sending the money to Bin Laden or sacrificing puppies to Satan, her dark lord. To fully appreciate Trucker on its own terms, you have to be prepared to react with horror to the idea that a woman who works hard at her job and who even turns out to be a pretty good mother when she has to be might sometimes want to arrange her own play date to sneak off to a Motel 6 with a handsome stranger and fuck each other's brains out.

Trailer Review: Made of Honor

Paul Clark — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

By now, I know better than to expect realism from most Hollywood movies, especially in the romantic comedy genre, which has always been about vicarious fantasy fulfillment. Still, this trailer begs the question: who ARE these people? Made of Honor seems to take place in an unbearably glossy parallel-dimension version of New York City where everyone is super-successful and sexy, excepting of course the obligatory comic relief nerd. If that's not bad enough, there's Patrick Dempsey, riding out his Grey's Anatomy success as an impossibly smooth (yet sensitive!) ladies' man who has the bad habit of knocking people over when he gets flustered. Cute! I'm not saying that every love story needs to look like a Mike Leigh movie, but the more trailers I see for romantic comedies, the more I'm convinced that the studios are trying to one-up each other for the title of most lavish and opulent onscreen romance, which of course doesn't do wonders for non-Patrick Dempsey-looking guys like me who are still trying to hack their way through the dating scene. Also, after Kiss Kiss Bang Bang a few years back I had high hopes for Michelle Monaghan's career, but it's looking more and more like Hollywood has no idea what to do with her. It's a shame- a talented, appealing actress with a real flair for comedy, she deserves much MUCH better than tripe like Made of Honor.