Country Strong

Director: Shane Feste
Writer: Shana Feste
Starring: Gwyneth Paltrow, Garrett Hedlund
Release Date: January 14, 2011
Length: 1 hour 52 minutes

Beau Hutton (Garett Hedlund) is a twenty something aspiring country musician working a rehabilitation center. He is having an affair with one of the center’s patients, country music star Kelly Canter (Gwyneth Paltrow). Kelly is cheating on her producer husband, James (Tim McGraw) with Beau and staying in rehab after an excruciating year of criticism, loss and humiliation. Kelly has almost recovered from a painful concert in Dallas, where she fell off the stage pregnant, and lost her baby while alcohol-induced. James takes Kelly out of rehab early in order for Kelly to go on her full tour, where the young and fresh Chiles Stanton (Leighton Meester) will open for her. However Kelly wants Beau to open for her concert so James reluctantly asks Beau to come on tour with them and Beau agrees. On this tour, the four travel together as they leave and create new relationships. Beau still worries that James took Kelly out of rehab too early and her addictions will creep up on her in given time. Writer/director Shana Feste creates a fictional biographical film that tries to be meaningful and poignant but ends up being sappy and overdone. There are a few things to love about this film but a script ain’t one. Everyone in the cast gives wonderful performances including the never-failing Gwyyneth Paltrow as the tormented Canter with her manic-depressive personality that makes her hated and pitied by the audience. Tim McGraw has proven himself a great actor from The Blind Side and continues to do so with his performance in Country Strong, playing the role of a dependable husband to a tormented crazy wife that needs him. Leighton Meester is engaging as the self-absorbed, naïve Chiles Stanton who dreams of becoming exactly like Kelly. The real star of the film is the captivating newcomer Garett Hedlund as Beau. His subtle authentic performance makes him stand out from everyone acting in the film. My highest amount of interest for this film came when he was on screen and he carries the entire film beautifully. The most enjoyable aspect of the film though, was the original country music composed by Michael Brook. Every soft song performed in Country Strong sung by Paltrow, Hedlund or Meester connected the story and made a lovely flow between scenes. Feste fittingly chooses the young Beau to be the main character of the film and gives a different perspective on Kelly rather than the film soully just being about her. Feste has a cute, interesting plot up until a very random unnecessary ending that clearly once again tries but fails to gain a deeper appreciation from the audience. A sweet romance blossoms between the characters of Chiles and Beau that endears the audience, while Kelly’s struggles with addiction and her husband maintains our interest. If the last 20 minutes were shaved off the film, Country Strong would have been likable because the rest of the movie while being cheesy and banal was still quite charming. If you love country music or Gwyneth Paltrow go ahead and see Country Strong, but be prepared for a shocking ending you might find abruptly pointless. 

Incendies

Director: Dennis Villeneuve
Writers: Dennis Villeneuve, Valerie Beaugrand-Champagne, Wajdi Mouawad (playwright)
Starring: Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin
Release Date: January 20, 2011
Length: 2 hours 10 minutes

French Canadian director Dennis Villeneuve takes on Wajdi Mouawad’s play Scorched and turns it into one of the most compelling graphic stories ever told on film. Incendies tells the story of twins, Jeanne and Simon Marwan who have just endured their mother’s death. When receiving her wills to them, they are told for the first time they have a brother they never knew about and have been requested by their mother to find him and their father to deliver their mother’s letters to them. As the twins journey through the different villages and cities in the Middle East where their mother lived, they unearth shocking revelations about who she was and the people they descend from that change their lives completely. Villeneuve creates a moving masterpiece of film, incredible in story and illustration as the film goes back and forth in time from the mother’s story to the twins’ discovery of it. Incendies has a beautiful narrative of two simple people who have their worlds turned upside down only through jaw dropping realizations but no impacting events. Actors Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin as Jeanne Marwan and Maxime Gaudette as Simon Marwan are exceptional as the twins. Through their fantastic performances, we can slowly see them change little by little together and apart. When they face what they know together as brother and sister, the audience is fully convinced of their close but now distraught relationship. Before it becomes a voyage for both twins, Jeanne travels on her own to the unspecified country in the Middle East to visit these places and find answers concerning her mother. In these scenes with only Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, we are swept away by her performance as we watch Jeanne’s struggle to remain relaxed and strong through the trip with all the knowledge coming her way stopping her. Early in the film, we learn that Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal), Jeanne and Simon’s mother, grew up in an extremely Christian home somewhere in the Middle East (most likely Lebanon). She was kicked out as a teenager for having a relationship with a Muslim and getting pregnant with his child. This teenage boy is shot by one of her family members in her opening scene. Later as a young adult when Nawal is living with her uncle in a populated city, she becomes a revolutionary in the country’s civil war. This is the tip of the iceberg for a woman that’s cast a large veil over an incredible amount of astonishing and disturbing stories she buries when she moves to Canada. Lubna Azabal gives an overwhelming performance as Nawal Marwan from when she is a teenager to an elderly woman. She carries the entire movie and you are so constantly intrigued and bowled over by this enigmatic woman. The story of Incendies oddly has strong feelings of realism and fantasy combined into one. The film feels so real because of the constant battles and riots occurring in the Middle East but it also feels quite dream-like because this is a fictional story happening in an unspecified country where what happens to the characters is so astonishing it can’t be real. Dennis Villeneuve brings all the alarming and tragic elements of every character’s time in the Middle East to life with stunning visual effects and cinematography. This film is absolutely breathtaking to watch, highlighted by beautiful scenery of the landscape of Jordan, where they shot part of the film. The graphic special effects are so compelling that they make you choke during the war scenes with Nawal Marwan. Dennis Villeneuve leads a film with spectacular acting, a heartbreaking story, and gorgeous visuals. One of the best films of the year, Incendies is a must-see. 

No Strings Attached

Director: Ivan Reitman
Writer: Elizabeth Meriwether
Staring: Natalie Portman, Ashton Kutcher
Release Date: January 21, 2010
Length: 1 hour 50 minutes

The beautiful Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher star in Ivan Reitman’s new romantic comedy, No Strings Attached. The film manages to squish two major overdone plot elements into one story. One being that this is yet another film with the “friends with benefits” premise and the second being that the girl in the story for some reason doesn’t believe in love while the boy is a hopeless romantic. Emma Kurtzman and Adam Franklin first meet at summer camp when they are teenagers, and continue to coincidently meet at 5-year intervals, similar to the classic romcom When Harry Met Sally. Now, Emma is working as a doctor at a local hospital, while Adam is an assistant producer of a glee-like TV show. Meeting for the fourth time in their lives, Adam shows up drunk at Emma’s door, crashes at her place for the night and the two spontaneously have sex the next morning. Discovering this idea of having sex without getting emotionally involved, Adam and more enthusiastically, Emma, decide to continue their sex-friendship by meeting up whenever one of them wants to. Things get messy though, when Adam has feelings for Emma and suggests dating. Feeling uncomfortable about this, Emma rejects the idea and starts to internally question letting her guard down for once. Like every romantic comedy, No Strings Attached has clichés in the storyline, unoriginal characters, type-casted supporting characters and one predictable happy ending. If the film is funny or cute enough though, these facets can be easily overlooked. However, this film had a consistent aspect of randomness, an aspect I believe, that can make or break a movie. The large amount of randomness in the film provided the humor, most of the plot changes and even some characters. Unfortunately, I did not find the whimsy of No Strings Attached appealing. It caused the film to progress at a very quick pace, with almost no character development, even though the characters were already predictable stereotypes. The arbitrary dialogue in each scene did sometimes evoke humor but caused the entire story as a whole to not make any sense. It almost seemed that no one involved in the making of this film knew what was really going on and just wanted to make a funny movie. There were numerous small characters that were added just because they were odd and funny but they had no real importance to the story. With all these futile personalities trying to be rolled into the movie, there was just way too much going on at once. The film also did not benefit from pointless subplots, such as Adam’s dad dating his ex-girlfriend or Adam trying to become a writer on the show he works for. There are some hilarious one-liners in the script but I couldn’t find most of them funny because I didn’t understand the point of the character saying them and that fueled an annoyance within me that overtook everything else mildly entertaining in the film. Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman both carried the film nicely and shared a great comedic as well as romantic chemistry, however they weren’t enough to distract me from the lack of plot in the film. Oddly enough, the only people that really made me laugh was Lake Bell as Adam’s bizarre boss who likes him and The Office’s Mindy Kaling as one of Emma’s best friends and co-workers. Both actresses’ unpredictability in their characters was so much stronger than everybody else’s and leads me to believe they used a lot more improvisation in their performances. No Strings Attached is one of those movies that you either love or hate. Personally, I need story structure to any movie I see and don’t appreciate all these characters just doing crazy things to bring laughs out of the audience. However, if you’re one of those people who doesn’t really care about the plot and just wants to be entertained, this is probably the film for you.