Anne Hathaway

Alice Through the Looking Glass

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Alice Through the Looking Glass
  • IMDb: link

Alice Through the Looking GlassOther than the bizarre Burtonian designs of the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) and the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) I remember almost nothing of 2010’s Alice in Wonderland. Six years later Tim Burton reassembles the cast for a sequel one studio executive, and possibly some other people somewhere, thought would be a good idea. Six years from now I wonder if I will remember anything about this film.

With Burton taking a backseat as producer this time around, James Bobin (The Muppets, The Muppets Most Wanted) steps into the director’s chair. Burton’s fingerprints are all over the film so we can’t really call it Bobin’s movie, but there are some humorous touches that could come from the director.

Set several years after the first film, Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is now a ship’s captain who is pulled back into Wonderland by either A) a friend in need or B) her inability to deal with the stress losing her ship to her ex-fiance. You can decide for yourself whether you believe Alice is an adventurer or a troubled young woman with mental problems she deals with through detailed hallucinations.

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The Intern

/ / Home Video
  • Title: The Intern
  • IMDb: link

The InternNancy Meyers‘ The Intern is a fun, if lightweight, affair casting Robert De Niro as the unlikely new intern at an online fashion company who, of course, turns out to be the perfect man for the job. Immediately loved by everyone else in the company, it takes longer for the company’s CEO (Anne Hathaway) to take to the firm’s newest employee.

The Intern succeeds mainly on the likability of its stars, although the script gets into trouble with an ill-conceived heist sequence and a rather awful girl’s night out hotel bonding sequence between the pair late in the film.

Also troubling is that for the smart, successful businesswoman Hathaway portrays she’s incapable of making the easiest (and most obvious) decision in the entire movie which she needs the help of not one but two men (both her intern/new best friend and her less-than-trustworthy cheating husband portrayed by Anders Holm) to make for her.

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Anne Hathaway’s Wrecking Ball vs. Emily Blunt’s Piece of My Heart (Lip Sync Battle)

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Lip Sync Battle
  • IMDb: link

Still full of far too much filler and not enough actual content, last night’s Lip Sync Battle raised the bar a bit by pitting good friends Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt against each other. The two verbally sparred back and forth for most of the evening but Hathaway stole the night with her performance of Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” (watch Blunt’s reaction in the background to her performance).

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Interstellar

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Interstellar
  • IMDb: link

InterstellarIf Christopher Nolan‘s sci-fi end-of-the-world epic feels a bit familiar it is. Borrowing obviously from 2001: A Space Odyssey and the recent success of an astronaut stranded in space in Gravity (both far better films), Interstellar showcases both Nolan’s strengths and weaknesses of the director when his subject matter lacks the originality of his best films.

An ambitious project to be sure, Interstellar‘s B-movie plot seemingly ripped straight out of 1950s sci-fi can only lead it so far. The strength of its cast can’t cover up the flaws in the nearly three-hour project whose length also effects the director’s decreasingly-effective bag-of-tricks such as the loud music blasts which may have worked in Inception but come off distracting and disorienting even obscuring dialogue in several scenes.

As a movie experience Interstellar has merit and is worth seeing. As a complete film experience I found it wanting and would compare it to the eerily similar Signs. M. Night Shamalan‘s equally ambitious project relied too strongly on performance, far-too-cute coincidences, and late twists (over a well-developed story) as well.

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Rio 2

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Rio 2
  • IMDb: link

Rio 22011’s Rio was a colorful (if mostly by the numbers) film featuring a domesticated Spix Macaw (Jesse Eisenberg) who finds himself stuck in the wider world in your basic fish (or in this case bird) out of water storyline. The sequel doesn’t stray far from the original as Blu (Eisenberg) once again is put in uncomfortable new surroundings only to eventually prove he has what it takes to survive and thrive.

After the discovery of other Macaws, Blu and Jewel (Anne Hathaway) head into the Amazon with their children (Rachel Crow, Amandla Stenberg, Pierce Gagnon) where Blu finds it increasingly hard to fit in (and that’s before meeting Jewel’s disapproving father). Once again the movie gives us both human and bird enemies, unnecessarily returning Jemaine Clement as the vengeance-obsessed Nigel, along with the supporting cast of the first film and a few new faces (most notably Kristin Chenoweth as a poisonous tree frog) as well.

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