Mini Facebook Style Reviews of Like Crazy, One Day, Cars 2, and Page One

     Like Crazy: Remember in the final scene of The Graduate, when after Benjamin Braddock crashing Elaine's wedding, they catch a bus, and go and sit the back? Instead of cutting right to the credits though, director Mike Nichols holds the camera on them, for what feels like an eternity in film time, showing the confusion, bewilderment, and potential excitement of this new situation wash over their faces. In, Like Crazy, writer/director Drake Doremus has been able to capture those feelings; those petulant, inconvenient, incredibly intense experiences of first love.
      Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones star as Jacob and Anna--her, an exchange student from the UK, him a design student from the States--who meet in college in a whirlwind romance that takes them both into only to be tested by everything from her expired student visa and her deportation back to the UK, the continued distance between them, occasional temptations, and most poignantly, the fact that they are growing up. 

      Now it may sound trite, but it's actually quite moving. You can see the anxiety and indecision of what these two are going through so stridently you can't help but relate. In Jones especially as well as Yelchin, Doremus has found equals, actors with equal parts whip smart emotional connection as well as enough believability to make even the most cloying of moments (of which there are a couple) avoid becoming schlocky.
      The continual back-and-forth does get a bit grating after a while especially since these two are in their early 20s and their estrangement doesn't seem to hold the same weight that something like that of Ryan and Michelle in Blue Valentine a year ago. Their lives separate seem disproportionately better than when they are together, so I don't see why they want it so badly. The script also needed to work on the characterization of the alluring Jennifer Lawrence and Charlie Bewley as the estranged couples significant others when they're apart. They are so underwritten, and poor Lawrence is especially wasted despite being so astute in her few brief moments.
      Like so many before it, Like Crazy is a rear view look into a worldview we all remember all too well. It may be a little tough sometimes to be confronted so brutally with ones own past. Grade: B

     One Day: Based on the widely popular and lovely novel by David Nicholls, the film follows two young Brits Dexter (Jim Sturgess) and Emma (Anne Hathaway) and drops in on them every year for the next twenty years on the day they met.
      It's a cute concept, and it nearly works as a film, but somewhere along the way, Nicholls in adapting his own work and director Lone Scherfig (who directed 2009's An Education with such delicacy and care) has taken the quirky and romantic and tried to make it sweeping and expansive and it just isn't big enough to fit that frame.
     For some reason, the filmmakers chose to focus more of their attention to Sturgess' Dexter leaving poor Annie as just this girl that pops in every few minutes to remind us she's there. She does what she can (despite a pretty unsteady accent), but no matter how much she wants us to think her socially awkward and idiosyncratic, I now find it hard to believe Anne Hathaway bookish and homely. Kudos to Patricia Clarkson (the screen's most dependable scene stealer) as Dexter's mother
      The film has some swoony romantic moments and gestures, and the last twenty minutes really sing. Ultimately though, One Day is bogged down by a concept and doesn't seem to break free leaving a group of very talented people stranded in a cage of their own design. Grade: C+

After the jump.....the spotlight on the ever-declining newspaper industry, and on a film that slightly tarnishes the golden standard of Pixar Animation

       

     Page One: Inside the New York Times: Chronicling what could be one of the most culturally and financially important years at the New York Times, the film does play well to explore and divulge the different problems plaguing the traditional media world. It discusses Wikileaks, the Jayson Blair scandal, and the rise of new media. That revolution of new media, the catastrophic jump off of advertising and classifieds all while still trying to put out a paper that's both informative and unbiased.
       But the film works on a deeper level; it chronicles an ever rising tide of the new world with all of it's benefits up against a world that still believes it's a vital and important part of the daily lives of all in involved. There's a sequence showing personnel that have worked for the times for almost a quarter century resigning or being fired, and you can see the pain and the realization that this part of their lives is over. It's a heartbreaking scene. Grade: B+

     Cars 2: Anytime you do any reading about Pixar, all of the filmmakers there seem to stress how important the story is. They trim the fat, they get rid of subplots that don't make sense, and keep the tightest, strongest story they possibly can. Obviously...none of those thoughts went into the production of this particularly sour lemon in the Pixar canon. It's nearly a disaster, and if it didn't have some killer visuals it would be unwatchable.
      By shifting focus away from Lightning McQueen and onto Mater--the lovably, dim-witted tow truck voiced by Larry the Cable Guy--the sophistication plummets considerably. Plus then you add secret agents, explosions, a subplot involving alternative fuel, and enough pandering to Sarah Palin's "Real America" you have a film too convoluted to actually be enjoyable.
      Thank god it looks as good as it does. The visuals, especially the World Grand Prix races and set pieces have a verve and distinctively splashy color palette that is hard to ignore or not be impressed by. Now about that pesky story....Grade: C