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Reviews
No Reservations (2007)
Fine Ingredients, Shabby Recipe
I adore Catherine Zeta-Jones. Abigail Breslin became one of my all-time favorite child actors when I saw Little Miss Sunshine last year. I love Aaron Eckhart's wit and charisma. I even love Bob Balaban, a member of Christopher Guest's mockumentary posse. Unfortunately, I did NOT love the watery stew in which they were all floating about, No Reservations. The plot is a formulaic hodgepodge of scenes that I imagine are supposed to press your emotional buttons. Unfortunately, the only emotions they managed to elicit from my companions and me were shock at the unoriginality of the story and amusement at the cheesiness of it all. The movie went beyond being overly predictable and saccharine, though. Remember that part in the movie's preview where Kate (Catherine Zeta-Jones) slices the list of the restaurant's main dishes in half and gives one of the pieces of the paper to Aaron Eckhart's character, telling him he will be in charge of those entrées and she will take care of the rest? I think the scriptwriters might have made a similar arrangement--except one of them forgot to turn in their portions. Some scenes seemed to be missing entire chunks, which made for choppy, unnatural, almost comical progressions of what were supposed to be dramatic events. Also, much as I love CZJ, the fact that she kept slipping into her native Welsh accent made her character even less believable. I know that she can maintain a near-perfect American accent because she did so in Chicago, which further leads me to suppose that No Reservations was microwaved when it should have been slow-cooked in the oven.
Clueless (1995)
Is "Clueless" all it's cracked up to be? As if!
I recently taped and watched "Clueless" when it was on the USA channel. The TV Now gave it 3 out of 4 stars. Friends and classmates have been raving about it since third grade. The general plot of a spoiled, popular valley girl making over a "loser" sounded like it had potential. I was excited and looking forward to some high-quality comedy, along the lines of "Austin Powers" or "Superstar". I could not have been more disappointed if I had watched a Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen movie. At least the twins act their age. Let me just say this: If "Clueless" had been a 5-minute skit on "Saturday Night Live", it might have made it. Fashion dilemmas and that '90s valley girl dialect get old after ten minutes, let alone after over an hour. And the ending! Blech! It doesn't get much sappier than that! Unless you adore teen movies, I'd, like, totally avoid "Clueless".