Just as my book reading has been well behind my usual pace this year, so has my movie watching. The latest group:
Ben Kingsley is very good at what he does. Starring Kingsley as an alcoholic hit man for a Polish mob family in Buffalo, You Kill Me is a quirky comedic thriller that entertains. Kingsley’s alcoholism causes him to screw up a hit that put his family in jeopardy and he moves to the west coast to dry out. There he meets a woman (Tea Leoni) before having to return to Buffalo to set the score.
After an incredible dinner, including excellent Cuatro Leches cake for dessert, at La Duni, Holly and I saw Baby Mama, starring Tina Fey (30 Rock is awesome) and Amy Poehler. Tina is a successful working woman who would like to have a kid on her own but has fertility problems. That plus the fact that she has no father prospects leads her to enlist Poehler, a strikingly stereotypical redneck, to be her surrogate. There is a bit of humor found in the pregnancy, but it all goes cockeyed before everyone kisses and makes up. Would have been better off missing this one.
The Brothers Solomon is dumber that Baby Mama and not at all a great dumb comedy. Nevertheless, I love Will Arnett–GOB is one of my favorite sit-com characters of all time–which is probably why I liked this movie more than it deserved. The brothers are sheltered, socially inept, and too happy for their own good. Hoping to please their father who is in a coma, they set out to father a child. They enlist a surrogate–sound familiar?–and attempt to learn to be parents.
I have read all of Elmore Leonard‘s crime novels (and they are excellent), but before he wrote crime novel, he wrote westerns. One of which was 3:10 to Yuma, which was recently redone as a movie of the same name starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale (it was first done as a movie in 1957; I’ve never seen it). In the 2007 remake, Crowe plays a leader of a band of outlaws who is captured and must be brought to justice. That means getting him to Contention for the 3:10 train to Yuma Territorial Prison before his gang catches up and try to free Crowe. Bale signs up as part of the group attempting to deliver Wade to Contention. In the end, he is the only one to even attempt to see it all the way through.
