Release Date : Thursday, 22 April 2010
Length : 1hrs 31min

Movie Director : Mark Steven Johnson
Distributor : The Walt Disney Company (australia) Pty Ltd

Main Cast :  Kristen Bell, Josh Duhamel, Anjelica Huston, Will Arnett, Jon Heder, Dax Shepard

The title of this film is not the only idiom you will find. WHEN IN ROME uses pretty much every common element from the romantic comedy vernacular with no apologies. But, honestly, that is what it needed to succeed. Romantic comedies have a hard time meeting every ones theatrical needs. We are all different and like certain things. Although this one is not stellar or mold breaking it has many pieces that make it a decent addition to the genre.In this one, Beth (Kristen Bell) is in Rome for her sisters wedding when she decides to “remove” a few coins from the fountain of love. Little does she know but that in doing so she has cast a spell on those who tossed them in and has become the object of their overzealous affection. Nick (Josh Duhamel) is the best man at the wedding who has caught Beth’s eye. She must now try and get his attention while staving off her love struck pursuers.

This film starts off slow and is almost destroyed by its own clichés. But once it finds its footing it becomes this quirky story filled with hilarious characters and a plot that moves forward with sufficient agility. Each of Beth’s courters is so very different and played to comic heights by Jon Heder, Will Arnett and Dax Shepard. Danny Devito even manages to keep up with these young bucks despite looking out of place and at times lost in his role. Bell needed to bring the same oomph that made Sarah Marshall a success. Though this script has nowhere near the meat, Bell makes her character endearing and strong. You like her and Josh and want to see them find each other. That is vital in a film like this.

Hidden in the quirkiness of this fantasy movie there is a nice underlying message about what it means to be in love and what that should cause us to do for others. I like that everyone plays nice in this one and gone is the protagonist that overturns the love cart. WHEN IN ROME allows its story to play out simply and sure it has the “oh no I wonder what will happen in the end although we all know what will happen” moments the writers at least made an attempt at cleverness that ties up nicely.

WHEN IN ROME is rated PG-13 for some suggestive content. I appreciated the lengths they went to in order to make this as clean as possible. There is nothing crude or offensive to be found. The language is very mild and other than a few moments of suggestive behavior this is safe for the 13 and up film goers. One a mother and daughter could go see without any of those awkward moments. I give it 3.5 out of 5 art galleries. Not ground breaking. Totally geared for the lover of the genre. But a fun cast, doable script and lots of on screen chemistry make this a pleasant outing for the Valentines season. So says Matt Mungle

Matt Mungle (3.5 out of 5)

“I myself found it an refreshing and funny option to see at the theaters. Hadn’t laughed that had or long in the theaters for a while. I must see romantic comedy.” – Nicky Cane (4 out of 5)

Synopsis: Based on best-selling novelist Nicholas Sparks’ (‘A Walk to Remember,’ ‘The Notebook’) latest novel, The Last Song is set in a small Southern beach town where an estranged father (Greg Kinnear) gets a chance to spend the summer with his reluctant teenage daughter (Miley Cyrus), who’d rather be home in New York.

He tries to reconnect with her through the only thing they have in common-music-in a story of family, friendship, secrets and salvation, along with first loves and second chances. The film is directed by Julie Anne Robinson from a screenplay by Sparks & Jeff Van Wie.

Look at that title carefully…The Last Song.

If you think you’re going to escape Nicolas Sparks’ trademark Inevitable Tragedy, well, you don’t know Sparks. The author has become the brand name for sun-soaked Southern melodrama, full of first love longings and, oh yeah, the Inevitable Tragedy. It doesn’t even matter if the story feels like it needs one; you’re going to get one anyway. It’s all part of the formula.The Last Song is not one of Sparks’ stronger efforts — a shaggy, rambling screenplay that doesn’t have a narrative so much as it loosely assembles a series of moments that Miley Cyrus can storm away from while saying, “You never told me about (fill in the blank)!!!” She’s Ronnie Miller, girl with a troubled past, trying to ride out the summer on Georgia’s Tybee Island under the care of her estranged father (the reliably appealing Greg Kinnear). She meets cute blue-blood beach bum Will (Liam Hemsworth), saves sea turtles, and generally sneers at everything and everyone for the first half of the film.

Withering sarcasm is not Cyrus’s strong suit as an actress. Once she kisses Will, she does a complete character turn (for no real reason other than, hey, kissing is fun), and is finally allowed to “just be Miley,” to paraphrase her hit song. You don’t have to be a chameleon-like actor to be a movie star, and Cyrus is definitely at her most appealing when she’s playing a variation of her own personality, rather than posturing as the surly brat. She’s not fooling anybody. Giggling during a mud fight or rolling around in the surf in a belly shirt while making out? That she can do.

This is Cyrus’s bid to grow up a little as an actress, while not alienating her fan base, and for that purpose, The Last Song looks to be a solid choice for the television star. It has echoes of Twilight (disaffected new-girl-in-town falls for someone in a romance that seems doomed) without Twilight’s dour sexuality. Sparks really stacks the deck with life-changing plot twists as well, with bits involving a girl in an abusive relationship (Carly Chaikin), suspected arson, divorce, teenage infidelity, and the dreaded (but not too surprising) Inevitable Tragedy. It’s an entire season’s worth of a teen soap opera crammed into a feature film.

I can’t say I think Cyrus is a fantastic actress, but she’s a unique screen presence. She acts almost entirely with her mouth, letting her lips do all of the thinking, instead of her eyes (which is a very odd thing for a big screen actor to do). It’s like when George Clooney used to emote using only head nods. She does manage to sneak in a few genuine moments through some awfully flat dialogue (by Sparks and Jeff Van Wie) and too-obvious directing by Julie Anne Robinson. Her little brother, played by Bobby Coleman, is a phenomenal child actor, and it’s his easy chemistry with Kinnear that makes the shaky first half of the film so tolerable.

“Tolerable” may sound like faint praise, but for someone who isn’t the intended audience for The Last Song (and, no, I don’t think thirty-something males are the intended audience) that’s not so bad. I’d imagine Cyrus fans (and Sparks fans) will enjoy their large box of tissues as much as their large box of popcorn, surely more than the average movie-goer. It may not have the edge that it needs to kick Miley Cyrus’s career into adult relevancy, but if you’re looking for an inoffensive romantic tearjerker, you’ll get what you pay for.

- by John Gholson – April 1st 2010

Like the largely (and justifiably) forgotten “I Love Trouble,” a thoroughly misbegotten teaming of Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte, “The Bounty Hunter” attempts a bit of a genre mix, tying the romantic sparring with a suspense story line that’s by turns rote and ridiculous. I’ll make it quick: Aniston plays Nicole, an ace Daily News reporter whose devotion to a story gets her served with a bench warrant. Butler is Milo, a hard-drinking (duh) down-on-his-luck ex-cop now reduced to skip-tracing, who’s assigned to track and return Nicole.

Guess what? They’re exes, who supposedly can’t stand each other but of course in fact can’t live without each other. As they bicker their way from Brooklyn to Atlantic City to deepest Queens (locations that the movie seems to posit as all being within five minutes’ driving distance from each other), they find themselves embroiled in a mystery involving a “suicide” that was actually a murder, and some serious police corruption.

Simultaneously, some mooks are after Milo for gambling debts. And a geek (Jason Sudeikis of “Saturday Night Live”) is doggedly pursuing (you could actually call it stalking) colleague Nicole, deluded that they’ve got a “thing going on.”

All of this is set up, and stretched out, rather tiresomely in the film’s first half. In increasingly dispiriting Hollywood fashion, this section (the parts of it that aren’t ham-handed exposition, that is) plays less like a genuine story than as a series of “beats” engineered for the cheapest possible audience responses. A scene will build to its crescendo, and then some familiar piece of pop music will either coddle or (presumably) perk up the viewer, and sometimes it seems as if writer Sarah Thorp and director Andy Tennant can keep this up indefinitely.

After another argument, Aniston throws something at Butler as his character departs to lose all his money at the gambling tables; cue Frank Sinatra’s “This Town,” of course. A teenage pedicab driver tells the cash-strapped Aniston that he’ll let her ride for free if she shows him her boobs; cut to Aniston herself driving the pedicab, the scammed teen in not-so-hot pursuit; cue Run-D.M.C.’s “It’s Tricky.” And so on. Familiar, welcome character actors (Christine Baranski, Cathy Moriarty of “Raging Bull,” the eerie Peter Greene, the preternatural milquetoast Matt Malloy) show up, are underused, and are dismissed. It’s pretty dismal, not to mention vulgar.

But in the second half of the picture things slow down a little bit, as Nicole and Milo rediscover their tender feelings for each other. Aniston and Butler start showing a very engaging rapport, and fall into a relaxed but snappy rhythm. Where before they had been trying too hard (Butler laying on the slob mannerisms and Noo Yawk accent a bit thick, and Aniston verging on the outright brittle), now they both display a seemingly natural charm. (That these scenes could very well have been shot prior to the earlier scenes in the film is entirely possible, and there, I suppose, might be the magic of editing for you.) While still offering gags that aren’t particularly inventive (although Milo’s method of turning a houseful of strip-club patrons against his mookish creditors winds up being one of the film’s cleverer touches), the movie shifts into a mode that’s tolerably cute, and then genuinely sweet.

I honestly wouldn’t have believed it had I not experienced it myself. Not that the shift inclined this reviewer to completely absolve the film of its former sins. But I imagine that “The Bounty Hunter” will catch a good number of moviegoers, particularly fans of its lead actors, in a more forgiving mood.

Glenn Kenny is a writer living in Brooklyn. He was the chief film critic for Premiere magazine from 1998 to 2007. He contributes to various publications and websites and blogs at http://somecamerunning.typepad.com

• A 2 0ut of 5 Review: The Bounty Hunter Review – Relies on Only: Chemistry

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Performers include singer, pianist, guitarist, and songwriter Nick Jonas, bassist John Fields, drummer Michael Bland, keyboardist Tommy Barbarella, and guitarist David Ryan Harris. Sonny Thompson replaced David Ryan Harris during the 2010 tour.

Their debut album Who I Am was released February 2, 2010 and reached Number 3 on the Billboard 200 Album chart, selling over 80,000 copies.

Watch Music Video Here

“I had written five or six songs that were on my heart, things that were just pouring out of me with this new and exciting sound,” says Jonas. “They weren’t necessarily right for the Jonas Brothers, but I thought they could be perfect for something else.”

Nick said that he’s modeling The Administration after Bruce Springsteen. “I’m kind of modeling it after Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band,” he said. “It’s kind of the look we were going for stylistically on the album cover and just the project in general… [Springsteen] pours so much passion and emotion into all of his songs every night and I hope I can capture that too.

Written by Stephen Whitty/Newark Star-Ledger

The funeral of a loved one ends with a burial. The mourning? That never stops.

It was half a dozen years ago that Tyler’s brother committed suicide. It’s been a decade since Ally’s mother was killed in a subway mugging. Their gravestones are well-weathered.

But it’s their survivors who are really the worst for wear, stumbling around New York, clumsily hurting each other.“Remember Me” brings two of them together, as Tyler meets Ally at college. Yet while their romance is sure to dominate the advertising — the star is “Twilight” phenom Robert Pattinson — it isn’t the whole point.

The real relationships being explored here are between parents and children, the living and the dead.

Fathers, really. Tyler’s father, well played by Pierce Brosnan, has reacted by withdrawing from his family, as if that will keep him from being hurt. Ally’s father, brought to life by the fine Chris Cooper, has turned overprotective, as if that will keep her from being hurt.

“Remember Me” is sensitively directed by Allen Coulter (who last did the underappreciated “Hollywoodland”) but it’s really a Pattinson project. (He also helped produce.) It’s a smart one, too, building on his “Twilight” persona as the sensitive yet dangerous bad boy.

It’s not a new movie character, of course — James Dean certainly did OK with it — but Pattinson smartly tweaks his own persona, dropping the “Twilight” neo-goth in favor of contemporary realism, playing Tyler as both moody and mischievous.

The script, from first-time screenwriter Will Fetters, serves other characters less well. Tyler’s mother needs more fleshing out. His roommate is strictly comic relief. And while Emilie de Ravin is appealing as Ally, we never get a true sense of how loss has affected her, outside of a few carpe-diem quirks. (She always eats her dessert first, just in case.)

Yet Pattinson’s hero is well drawn, emerging as yet another descendant of Holden Caulfield. And Brosnan, who is having a very busy year, is fiercely effective as the withholding dad.

Young “Twilight” fans (and their parents) should be warned that this is a far more realistic and adult romance than the beloved vampire saga. Movie fans should know that the story takes an abrupt third-act twist, and tacks on the sort of arbitrary, “significant” ending that’s better left to first-year creative-writing assignments.

But Pattinson’s young, and older, fans? No need to worry at all. The boy is growing up — and into someone interesting.

Rated: B

Opened March 12th 2010
Running time: 112 minutes.

February 14th, Valentines Day, is not a national holiday, but it is one of those days that must be celebrated. There are “special someones” in your life who expect to receive romantic gifts from their lovers.

Commercialism has put a tremendous amount of pressure on men to give their lovers a romantic day with all the trimmings. Women are under pressure to have a man, or they feel desperate and unloved. Valentines Day follows the lives of several couples during this day. Their stories are told through the interconnections they have with each other.

Some will find romance in their relationship, and others will feel the heartbreak of ending a relationship. In this Russian roulette world of finding love, everyone in the film is asking for advice on how to find and keep true love. – Douglas Young (the-movie-guy)

Stars:

Jessica Alba    …     Morley Clarkson
Kathy Bates    …     Susan
Jessica Biel    …     Kara Monahan
Bradley Cooper    …     Holden
Eric Dane    …     Sean Jackson
Patrick Dempsey    …     Dr. Harrison Copeland
Hector Elizondo    …     Edgar
Jamie Foxx    …     Kelvin Moore
Jennifer Garner    …     Julia Fitzpatrick
Topher Grace    …     Jason
Anne Hathaway    …     Liz
Carter Jenkins    …     Alex
Ashton Kutcher    …     Reed Bennett
Queen Latifah    …     Paula Thomas
Taylor Lautner    …     Willy
George Lopez    …     Alphonso
Shirley MacLaine   …     Estelle
Emma Roberts    …     Grace
Julia Roberts    …     Captain Kate Hazeltine
Taylor Swift    …     Felicia